Discovery of Boiga siamensis Nutaphand, 1971 (Squamata, Colubridae) from Yunnan Province, China

Abstract

We reported the first record of a colubrid snake, Boiga siamensis, from China based on a female specimen collected in the tropical forest at Yingjiang county, near the China-Myanmar border. Boiga siamensis represents the fifth species of the genus in China. This species can be distinguished from congeners by a combination of morphological characters as stated in the original description. We further described morphological characters of the Chinese specimen in details and provided additional natural history data based on our observation. Lastly, we reconstructed the mitochondrial gene tree of all the species of Boiga from China using the cytochrome b gene fragment and suggested that B. siamensis is the sister taxon of B. guangxiensis with an uncorrected pairwise distance of 14.6%.