NEW DELHI, June 29 (Xinhua) -- A team from Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has rediscovered a species of a snake in Assam after it has being considered extinct for 129 years, officials said Monday.
The species "Hebius pealii," also called Assam Keelback, was first seen in 1891 when British tea-planter Samuel Edward Peal collected two male specimens from Sibsagar district in Assam.
One of them was kept at the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) in Kolkata and the other in London's Natural History Museum (NHM). The snake was never seen after that and was believed to be extinct.
It was accidentally found in a reserve forest, 118km from the place where it was first collected on the Assam border, when a team from WII was retracing steps of the Abor Expedition, a military expedition by the British against Abors in 1911.
The find was published on June 26 in Vertebrate Zoology, an international journal based in Germany.
WII researchers have put the photographs of this non-venomous snake species measuring between 50-60 centimeters in length on social media.
The researchers in their paper said they have performed DNA profiling to establish that the snake found in the Poba Forest Reserve is indeed an Assam Keelback. Enditem
