New record of Corallus cropanii (Boidae, Boinae): a rare snake from the Vale do Ribeira, State of São Paulo, Brazil

The boid genus Corallus Daudin, 1803 is comprised of nine Neotropical species (Henderson et al. 2009): Corallus an­ nulatus (Cope, 1876), Corallus batesii (Gray, 1860), Co­ rallus blombergi (Rendahl & Vestergren, 1941), Coral­ lus caninus (Linnaeus, 1758), Corallus cookii Gray, 1842, Corallus cropanii (Hoge, 1954), Corallus grenadensis (Barbour, 1914), Corallus hortulanus (Linnaeus, 1758), and Corallus ruschenbergerii (Cope, 1876). The most conspicuous morphological attributes of representatives of these species are the laterally compressed body, robust head, slim neck, and the presence of deep pits in some of the labial scales (Henderson 1993a, 1997). Species of Corallus are distributed from northern Central American to southern Brazil, including Trinidad and Tobago and islands of the south Caribbean. Four species occur in Brazil: Corallus batesii, C. caninus, C. cropanii, and C. hortulanus. Hoge (1954) originally described Corallus cropanii as Xenoboa cropanii based on a single specimen (adult male, IBSP 15.200, snout–vent length (SVL) = 1080 mm; tail length (TL) = 195 mm; head length (HL) = 60.6 mm; Figure 1) from Miracatu, Vale do Ribeira, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil (24°17’ S, 47°28’ W, 51 m elevation) (Figure 2). Unfortunately, this holotype was probably lost in the recent fire in the herpetological collection of Institute Butantan (Kumar 2010) on March 15th, 2010. Based on osteological characters, Kluge (1991) regarded Xenoboa as a junior synonym of Corallus, and C. cropanii as a sister species of C. caninus. According to the literature, this species is viviparous, semi-arboreal, and preys upon small mammals, similar to other members of the genus (Henderson 1993b, Marques & Cavalheiro 1998, Marques et al. 2004). Corallus cropanii shows in vivo an olive-beige dorsal colouration, with dark brown rhomboidal spots that appear from the neck as far as the tail (Hoge 1954). The ventral shields are yellow with the borders being stained with dark brown; these stains progressively become larger, darkening the abdomen, towards the tail. Until recently, only four specimens (including the above mentioned holotype) of C. cropanii were deposited in herpetological collections: three in the Colecao Herpetologica “Alphonse Richard Hoge”, Instituto Butantan, Sao Paulo,