A New Guinea snake now carries Slash’s name, 20 years after it was collected

Slash, the Guns N’ Roses guitarist whose real name is Saul Hudson, now has a snake named after him: Lielaphis slashi, or Slash’s groundsnake, a reddish-brown reptile about 28 inches long from the forests of New Guinea. The musician said he was “extremely honored and humbled” by the gesture.

The animal had sat unrecognized in scientific collections for two decades, and the scientist who finally named it has been a fan of the band since she was a small child. The naming, which credits the guitarist’s long interest in reptiles, turned a quiet taxonomy paper into an unusually widely shared science story, and it came with a conservation message attached.

Two decades from field jar to formal name

The snake’s path to a name was slow. According to the Field Museum release carried by ScienceDaily, herpetologist Chris Austin of Louisiana State University met an unfamiliar snake during fieldwork one night in 2006, and the formal description arrived 20 years later, in 2026. The animal looked unremarkable at first glance, so nothing about its appearance announced that it was new. Popular Science reports that Huang said the physical and genetic evidence together led the team to realize it was an entirely new species, which is the sort of conclusion only a lab, not a night in the forest, can deliver.

What settled the question was laboratory work. Tianqi Huang, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum, said the team found L. slashi to be genetically distinct from similar snakes in its genus, a result The Brighter Side of News reported as drawn from tissue of 90 Lielaphis snakes and 4,870 genetic markers. Scale counts also differed from related species, with the same outlet citing 17 scale rows at midbody and 165 to 181 belly scales as diagnostic traits, and ecological modeling suggested the snake prefers a different habitat from its look-alikes.

The same coverage says specimens of this kind had previously been filed under the name L. parvus, a species known from Yapen Island, Indonesia, and that the new description lifts the genus from 19 to 20 recognized species. The work is published in Zootaxa, volume 5866, issue 2, with seven authors spread across the Field Museum, Rutgers, Louisiana State, the Papua New Guinea National Museum and several other institutions, including Slippery Rock University, the Virginia Museum of Natural History and the University of Kentucky. Ruane and Austin began collaborating at Louisiana State in 2016 on the poorly known snakes of New Guinea, according to the release.

Why a Field Museum curator picked a guitarist

The central voice in the story is Sara Ruane, the Field Museum’s associate curator of herpetology and the paper’s senior author. In the release she said Guns N’ Roses has been one of her favorite bands since first grade. By fifth grade she had told her teacher she wanted to be a herpetologist, and at 12 she received an issue of Reptiles Magazine featuring Slash with his pet reticulated python, an issue she later returned to when a name was needed.

Nautilus quoted her (it dates the interview to 1995) describing what she found on rereading the interview: Slash “talked about how much he loves museums and zoos and natural history.” The release adds that he has supported zoos, museums and natural history over the years. Nautilus also lists his earlier pets as including anacondas, Burmese pythons and a red-tailed boa named Pandora.

Slash responded through a statement. AAP reported him as saying, that, as a long-time “herpephile,” he was “extremely honoured and humbled” to have the New Guinea species named after him, and adding that the moment was “really exciting.” Popular Science carried a near-identical line from him, so the sentiment appears consistent across outlets.

A harmless nocturnal snake with little known about it

Readers worried about the namesake can relax: the snake is not dangerous. Popular Science describes it as nonvenomous and no threat to humans. Austin, however, cautioned in the release that several highly venomous New Guinea species look very similar to these groundsnakes, so anyone searching at night needs care. He noted that the groundsnakes are nocturnal and usually turn up just after sunset at the base of large trees, which is why night fieldwork is the best way to find them.

Almost nothing else is known about its life. Ruane said snakes in the genus often have large teeth in the back of the mouth, which may help them grip small, slippery-scaled lizards and reptile eggs, and that they do not squeeze prey the way a boa constrictor does. Watching them is hard: Ruane told Nautilus it is incredibly hard to observe snakes in the wild before they slither away, so knowledge about L. slashi is limited.

The habitat behind the novelty

Ruane used the attention to make a conservation point. In the release she said the habitats Slash’s groundsnake comes from are under threat from industries like coffee farming and mining, and Popular Science quotes her arguing that conservation depends on knowing what exists: animals and other living things that are unknown cannot be conserved. The Brighter Side of News adds logging and plantations to the list of pressures, and says the known specimens come from largely undisturbed secondary forest north of the Central Cordillera.

None of the coverage reviewed mentions a conservation status assessment for the new species, so how threatened it actually is remains an open question. What the record does show is that a snake first met in 2006 needed genetics, scale counts and habitat modeling before it could be named, with the animal’s habitat, behavior and diet still largely undocumented.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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