Photo Credit: Photo by Fred Kraus for Mongabay.
Herpetology has long navigated through tangled terrain in Papua New Guinea, where species mislabeling and sparse sampling have clouded scientific understanding. But a recent revision has brought rare clarity—and four unexpected discoveries, reports Akhyari Hananto for Mongabay-Indonesia.
In April 2025, Fred Kraus of the University of Michigan published a study inZootaxa identifying four new tree snakes in the genus Dendrelaphis, each endemic to a different island in the Louisiade and Woodlark archipelagos in PNG’s Milne Bay.