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Supposedly new snake species
August 8, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 13 weeks ago
Comment id: 31441
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If you go to Google Books and search for "thread snake" and Barbados, you find that volumes of the Guinness Book of World Records going back 20 years describe the thread snake, which lives on Barbados and other islands, as the world's shortest snake. It has its own scientific name, Leptotyphlops
bilineata. The 1998 edition says that the longest known specimen was 4½" long, and that it could fit inside a pencil if the lead were removed. Is that different from what S. Blair Hedges claims to have discovered and named for his wife? If not, then perhaps, if Dr. Hedges wanted to do something nice for his wife, he should have taken her out to dinner.
-- Peter Crane, Seattle