A New Genus and Species of Snake from Western Ecuador

Resumen

Among specimens deposited through the courtesy of Dr. Charles M. Fugler in the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History and collected by George Key in Ecuador, is a snake representing a hitherto unknown genus and species. It bears an extraordinarily close external resemblance to the rare Synophis miops Boulenger (1898), but possesses a remarkable, unique modification of the vertebral column, here assumed to be an anti-twist mechanism supplementing the zygantrum-zygosphene function. The vertebrae exhibit one of the most extreme modifications