A new species of Gonyosoma Wagler, 1828 (Serpentes, Colubridae), previously confused with G. prasinum (Blyth, 1854)

Abstract

A new species of the genus Gonyosoma Wagler is described from Yunnan Province, China. The new species closely resembles G. prasinum (Blyth), but it is differentiated from the latter species by the following characters: precloacal plate divided, iris blue and inside of mouth greyish-white in life. Based on phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence data, the new species is recovered as the sister species to G. prasinum by Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood analyses. The uncorrected pairwise distance between the new species and other species of the genus Gonyosoma ranged from 11.78% to 17.07% calculated using the mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence. This discovery increases the number of Gonyosoma species to seven.