How a near-death experience overturned 185 years of herpetology

Nature · Published 7 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: After being bitten by a king cobra, conservationist Gowri Shankar realized something was wrong when the antivenom failed. This video explores the discovery that the king cobra is not just one single species.

For nearly two centuries, the scientific community operated under the assumption that only one species of king cobra existed. However, after surviving a bite from a specimen that did not respond to standard antivenom, herpetologist Gowri Shankar identified a fundamental error in our understanding of these snakes.

Shankar's epiphany, born from a life-threatening encounter, revealed that there is more than one unique species of king cobra, a discovery that fundamentally changed the field of herpetology.

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