A global catalog of primary reptile type specimens

Abstract

We present information on primary type specimens for 13,282 species and subspecies of reptiles compiled in the Reptile Database, that is, holotypes, neotypes, lectotypes, and syntypes. These represent 99.4% of all 13,361 currently recognized taxa (11,050 species and 2311 subspecies). Type specimens of 653 taxa (4.9%) are either lost or not located, were never designated, or we did not find any information about them. 51 species are based on iconotypes. To map all types to physical collections we have consolidated all synonymous and ambiguous collection acronyms into an unambiguous list of 364 collections holding these primary types. The 10 largest collections possess more than 50% of all (primary) reptile types, the 36 largest collections possess more than 10,000 types and the largest 73 collections possess over 90% of all types. Of the 364 collections, 107 hold type specimens of only 1 species or subspecies. Dozens of types are still in private collections. In order to increase their utility, we recommend that the description of type specimens be supplemented with data from high-resolution images and CT-scans, and clear links to tissue samples and DNA sequence data (when available). We request members of the herpetological community provide us with any missing type information to complete the list.

Estimating diversification rates for higher taxa: BAMM can give problematic estimates of rates and rate shifts

“…We chose snakes because they offer a set of wellsampled clades that are similar to our simulations, in terms of the number of clades and their size (15 clades per tree, mean = 227 species per clades vs 10 clades per tree and mean = 200 species per clade in the simulations). For these comparisons, we focused on 15 clades that are typically recognized as families, but we also included subfamilies within the megadiverse family Colubridae (clades recognized as families by some authors; Uetz et al 2017). Since the subfamily Colubrinae was not monophyletic in the tree of Zheng and Wiens (2016), we treated it as two separate clades.…”

“…We included only families with >5 species in the tree for these comparisons, since BAMM estimation failed on clades with 5 or fewer species (smaller families were included in the overall tree, but not used in these comparisons). We used the Reptile Database (Uetz et al 2017) to obtain the number of described species in each clade and to seed BAMM with the sampling fraction (proportion of described species in the clade included in the tree) across the phylogeny (0.35) and for each clade (Table S4). Table 1 First, we applied BAMM to the entire tree, setting priors using the setBAMMpriors function in BAMMTOOLS.…”

Knowledge and interactions of the local community with the herpetofauna in the forest reserve of Quininí (Tibacuy, Cundinamarca)

“…Colombia is one of the most diverse countries of the world in herpetofauna species; currently, 616 species of reptiles and 835 species of amphibians [30,31] are registered in Colombia; with 115 and 367 endemic species, respectively [27]. Given this scenario, it is important to understand local communities’ perception about the species with which they share their territory.…”

Developmental Osteology of the Parafrontal Bones of the Sphaerodactylidae

“…It is distributed across South America, the Caribbean, northern Africa, and the Middle East (Gamble et al, 2008a). Sphaerodactylids comprise roughly 13% of described extant geckos (Uetz et al, 2017), and most species are characterized by their derived miniaturized condition (Rieppel, 1984a). Examples include Sphaerodactylus parthenopion (18 mm maximum snoutto-vent length [SVL]; Schwartz and Henderson, 1991), S. elasmorhynchus (17 mm maximum SVL), and S. ariasae, which, until recently (Glaw et al, 2012), was the smallest described amniote, averaging 16 mm SVL (Hedges and Thomas, 2001).…”

“…We additionally obtained data from ontogenetic series of Aristelliger and Teratoscincus (Gamble et al, 2015b). Parenthetical numbers correspond to the recognized number of species within each genus (Uetz, 2017). Adjacent boxplots indicate the range of maximum SVLs for the corresponding genus, based on maximum SVL data for 210 of the 215 recognized sphaerodactylid species (Blanford, 1881;Werner, 1896;Rivero-Blanco, 1968;Hoogmoed, 1973;Thomas, 1975;Schwartz and Henderson, 1991;Avila-Pires, 1995;Schleich et al, 1996;Szczerbak and Golubev, 1996;Anderson, 1999;Hedges and Thomas, 2001;Fong and Díaz, 2004;Barrio-Amor os and Brewer-Carias, 2008;Meiri, 2008;Rivas and Schargel, 2008;R€ osler et al, 2008;Díaz and Hedges, 2009;Largen and Spawls, 2010;Rojas-Runjaic et al, 2010;Schargel et al, 2010;Sturaro and Avila-Pires, 2011;Kok, 2011;McCranie and Hedges, 2012;Rivero-Blanco and Schargel, 2012;McCranie and Hedges, 2013;Rivas et al, 2013;Batista et al, 2015;Calder on-Espinosa and Medina-Rangel, 2016;Griffing et al, 2017).…”