Sign up for our mailing list for updates by clicking here (just send us an empty email). For new species updates see the new species page.

Literature database. We have added 471 references to the database since January, which now stands at 71,904 references (71,433 in January 2026). We need to further automate literature imports and curation, so let us know if you are interested in helping with a new project using AI. See below for details.

Photos: Over the past 5 months, we have added 586 photos of 320 species submitted by 32 photographers. The photo count now stands at 24,645 photos, covering 6,991 species (55% of all species). In our last release we had photos of 6,898 species, so we added photos of 93 species. 6,991 species correspond to 1,129 genera (out of 1,260) hence we have photos of about 90% of all genera (here is a list of 130 genera, including 242 species, without photos in the database [Excel], just in case you have any).

In any case, nine photographers submitted more than 10 photos this time around (in bold below). The photographers this time were Alberth H. Rojas-Carranza (21 photos), Alejandro Arteaga (22), Anh van Pham (2), Basundhara Chettri (7), Carlos Joaquín Pavón Vázquez (8), César Barrio-Amoros (44), Esteban Alzate Basto (1), Fidélis Júnio Marra Santos (1), Gabriel Martínez (1), H.P. Berghof (1), Henrik Bringsøe (246), Ian Fisher (3), Ivan Ineich (1), John G. Phillips (27), Juan CB (1), Keyko Cruz-Garcia (17), Krystal Tolley (4), Luciano Avila (2), Lutz Obelgönner (5), Manuel R Lorenzana (1), Marco Antonio de Freitas (114), Montri Sumontha (1), Nathanaël Maury (2), Paul Freed (13), Peter Janzen (2), Peter Uetz (23), Robert Van Devender (6), Sergio Naretto (4), Somphouthone Phimmachak (1), SR Ganesh & SR Chandramouli (2), Todd Lewis (2), and Werner Conradie (1). Thanks again for your invaluable contributions!

We will request photos for new (and old) species directly from authors directly, so please be prepared for some nagging personal emails from us shortly.

New checklists. This release incorporates data from several new checklists, including one for Bolivia (Gómez-Murillo et al. 2025) with 314 species of reptiles. We also added a number of regional checklists and cross-referenced them, e.g. for Zacatecas (Mexico) with 119 species (Sigala-Rodríguez et al. 2026), Samar Island (Philippines) with 74 species (Diesmos et al. 2026) or Namibe Province in Angola (132 species, Parrinha et al. 2026), plus a few others.

Are you teaching herpetology? In February, we asked you if you are teaching a herpetology class (or if you are a student) and if you would be interested in sharing your experiences or teaching materials with others. 36 of you responded by filling out our brief survey and the pleasant surprise was that the respondents literally came from all over the world: of those who shared their location, 5 were in Africa, 1 is in Australia, 6 are in Asia, 5 in Latin America, 10 in North America and 3 in Europe. Most of the respondents were interested in participating in a zoom call, and while we haven’t had one, here is a poll with possible dates in late June and early August (right before the fall semester starts in the US). If you are interested but haven’t filled out the form, please do so, and if you want to join the discussion, chose a time in the poll. Before the video call, we will share more details about the responses we have received and some ideas how we can work together to make our teaching better, more timely, and more exciting. Among other things, we will discuss how to use AI in teaching herpetology. Talking about AI …

AI in herpetology, science, and life. If you are using AI for coding, literature analysis, or just sophisticated searches, please let us know by emailing us or by a comment on our Facebook page. We may even want to meet over zoom to discuss your experience. With improving AI capabilities, databases need to re-invent themselves and figure out what they can do that chatbots cannot. What do you think? Contact us if you want to put your AI skills to use for the Reptile Database! Obviously, AI does not only affect the Reptile (or any other) database, but everything else as well.

Quickly search the Reptile Database on your phone. While our website is not super mobile-friendly, we do have a preliminary mobile friendly version at http://www.reptile-database.org/index_m.html. However, search is even easier if you teach the web browser on your phone to search the database. For instance, you can automatically convert an abbreviation like “rdb” into "Reptile Database” and use that in your favorite web browser to search for your favorite taxon, e.g. by simply typing "rdb anolis”. In iOS, go to Settings > Keyboard > Text replacement > tap the plus symbol and enter the phrase “Reptile Database” and a shortcut like “rdb”. The next time you are in your web browser (with a default search engine like Google”, just type a search like "rdb anolis” which should give you the same result as navigating to the site and then typing “anolis” into the (quick) search box. You can also do a search and then go to Settings > Apps > Safari (or whatever browser you use) > Quick website search which should list the Reptile Database and thus keeps it under search results when you search for anything — just scroll down in your search results to see the results from the Reptile Database.

Our next database release is scheduled for September 2026.

As always, if you have any corrections or additions, please email us (or comment on our Facebook page).

28 January 2026 -- new release

Happy New Year! We started the year with a new release of the Reptile Database last week, 5 months after the previous version in September 2025 — and a bit later as planned. Here is a summary of what’s new:

This update has 12,568 species (up from 12,502 reptile species in the September 2025 release, including 2,070 subspecies, that is, a total of 14,638 taxa. 81 new entries have been added to the release, including 69 new species, 6 species elevated from subspecies, and another 6 resurrected from synonymy. 16 species have been synonymized or downgraded to subspecies level, resulting in a total of 106 species-level changes. Overall, more than 4,000 species pages have been updated with new data published in 2025, with more than 1,000 species having updated chresonymies. As always, you can find a complete list of (taxonomic) changes as part of our checklist, available on our download page.

Literature database. We have added 1393 references to the database published in 2025, which now stands at 71,491 references (69,316 in January 2025). 782 papers have been added that were published before 2025. Literature curation is still a largely manual process which is why we need your help, especially if you have some coding (or prompt engineering) skills — we need to further automate literature imports, so let us know if you are interested in helping (and in learning some coding along the way).

How big is the herpetological literature? Part 2: What is your part in this? Following up on our request in the last newsletter, we are now looking for people who have published more than a 50 (or so) reptile papers. The question is: how many of your papers do we have in the database? Please take a look at our literature list, also available from our download page, and check how many of your reptile papers are in that list (note that about 1% of papers are cited with incomplete author lists, using "et al.” or “…” — simply because many of our sources provide only abbreviated citations; also, your name may be listed erroneously or misspelled etc.). Also, it is quite possible that a paper is in the downloadable spreadsheet but not in the online database (because the latter is centered around species while many papers are not, including papers about our database). Then send us a brief email stating your main area of research (e.g. ecology, taxonomy etc.) and the number or fraction of your papers that we missed, including any popular papers or paper that is only tangentially related to reptiles (but does deal with reptiles somehow). Obviously, we think that we are more or less complete for the taxonomic literature but certainly not for other areas. This will help us to estimate the overall fraction of the (recent) literature that we miss and in which areas. Thank you!

Dubious articles and predatory journals. Like everybody else, we encounter an increasing number of articles in dubious journals, often from predatory publishers. Although they are often easy to spot, based on their poor layout (and especially poor figures and photos), sometimes they are not — or only once you read them. Typically they already have suspicious journal names which appear to have been made up on the spot, e.g. the Western European Journal of Modern Experiments and Scientific Methods (WTF ??). We have now started adding a “dubious” flag to references, so they are easier to spot. You may argue that we should not even cite them but sometimes they may contain useful information, even though the authors themselves may not have realized that they fell for a predatory journal. Let us know if you come across such papers and we will flag them in future releases.

Photos: Over the past 5 months, we have added 319 photos of 146 species submitted by 43 photographers. The photo count stands at 24,068 photos of 6,898 species now. In our last release we had photos of 6,803 species, so we added photos of 95 species. We are almost certain that we will reach 7,000 species in our next release —please consider contributing a few photos for that goal by sending them to photos@reptile-database.org. Seven photographers submitted more than 10 photos this time around (in bold below). The (other) photographers this time were A.V. Pham (5), Andreas Nöllert (43), César Barrio-Amoros (25), Charles B. Grogan (1), Citeli et a. 2016 (1), Daniel Durán (5), Daniel Jablonski (27), Daniel Nungaray (1), Dongru et al. 2025 (2), Duvan Zambrano (1), Fred Kraus (2), Fred Parker (1), Gernot Vogel (16), Greg Sievert (64), Hanh Ngo (1), Henrik Bringsøe (9), Ian Fisher (3), J.H. Yang (1), Jackie Childers (4), Jairo H. Maldonado (1), Jakob Hallermann (8), John Matter (2), Juan C. Arredondo (1), Kurt van Wyk (2), Li Ding (3), Lutz Obelgönner (1), Manju Mahatara (1), Marco Antonio de Freitas (2), Milton Salazar-Saavedra (5), Orty Bourquin (11), Paul Freed (8), Peter Janzen (3), Peter Uetz (31), Rhys Chapman (4), Rishi Baral (5), S.P.Vijayakumar (1), T.R. Zhang (2), Teddy Angarita-Sierra (3), Timofey Zalutsky (3), Trivalairat et al. 2020 (3), Vladimir Turitsyn (1), Ximena López Goñi (4), Y.H. Xu (2). Thank you all!

Literature curation and AI. Some time ago we started a project on team-curation of the reptile literature. Unfortunately this turned out to be less effective than thought, due to the lack of a coherent strategy and proper tools. We would like to restart this project, but this time integrate some modern AI tools (which also can read pdfs). As you all know, AI can read papers now and extract information — well, at least it claims it can. Obviously, AI is not quite there yet, but we would like to find a couple of curious volunteers who are willing to help us probing the limits of AI with reptile literature curation and to learn something about AI tools along the way. We plan to organize a few zoom meetings to discuss various approaches and hopefully will figure out some strategies to more effectively read and curate the reptile literature into the Reptile Database. Please email us for more information if interested.

Year of the genome: new reptile genomes. Last year was like a breakthrough year for reptile genomes. While the past 5 years each have had at least a few reptile genomes published, we reached about 250 genomes last year, with Colston et al. 2025 on about 100 draft genomes standing out. You can find most of them by simply searching the database for “genome” although that will include many mitochondrial genomes too.

R package for the Reptile Database. For those of you who are frustrated with our limited search functions, you can now expand those abilities by an R package written by JP Alencar.

9000 amphibians. By the way, our friends at the IUCN amphibian specialist group just reported that they have reached 9000 species of amphibians, so that there are more than 21,500 herp species now. At the current rate of description, there will be 10,000 amphibians in a few years. We hope that they do not go extinct as fast as they are described, which reminds us of ...

Conservation news

We welcome Nick (Wei Cheng Tan) as our new conservation editor. Nick is a postdoctoral ecologist for the Virtual Ecosystem project of Imperial College London. His research interests encompass the evolution of phenotypic diversity as well as the effects of climate and land use changes on biodiversity. Nick has a keen interest in herpetology and enjoys studying them in their natural environment. Nick will help us to post news about conservation-related topics in our newsletter and social media feeds. We think that we should report more about conservation issues, given the increasing human pressure on natural habitats and biodiversity. So, please expect more of this in the future and welcome Nick! Here is his first (totally subjective) selection of newsworthy notes:

Global reptile trade. Nearly 35% of the world’s 11,000+ reptile species are traded, with demand heavily skewed toward reptiles of large body sizes, habitat generalists, and insular endemics. Unsurprisingly, turtles and crocodiles face particularly high trade risk. The authors warn that many reptile trades remain unprotected by international regulations, with online trade records often underestimated, highlighting an urgent need for targeted monitoring and stricter measures to protect species. Source: Zhang, S. et al. (2025) Demand for small- and large-ranged reptiles in worldwide wildlife trade. Conservation Biology, e70095

One-quarter of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction. One in four freshwater species, including fishes, crustaceans, and dragonflies, is threatened with extinction. Key drivers include pollution, dams, water extraction, and agriculture, while invasive species and diseases and overharvesting has already caused more extinctions than expected. More importantly, the study says that relying on abiotic indicators like water stress and eutrophication should be urgently re-evaluated. Source: Sayer, C. A., et al. 2025) One-quarter of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction. Nature aop

Teaching Herpetology

Are you teaching herpetology? Are you a student of herpetology? We wonder how many people teach herpetology (and related classes) at the university level and how we can improve on herpetology classes. Let us know via this Google form. Can we develop some shared teaching materials? Examples are identification tools (using the Reptile Database, AI etc.), bioinformatics exercises (phylogenetics, genetics and genome sciences), ecology, citizen science (iNaturalist), comparative morphology resources, etc. We are planning to organize a zoom meeting after our next newsletter in May, so please let us know if you are interested in participating filling out a simple form. No obligation!

Reptile Etymologies

Last September, we posted a short quiz about reptile etymologies. We asked you whether you know the meaning of 10 common genus or species names. 132 of you have filled out the short questionnaire. Here are the results:

1. -ophis (Greek) — 80% correctly chose “snake” as its meaning (but 15% thought it means worm). (120 snake genera and almost 1000 species, including some snake-like lizards, contain that word in their name, so it’s good to know!).

2. Amphisbaena (worm lizards): this was one of the most contentiious ones. 36% said it means “double-headed” while almost 40% thought it means moving in both directions. Technically, the latter is correct, from Greek ámphís (= on both sides) and baíno (= to go). Interestingly, 11% thought it means “amphibious” and 14% guessed “none of these”. There are more than 100 species in the genus.

3. brevis is Latin for short. 90% got that right. (59 species have that word in their name)

4. viridis is Latin for green, 94% of you knew it!

5. lineatus is Latin for lined, and 81% were right, but another 13% were not entirely wrong guessing “linear”. About 140 species have that word in their name, including bilineata (two-lined), albolineata (= white-lined) etc.

6. maculata is Latin for spotted and 75% of you knew it. 16% said marbled which is not completely wrong. 96 species use that word.

7. pulcher means pretty in Latin, but only 52% of you knew it. 27% guessed “patterned” and 20% said “ornamented” or “colorful”. It’s not as common as maculata but there are still about 50 species with some form of pulcher in their name.

8. laticeps means broad-headed in Latin and 61.5% correctly chose that option.

9. taeniatus is a Latin or Greek word for “ribbon”, so it can mean both “having ribbons” (47%) or “having bars” (40%) when translated more loosely.

10. leucogaster (Greek) was correctly found to mean white-bellied by 80.6%. Just remember leukemia for blood cancer (of the white blood cells) and gastro-intestinal (for stomach and intestines, from Greek gaster = belly).

A graphical summary is available here, and a summary of the open questions here.

We will likely post a few more such quizzes on social media, so follow us on Facebook or one of the other sites (see below).

Books received

Mattison, Chris (2025) The Lives of Snakes: A Natural History of the World's Snakes. Princeton University Press, 288 pp. $24.50, with 30% discount). Almost 30 years after Harry Greene’s Snakes — The evolution of mystery in nature, Chris Mattison presents a beautifully illustrated and updated overview of snake biology. Although shorter and with much less text (but with a similar number of photos, Mattison covers morphology, ecology, reproduction, diet and feeding, enemies and defense, as well as their relationship to humans in one chapter each. The high-quality photos and selecting drawings (especially to illustrate the morphology) make the book ideal for non-experts. About 50 species are individually presented (on 2 pages each) as exemplars for their behavior, ecology, or evolutionary adaptations.

Teddy Angarita Sierra and Francisco Ruiz [eds.] (2024) Bites, Venoms, and Venomous Snakes of Colombia / first edition. Bogotá: Instituto Nacional de Salud, 2024. This is a comprehensive survey of the 54 or so species of vipers and coral snakes of Colombia. The books was written by a total fo 24 authors in 10 chapters, most of which concerned with venoms and snakebite. However, the first 3 chapters describe the taxonom of coral snakes and vipers in Colombia. The book is free to download at the link above.

Social media update

Finally, let’s welcome Daniel Duran as new social media officer. Daniel is a biologist from Yucatán, México. His main research focus is on taxonomy and species distribution, mainly with reptiles and amphibians, He also likes wildlife photography and promoting citizen science. He will help Ro to operate an expanded list of social media activities, including postings to Facebook, Mastodon and Bluesky.

Our next database release is scheduled for May/June 2026.

As always, if you have any corrections or additions, please email us.

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Created: 2 May 2020 / Last updated: as indicated on top

What's new? (June 2026)

24 June 2026 -- new release