Old farmer's hidden snake collection becomes scientific treasure

A decade ago, American scientist Alex Bentley traveled to Mera, a small town in the Ecuadorean Amazon foothills, to study an elusive snake species called the "X." A local park ranger told him about an old man with an unusual collection of snakes.

Bentley found a shack with a hand-painted sign offering admission: $1 for adults, 50 cents for children. Inside, wooden shelves held dozens of dead snakes coiled in plastic bottles and glass jars, preserved in cane liquor that had turned cloudy over time. The specimens were rare and obscure—some so unusual that Bentley could not immediately identify them. The collection had been gathering for 70 years.

The collector was Manuel Genaro Peñafiel Flores, a slight farmer with a mustache who lived in the white house next door. Bentley called the jars "a little hidden treasure," something that had simply been overlooked. Peñafiel, then 90 years old, had spent his lifetime catching snakes on his finca, or rural estate, often risking fatal bites to add to his collection.

His shelves held thin whip snakes and the equis, a lethal pit viper recognizable by the hourglass markings that give the "X" snake its name. The specimens represent one of Earth's most diverse snake habitats, preserved by a farmer who turned his private obsession into a makeshift museum.

Today, at 101 years old, Peñafiel and Bentley are working together to transform the amateur collection into a proper scientific survey of the region's snake species. Their partnership shows how local knowledge and scientific expertise can unlock discoveries that might otherwise remain hidden.