New Guinea Groundsnake Species Named After Guns N' Roses Guitarist Slash

A newly identified groundsnake species, Lielaphis slashi, has been named after Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash (Saul Hudson) for his lifelong interest in reptiles. The 28-inch-long, reddish-brown snake lives in the forests of New Guinea — the world's second-largest island after Greenland, divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea — and is described in a paper in the journal Zootaxa.

Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science and a paper co-author, first encountered an unfamiliar snake while doing nighttime fieldwork in New Guinea in 2006. New Guinea groundsnakes are nocturnal, typically found just after sunset at the base of large trees searching for food; researchers must be careful at night because several highly venomous species look similar to the non-venomous groundsnakes.

The snake's appearance alone was not enough to confirm it as a separate species. Using multiple genetic analyses, researchers led by Sara Ruane, the Field Museum's Associate Curator of Herpetology and the paper's senior author, and Tianqi Huang, the study's first author and a post-doctoral researcher at the Field Museum, found L. slashi genetically distinct from other snakes in its genus. That evidence, combined with differences in scale numbers and ecological modeling showing a different preferred habitat, confirmed it as a new species.

Little is known about L. slashi's behavior, since these snakes are hard to observe in the wild before they slither away. Snakes in this genus often have large teeth at the back of the mouth, which groundsnakes may use to grab small, slippery-scaled lizards and reptile eggs, rather than squeezing prey the way a boa constrictor does. Despite Guns N' Roses once being called the "most dangerous band in the world," L. slashi's venom is not capable of seriously harming a person.

The forests that L. slashi and other New Guinea species inhabit are under threat from industries including coffee farming and mining, according to Ruane.