Silver Boa Discovered in Bahamas

The discovery is made when the boa slithered onto the head of a researcher.

A large new species of boa made itself known to the world in a dramatic way: it slithered onto the head of a researcher who was sleeping on a beach in the Bahamas.
Named the Bahamian Silver Boa (Chilabothrus argentum), the over three-foot-long snake lives up to its name both due to its shimmery metallic-like body coloration and because of where another such individual was found: up a Silver Palm tree (Cocothrinax argentata). The boa is described in a paper that will soon publish in the journal Breviora.
First Snake Crawled on Four Feet
Graham Reynolds, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, was the beach snoozer who wound up with the snake on his head. Reynolds, then a Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow, was leading a nocturnal survey for reptiles in July 2015 in the Bahamas.
Before his disrupted slumber, Reynolds -- along with co-author Nick Hermann and other colleagues -- had admired one of the silver snakes in a Silver Palm tree near the water's edge on a remote island in the southern portion of the Caribbean island chain. They suspected the snake was a new species, having never seen anything like it before, so they camped out on a nearby beach to rest before hoping to gather and document specimens. That is when one of the snakes essentially discovered Reynolds, instead of the other way around.