A Singapore Snake Sighting

My friend Shannon Bohle tipped me to this one. Her  friend Dr. John van Wyhe has found a specimen of the lined blind snake, aka Ramphotyphlops lineatus, that had been missing and "indeterminate" in status, not having been seen in a whopping 172 years.  Dr. van Wyhe is a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore.  The find occurred in the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve,where the half-meter snake was found dead. The IUCN Red List entry on the species, last updated in 2012, has almost no information.
The discovery is an important reminder that a species may resurface after presumed extinction - even prolonged presumed extinction. This is the longest period I've heard of for a reptile, although I covered some other animal species in my books.  
It's surprising how many such cases there are. New Zealand's takahe, a colorful, turkey-sized ground-dwelling bird, was declared extinct three times before turning up for good in 1948.  The Bermuda petrel, or cahow, was rediscovered after being presumed extinct for 300 years, a record unlikely to be broken (there were two collected during that time, so maybe there's an asterisk). The Guadalupe fur seal was believed to be extinct three times, despite being a rather prominent mammal weighing up to 140kg, and the Juan Fernandez fur seal was "lost" from 1917 to 1968.  The first specimen of Fraser's dolphin washed up dead in 1895: no one confirmed it in life until 1971 Heaviside's dolphin, a 1.6-m cetacean le from South African waters, is a distinctive animal: except for having a short dorsal fin, it's colored and shaped like a miniature killer whale.  It was missing from 1856 to 1965. The pygmy killer whale, a round⌐headed, beakless dolphin which maybe almost 3m long, was recognized from one skull found in 1827.  One was caught off Japan in 1954.
So congratulations to Dr. van Wyhe.  Keep looking!