Years ago, Reptile Gardens Public Relations Director Johnny Brockelsby, son of the founder, sent documentation to Guinness of the more than 200 species housed at the attraction. But he never heard a word.

This month, someone mentioned that the 260-page 2014 edition of the venerable record book featured Reptile Gardens and Brockelsby immediately ran out and bought a copy.

“I was shocked but absolutely thrilled,” Brockelsby said Thursday. “We have always claimed we were the world’s largest, but everybody claims they are the biggest this or the biggest that. But when the new book came out naming us the largest reptile collection in the world, it immediately gave us credibility.”

The existing dead sample was assumed to be a labelling error and the snake was largely struck from taxonomic registries.

But Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher for the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, suspected it might still exist. He and Juan Martinez Gomez of Mexico's Ecology Institute set out to find it.

Martinez Gomez, an expert on the Revillagigedo Islands, noted the islands change a lot from season to season, so they timed the expedition last May to replicate Beebe's steps as they looked for the snake, which blends in with the island's rock formations and is largely active at night. And they used Beebe's original field notes as a guide.

"Basically, following those directions, we essentially put ourselves in his place," Martinez Gomez said.

One of his graduate students, Juan Alberto Cervantes, was the first to spot one of the snakes for the first time since 1936.

The researchers performed DNA analysis to establish the long, dark spotted snake as its own species and see where it had come from.

As beachgoers watched in awe at Langdon Beach on Gulf Islands National Seashore, two Gulfarium specialists carefully removed Tinkerbell, a 20-pound green sea turtle, and Wendy, a 14-inch Kemp's ridley, from large plastic containers and carried them to an inviting, calm and azure Gulf.

The turtles flapped their flippers furiously in anticipation of freedom as Rachel Cain and Samantha Fuentes carried them to the edge of the surf. Then with a splash punctuated by cheers from the crowd of onlookers, the two turtles swam with purpose toward open water, their shadowy shapes darting here and there under the clear sea.

The 14 new species were described last week in the Ceylon Journal of Science, bringing the total number of known dancing frog species in India to 24. All of the tiny frogs, the largest of which measure just 35 millimeters, come from the genus Micrixalus, which can only be found in the Western Ghats.

Unfortunately, none of these tiny frogs may be around much longer. According to the research by University of Delhi biologist S. D. Biju and colleagues, Micrixalus frogs already suffer from a 100 to 1 male-to-female sex ratio. (That’s another reason for the “dancing”—the males also kick away potential mating competitors.) The frogs only breed after monsoon season when water in their habitats is moving swiftly. On top of that, the Western Ghats are expected to experience much lower rainfall levels in the coming years due to climate change. In fact, the rivers already appear to be drying up and the number of frogs observed in the wild has dropped by 80 percent since 2006, the researchers report.

On Sunday, May 11, 521 tortoises – all juveniles - were seized prior to being loaded on a Kenya Aiways flight to Nairobi; the smuggler ran away when his name was called by the information desk and was not apprehended. The shipment included 512 Radiated Tortoises (Astrochelys radiata) and nine Ploughshare Tortoises (Astrochelys yniphora) that were placed with the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) for initial care and safe keeping.

But the "non-native species" has been ranked "of high concern" by the London Invasive Species Initiative (LISI), a government advisory quango which has called for the "foreign" family of snakes to be eradicated. It claims, if not stopped, the snakes could spread, causing "serious negative impact" on the eco-system.

This tough-line stance was this week disputed by Dr Wolfgang Wuster, a snake venom expert and senior lecturer of the School of Biological

Science in Bangor University, who told the New Journal: "Any attempt to eradicate the Aesculapian snake would require justification of resources to be devoted to an almost certainly non-problematic introduced species with little prospects of spread, as opposed to the many far more damaging species already out there."