We Found A New Species of Snake!

So this morning here at Chaparri, one of the most interesting and exciting things that has happened to me in a very long time happened. The guys were cleaning out right here, right in the kitchen area where they dump the ash, an area that's full of termites and ants, and they dug up something that in 38 years of working here they've never seen before, and that little something is a blind snake. Now blind snakes are an incredibly, incredibly interesting burrowing species of tiny little snake with tiny little eyes. They're subterranean, meaning they live under the ground. I was like, cool, you know there's blind snakes in Peru. In fact, there's the Tembizian blind snake that we know occurs right here. But as soon as the guys brought me the snake, and I started to try and key out as to what it could be, well turns out we have an incredible discovery on our hands here. So I'll give you guys a look at what we found here, and by we, I mean Yvonne in the kitchen. Here he comes. So you see all this dirt that's coming out here. Look at this beautiful little blind snake. Now typically these are a non-venomous snake. You can see he's absolutely tiny. He almost looks like an earthworm, but if you look closely that is not an earthworm. He's got this minute little white head, this slender beautiful little shiny body, very shimmery, and he's quite active. He's constantly moving. He's always looking for dirt. As you can see, the blind snakes, when they find dirt, they burrow right in. They live underneath the leaf litter in their subterranean. Now as soon as we couldn't key this out with any known species from any of the reptile books, we went to work on the internet, contacted an old professor from university, a Brazilian herpetology expert, a Peruvian herpetology expert. We sent in the measurements, which we took, and a whole bunch of close-up photos, and we found that, well, it could be a couple different things, and this is where the story gets even more interesting. One is that there's a chance that this is a new species, right? Two is that there's a chance that this is Lyotryphus albitosus, which is a white-headed blind snake that's never before been seen in this area, which is typically known to be endemic to Ecuador, the country north of us. And three, perhaps the most exciting, this could actually be an extinct or alive creature, and what I mean by that is this could be an ancient, old world blind snake from the family Anemolapis, and if it is, it potentially could be the species which was only seen once in history in 1939, making this the second ever specimen of that species to ever be found, something that had disappeared from the world in 1939. It's an absolutely beautiful little snake. Look at him here, dug up literally in the kitchen of Chapari Ecological Reserve, and that, if that's not indicative of how incredible this place is, the fact that there are new species and extinct or alive species being discovered in the kitchen, then I don't know what is. So what we're going to do is send more of these images, send some DNA to some experts here in Peru, and see if we can get a definitive answer, but for all intents and purposes, this little critter is a massive discovery.