Letheobia Kibarae
''Letheobia kibarae'', also known as the Upemba gracile blind snake or Katanga beaked snake, is a species of snakes in the family Typhlopidae. It is Endemism, endemic to southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its Type locality (biology), type locality is in the Upemba National Park. References Further reading * Gaston-François de Witte, de Witte, G.F. 1953. ''Exploration du Parc National de l'Upemba. Mission G.F. de Witte en collaboration avec W. Adam, A. Janssens, L. van Meel et R. Verheyen (1946-1949). Reptiles''. Institut des Parcs Nationaux du Congo Belge. Brussels. 6: 1–322. Letheobia Snakes of Africa Reptiles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Endemic fauna of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Taxa named by Gaston-François de Witte Reptiles described in 1953 {{Scolecophidia-stub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gaston-François De Witte
Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at :fr:Gaston-François de Witte; see its history for attribution. Gaston-François de Witte (12 June 1897, Antwerp – 1 June 1980, Brussels) was a Belgian herpetologist who discovered and described at least 24 different species of reptiles. During his career, he was associated with the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (from 1920) and the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels (from 1937). He is best known for his research of amphibians and reptiles found in the Belgian Congo, from where he collected thousands of specimens. While in central Africa, he also collected botanical specimens. Biography Gaston-François de Witte was the son of Henry de Witte and Jeanne della Faine de Leverghem, and the grand-son of Jean de Witte. As a child, he already liked natural science. During his scholarship at the Bénédictins of the Abbaye de Maredsours, Gaston-François met the british zoologist George A ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Van Wallach
Van Stanley Bartholomew Wallach (born 1947) is an American herpetologist and an expert on blindsnakes and on the systematics, internal anatomy, and taxonomy of snakes. He has contributed to the descriptions of at least 46 species of snakes and has conducted fieldwork on tropical snakes in the Philippines, Nicaragua, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For many years Wallach worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He retired from the museum in 2012, but he continues to work on snake taxonomy. Wallach was the lead editor of the 1,227 page authoritative reference book ''Snakes of the World''. In the 2000s Wallach was one of several herpetologists who became embroiled in a dispute with Raymond Hoser, a self-published Australian herpetologist, over proper nomenclatorial acts. Hoser charged Wallach with attempting to name species that Hoser had already described in his self-published journal. Wallach ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Snake
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads ( cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty-five times independently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbae ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Typhlopidae
The Typhlopidae are a family of blind snakes. They are found mostly in the tropical regions of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and all mainland Australia and various islands. The rostral scale overhangs the mouth to form a shovel-like burrowing structure. They live underground in burrows, and since they have no use for vision, their eyes are mostly vestigial. They have light-detecting black eye spots, and teeth occur in the upper jaw. Typhlopids do not have dislocatable lower jaw articulations restricting them to prey smaller than their oral aperture. The tail ends with a horn-like scale. Most of these species are oviparous. Currently, 18 genera are recognized containing over 200 species. Geographic range They are found in most tropical and many subtropical regions all over the world, particularly in Africa, Asia, islands in the Pacific, tropical America, and southeastern Europe. Fossil record Possible Typhlopid skin has been identified in Dominican amber. Genera Type genus For ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Endemism
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, the Cape sugarbird is found exclusively in southwestern South Africa and is therefore said to be ''endemic'' to that particular part of the world. An endemic species can be also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or in scientific literature as an ''endemite''. For example ''Cytisus aeolicus'' is an endemite of the Italian flora. ''Adzharia renschi'' was once believed to be an endemite of the Caucasus, but it was later discovered to be a non-indigenous species from South America belonging to a different genus. The extreme opposite of an endemic species is one with a cosmopolitan distribution, having a global or widespread range. A rare alternative term for a species that is endemic is "precinctive", which applies t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Democratic Republic Of The Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in Central Africa. It is bordered to the northwest by the Republic of the Congo, to the north by the Central African Republic, to the northeast by South Sudan, to the east by Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, and by Tanzania (across Lake Tanganyika), to the south and southeast by Zambia, to the southwest by Angola, and to the west by the South Atlantic Ocean and the Cabinda exclave of Angola. By area, it is the second-largest country in Africa and the 11th-largest in the world. With a population of around 108 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most populous officially Francophone country in the world. The national capital and largest city is Kinshasa, which is also the nation's economic center. Centered on the Congo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Type Locality (biology)
In biology, a type is a particular specimen (or in some cases a group of specimens) of an organism to which the scientific name of that organism is formally attached. In other words, a type is an example that serves to anchor or centralizes the defining features of that particular taxon. In older usage (pre-1900 in botany), a type was a taxon rather than a specimen. A taxon is a scientifically named grouping of organisms with other like organisms, a set that includes some organisms and excludes others, based on a detailed published description (for example a species description) and on the provision of type material, which is usually available to scientists for examination in a major museum research collection, or similar institution. Type specimen According to a precise set of rules laid down in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), the scientific name of every taxon is almos ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Upemba National Park
Upemba National Park is a large national park in Haut-Lomami, Lualaba Province & Haut-Katanga Province (formerly in Katanga Province) of the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Geography At the time of the creation of Upemba National Park, on 15 May 1939, the park had a surface area of . It was the largest park in Africa. In July 1975, the limits were revised and today the integral park has an area of with an annex of a further . Its lower section is located in the Upemba Depression, a lush area of lakes and marshes including the eponymous Lake Upemba, and bordered by the Lualaba River. Its higher section is in the dryer Kibara Plateau mountains. History Upemba National Park was first established in 1939. As with much of the wildlife of the region, in contemporary times the park continues to be threatened by the activities of poachers, pollution, and the activities of refugees and militia. There are also a handful of villages in the park. In recent y ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Letheobia
''Letheobia'' is a genus of blind snakes in the family Typhlopidae. Wallach, Van (2005) "''Letheobia pauwelsi'', a new species of blindsnake from Gabon (Serpentes: Typhlopidae)." ''African Journal of Herpetology'' 54 (1): 85-91. Geographic range The genus is endemic to Africa. Taxonomy In 1869, the genus ''Letheobia'' was established by Edward Drinker Cope based primarily on two specimens of ''Letheobia pallida'' from Zanzibar, but later also including ''Letheobia caeca'' (originally ''Onychocephalus cæcus'' Duméril, 1856) from Gabon. Wilhelm Peters, in 1874 when describing ''Onychocephalus lumbriciformis'' from Zanzibar and in 1878 ''Typhlops unitaeniatus'' from Kenya, considered ''Letheobia'' to be a subgenus. Nonetheless, in 1881, Peters selected ''Letheobia caeca'' Duméril as the type species for the genus. In 1883, Boulenger decided that at best ''Letheobia'' was a subgenus of ''Typhlops'', and placed it as a junior synonym. Later in reconstructing ''Rhinotyphlops'' i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Snakes Of Africa
Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads ( cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs about twenty-five times independently via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Di ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Reptiles Of The Democratic Republic Of The Congo
Reptiles, as most commonly defined are the animals in the class Reptilia ( ), a paraphyletic grouping comprising all sauropsids except birds. Living reptiles comprise turtles, crocodilians, squamates (lizards and snakes) and rhynchocephalians (tuatara). As of March 2022, the Reptile Database includes about 11,700 species. In the traditional Linnaean classification system, birds are considered a separate class to reptiles. However, crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to other living reptiles, and so modern cladistic classification systems include birds within Reptilia, redefining the term as a clade. Other cladistic definitions abandon the term reptile altogether in favor of the clade Sauropsida, which refers to all amniotes more closely related to modern reptiles than to mammals. The study of the traditional reptile orders, historically combined with that of modern amphibians, is called herpetology. The earliest known proto-reptiles originated around ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |