ALIEN ZOO

KARL SHUKER reports on a social media snake, a pink panther and a metalcore rat king

DISCOVERED ON INSTAGRAM

It’s not often that a distinctive, hitherto unknown species of animal is discovered, neither in the field nor in a museum, but instead on social media. Yet that is what happened recently with regard to a new snake. Confined during India’s Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020, Guru Nanak Dev University student Virendar Bhardwaj decided to photograph the (and named after their teeth, which resemble Nepalese daggers or kukris), it did not match the only species previously known to exist in the area where it was found. So Mirza contacted Bhardwaj, who procured two specimens for him to study, a female and a male, both adults (Bhardwaj also observed several additional specimens in the wild but did not collect them).