Identifying a new species is not always straightforward. Scientists usually rely on physical traits that separate one species from another, but in nature those differences do not always fall into neat categories. Sometimes two different species look almost identical. These are called cryptic species. In other cases, a single species can vary so much in appearance that it seems like several different species instead. The challenge becomes even greater when both patterns show up at the same time. Herpetologist Dr. Chan Kin Onn (previously at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore, now with the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, USA) led research on a pit viper from Myanmar that seemed to be both similar to and distinct from its closest relatives. The work was published in the open access journal ZooKeys, building on an earlier genomic study in Systematic Biology that had already indicated the snakes represented a separate evolutionary lineage.…