Rhinophis goweri

Rhinophis goweri, also known as Gower's shieldtail snake, is a recently described, little-known species of snake of the family Uropeltidae. It is endemic to the Eastern Ghats of Tamil Nadu in South India.[1][2][3]

Rhinophis goweri
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Suborder: Serpentes
Family: Uropeltidae
Genus: Rhinophis
Species:
R. goweri
Binomial name
Rhinophis goweri
Aengals & Ganesh, 2013

Description

Rhinophis goweri can be identified by the following combination of characters: midbody scale rows 17; convex caudal shield as long as or longer than shielded part of head; rostral not more than half as long as shielded part of head, separating prefrontal scales for more than half their length; ventral scales 215; venter and outermost scale rows without large spots; uniform dark grayish brown above and off-white heavily powdered with brown below; tail distinctly reddish orange below; dorsum uniform and unpatterned.[4][5]

Etymology

This species was named after Dr. David Gower, a herpetologist with the Natural History Museum, London, for his work on these snakes.[1]

Geographic range

This species was first described from Bodha Malai bordering Namakkal and Salem district of Tamil Nadu state. Later, surveys in other hills of Eastern Ghats revealed its presence in Kolli Hills, in Namakkal district.[6]

Habits and habitat

This species is slow-moving, nocturnal, fossorial, and lives in the tropical wet forests covering the higher slopes (>900 m (3,000 ft) asl) of the hills. It is thought to feed on earthworms like other snakes of the family Uropeltidae. It becomes more active during monsoon. It has been recorded from an elevation of up to 1,370 m (4,490 ft) asl, atop Kolli Hills in dense forests as well as coffee and pineapple plantations and mixed fruit orchards.[6]

gollark: Or Great Information Transfer.
gollark: Git stands for GIT Is Tremendous.
gollark: The stages of git clone are: Receive a "pack" file of all the objects in the repo database Create an index file for the received pack Check out the head revision (for a non-bare repo, obviously)"Resolving deltas" is the message shown for the second stage, indexing the pack file ("git index-pack").Pack files do not have the actual object IDs in them, only the object content. So to determine what the object IDs are, git has to do a decompress+SHA1 of each object in the pack to produce the object ID, which is then written into the index file.An object in a pack file may be stored as a delta i.e. a sequence of changes to make to some other object. In this case, git needs to retrieve the base object, apply the commands and SHA1 the result. The base object itself might have to be derived by applying a sequence of delta commands. (Even though in the case of a clone, the base object will have been encountered already, there is a limit to how many manufactured objects are cached in memory).In summary, the "resolving deltas" stage involves decompressing and checksumming the entire repo database, which not surprisingly takes quite a long time. Presumably decompressing and calculating SHA1s actually takes more time than applying the delta commands.In the case of a subsequent fetch, the received pack file may contain references (as delta object bases) to other objects that the receiving git is expected to already have. In this case, the receiving git actually rewrites the received pack file to include any such referenced objects, so that any stored pack file is self-sufficient. This might be where the message "resolving deltas" originated.
gollark: UPDATE: this is wrong.
gollark: > Git uses delta encoding to store some of the objects in packfiles. However, you don't want to have to play back every single change ever on a given file in order to get the current version, so Git also has occasional snapshots of the file contents stored as well. "Resolving deltas" is the step that deals with making sure all of that stays consistent.

References
  1. Rhinophis goweri at the Reptarium.cz Reptile Database. Accessed 31 January 2019.
  2. "347 flora, 242 fauna species discovered in 2013-14: Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar". The Economic Times. India: The Economic Times. 2015-08-11. Retrieved 2019-01-19.
  3. Singh, Shiv Sahay (2014-07-13). "India logged 248 new species in 2013". The Hindu. India: The Hindu. Retrieved 2019-01-19.
  4. Aengals, R. & S. R. Ganesh (2013). "Rhinophis goweri — A new species of shieldtail snake from the Southern Eastern Ghats, India". Russian Journal of Herpetology. 20 (1): 61–65.
  5. Pyron, R. A.; Ganesh, S. R.; Sayyed, A.; Sharma, V.; Wallach, V. & Somaweera, R. (2016). "A catalogue and systematic overview of the shield-tailed snakes (Serpentes: Uropeltidae)" (PDF). Zoosystema. 38 (4): 453–506.
  6. Ganesh, S. R. & M. Arumugam (2016). "Species richness of montane herpetofauna of southern Eastern Ghats, India: A historical resume and a descriptive checklist". Russian Journal of Herpetology. 23 (1): 7–24.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.