This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Slash, aka Saul Hudson, is probably best known as the guitarist for Guns N' Roses. But there's more to Slash than his music.
He's also a lifelong reptile lover and an avid supporter of zoos and museums. And now, he's the namesake of the newly discovered Lielaphis slashi: Slash's groundsnake. "As a longtime herpetophile, I am extremely honored and humbled to have Lielaphis slashi from New Guinea named after me.
I never would have imagined this moment would arrive," says Slash. "Guns N' Roses has been one of my favorite bands since I was in first grade, and by fifth grade, I had already told my teacher that I wanted to be a herpetologist—a scientist who studies reptiles—when I grew up," says Sara Ruane, the Field Museum's associate curator of herpetology and senior author of a paper in Zootaxa describing the new species. "So when I was 12 years old and got my copy of Reptiles Magazine in the mail and it had a picture of Slash holding his pet reticulated python on the cover, I thought, 'This guy is so cool.'" When she grew up to be a scientist who occasionally gets to give new reptile species official scientific names, Ruane thought back to the magazine article.
"I reread his interview, and he talked about how much he loves museums and zoos and natural history, and about how when he was a kid, he'd go outside and look for snakes—it was all stuff that I really related to, and it made me think that he'd be a great person to name a new species after," says Ruane. Ruane finally got her chance with a 28-inch-long (71-centimeter-long) reddish-brown snake from the forests of New Guinea. New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world, after Greenland.
It's located just north of Australia, and the landmass is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The island's dense tropical forests contain untold biodiversity, but they have not been well studied by scientists. One night in 2006, Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea when he came across an unfamiliar snake.
"These New Guinea groundsnakes are nocturnal, so the best way to find them is at night. They are typically found just after sunset at the base of large trees, where they are looking for something to eat," says Austin, a co-author of the paper describing the new species. "When working at night in New Guinea, you need to be very careful, as there are several highly venomous species that look very similar to the nonvenomous groundsnakes." In 2016, after finishing her doctorate, Ruane spent time working with Austin at Louisiana State University.
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