A new species of a kind of green pit viper was found in the forests of western Arunachal Pradesh. Interestingly, it has been named Trimeresurus salazar, after Salazar Slytherin, the infamous founder of one of the houses in Hogwarts, the magical school in the books of Harry Potter.
As fans will remember, the colour of Slytherin house was green and the logo that of a snake. Salazar himself was a parselmouth wizard, or capable of speaking with serpents in JK Rowling’s hit work of fiction.
The discovery was published in a new paper in Zoosystematics and Evolution and the study has been led by researchers of the National Centre for Biological Science of Bangalore, India. The paper specified that “the specific epithet is a noun in apposition for JK Rowling’s fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s co-founder, Salazar Slytherin."
T salazar shares several similarities with T septentrionalis, T insularis and T. albolabris of the same genus Trimeresurus which is a group of venomous pit vipers mostly found in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and China.
Such high similarity poses difficulty in finding new species of serpents from the high bio-diverse region of Arunachal Pradesh. Although many of the pit vipers are similar in appearance, a T salazar can be identified by a vivid orange stripe on the head of a male Salazar and its number of teeth.
The reason behind naming new species after a popular fictional character is to gain attention to wildlife and encourage others to delve in the field of research.
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