Field Museum scientists name newly discovered snake after Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash

Scientists at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago have named a newly discovered snake after Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash.

"As a long-time herpephile, I am extremely honored and humbled to have Lielaphis slashi from New Guinea named after me. It is really exciting, I never would have imagined this moment would arrive," Slash said in a statement provided by the museum.

The museum was hosting a show-and-tell with a specimen of the snake on Tuesday.

The 28-inch snake was discovered in the forests of New Guinea, the second-largest island in the world, according to the Field Museum.

Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, first spotted the snake while conducting fieldwork in New Guinea in 2006, but at the time it wasn't clear that it was a new species of snake.

In 2016, Austin teamed up with Field Museum associate curator of herpetology Sara Ruane, to more closely study poorly known groundsnakes in New Guinea.

Tianqi Huang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum, helped Ruane and Austin author a newly published study that determined the snake is genetically distinct from other similar snakes.

"The combination of physical characteristics, like differences in numbers of scales when compared with other species, and the genetic evidence is what led us to realize that it is an entirely new species," Huang said in a statement from the museum.

Ruane, who has been a Guns N' Roses fan since she was in elementary school, decided to name the snake Lielaphis slashi, or Slash's groundsnake, after the band's guitarist, who is also a lifelong reptile lover and supporter of zoos and museums.

When she was 12 years old, she saw a picture of Slash holding his pet python on the cover of Reptiles Magazine. After growing up to become a scientist focused on snakes, she thought back to that same article.

"I reread his interview, and he talked about how much he loves museums and zoos and natural history, and about how when he was a kid, he'd go outside and look for snakes-- it was all stuff that I really related to, and it made me think that he'd be a great person to name a new species after," Ruane said in a statement from the museum.

The museum said there's still a lot to learn about Slash's groundsnake, because of how hard it is to observe snakes in the wild, and while it's not venomous an poses no threat to people, human activity like coffee farming and mining could threaten its habitat.

"That's part of why describing the species that live there is important. Every species should be recognized in order for us to better understand how ecosystems work, how everything fits into the environment. We can't conserve animals or other living things that we don't know about," Ruane said.