Harrison Ford Reacts to Having a Snake Named After Him


Harrison Ford has earned the appropriate to be curmudgeonly—however the 81-year-old star of so many iconic movies is thought for tempering his grouchiness with sly humor and coronary heart. That got here by means of 100% in a press release he shared after scientists found a brand new species of snake in Peru’s Otishi Nationwide Park and named it Tachymenoides harrisonfordi.
“The snake’s bought eyes you may drown in, and he spends many of the day sunning himself by a pool of soiled water—we in all probability would’ve been pals within the early ‘60s,” the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Future star mentioned in a press release to Conservation International (through People), of which the actor serves as vice-chairman. “In all seriousness, this discovery is humbling. It’s a reminder that there’s nonetheless a lot to study our wild world—and that people are one small a part of an impossibly huge biosphere. On this planet, all fates are intertwined, and proper now, a million species are teetering on the sting of oblivion. We now have an existential mandate to fix our damaged relationship with nature and defend the locations that maintain life.”
In keeping with Conservation Worldwide, the invention was made by a group from the U.S. and Peru led by Illinois Wesleyan College biology professor Edgar Lehr; the identify happened due to Ford’s “decades-long environmental advocacy.” Whereas the snake (“pale, yellowish-brown with scattered black blotches, a black stomach, and a vertical streak over its copper-colored eye”) is thematically becoming given Indiana Jones’ well-known affiliation with them, Ford has additionally had a spider (Calponia harrisonfordi) and an ant named after him (Pheidole harrisonfordi).
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