Monday, August 4, 2008 --- 11 a.m.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- It's not a worm, it's a snake, but it's not a very big one. A Penn State University scientist says he's discovered the globe's tiniest species of snake.

Blair Hedges says he found the tiny critter in the easternmost Caribbean island of Barbados. He says full-grown adults of the species typically stretch fewer than 4 inches long. It can curl up on a U.S. quarter. The snake was found slithering beneath a rock near a patch of forest. The smallest of the roughly 3,100 known snake species will be introduced to the scientific world in the journal "Zootaxa" today.

Hedges' research teams also have found the word's tiniest lizard in the Dominican Republic and the smallest frog in Cuba.