A new species of Lycodon Boie, 1826 (Serpentes, Colubridae) from northern Vietnam

By

Janssen, Helen
Pham, Cuong The
Ngo, Hanh Thi
Le, Minh Duc, 1973-
Nguyen, Quang Truong
Ziegler, Thomas, 1970-

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2019

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

875

Pages

1--29

Subjects

Cao Bang Province , Lycodon pictus sp. nov , Morphology , Phylogeny , taxonomy

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.875.35933

 

Abstract

A new species of the genusLycodonis described from Cao Bang Province, Vietnam, based on three individuals with distinct differences in morphology and molecular data. The new species is differentiated from its congeners by a combination of the following characters: dorsal scales in 17-17-15 rows, smooth throughout; supralabials usually eight (rarely nine); infralabials ten; one elongated loreal on each side, in contact with the eye; precloacal plate single; ventral scales 212–218 (plus one or two preventral scales); subcaudals 90 or 91; maxillary teeth 13 or 14; dorsal surface of body with 28 or 29 light body bands; dorsal surface of tail with 13 cream bands, forming a distinct blotch in the vertebral region. Based on phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial cytochromebsequence data, the new species is recovered as the sister species to a clade containingL. multizonatusandL. liuchengchaoiwith strong support from the Bayesian analysis. The new species is at least 7.5% divergent from other species within this clade in uncorrected pairwise distance calculated using a fragment of more than 1000 bp of the mitochondrial cytochromeb.This discovery increases the number ofLycodonspecies known from Vietnam to 16.