photo by: University of Kansas
Jeff Weinell, a KU graduate research assistant at the KU Biodiversity Institute, is lead author of a paper describing the Waray Dwarf Burrowing Snake as both a new genus and a new species in the peer-reviewed journal Copeia.
It just took a fresh pair of eyes for three preserved snake specimens to be recognized as something special — and entirely new.
In 2017, graduate research assistant Jeff Weinell realized that three snake specimens in the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum had been misidentified.
He had been studying a genus of snakes called Pseudorabdion and sequencing their DNA in order to understand their evolutionary relationships. When he got the results back, however, he realized that one specimen that had been identified as Pseudorabdion did not actually fit into the genus.