What's new? (2014-2020)

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17 August 2020 -- New Release!

New species and other name changes. Since our last release in April / early May, we have added 99 species records to the Reptile Database which stands now at 11,341 species and 2,224 subspecies (excluding nominate subspecies). 92 species have been newly described during the past 4 months or so. The year 2020 has already gained 145 newly described species, again bound for an all-time high this year. In addition to new species, 38 names have changed, including 11 species that were moved to other genera. This includes 2 new genera, namely the gymnopththalmid genus Magdalenasaura and the colubrid genus Persiophis. 15 subspecies were elevated to full species and another 7 species were revalidated from synonymy. Eleven species were either synonymized or downgraded to subspecies since our last release, resulting in a total of 141 name changes in a mere ~4 months, or at last one new species or changed name per day. The good news is that you can find all changes, as usual, in our updated checklist, available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/. As always, you can also see a continuously updated list of new species on our new species page.

Literature database. Our literature database count stands now at 51,314 references, (764 more than the 50,550 references in the April release), including 770 that were published this year. 36,751 out of the 51,314 references (~72%) have links to online sources, although there are still many that are either behind paywalls or that have to be ordered as hardcopies. It’s difficult to estimate the number of open access papers, but we have close to 3000 papers linked to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, mostly out of print and out of copyright papers.

Tuatara genome published. A noteable highlight among recently published papers is the tuatara genome that was released earlier this month. At 5 Gb, it is not only one of the largest vertebrate genomes yet assembled, but it also completes, in a sense, the genomes of lizards, snakes, crocodiles and turtles published so far. As expected, the genome also confirms the unusual position of tuataras in the tree of life and among reptiles in particular. It also supports, by the way, synonymization of the tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus and its (former) sister species, S. guntheri, which represents a highly inbred population.

Snake trade: A more conservation-related paper was published by Hierink et al. 2020 who made an attempt to track down worldwide snake trade over the past 50 years or so. In order to get that data, they analyzed a database of traded species maintained by CITES. The database records over 40 million snakes and the analysis finds that cmmercially traded pythons dominated the global snake trade, comprising 38.8% of all traded snakes. Live snakes were mainly exported by Ghana, Indonesia, Togo, and Benin, and mainly imported by China and the USA. Venomous snake trade comprised 10.8% of all traded snakes, and over 75% of wild-sourced venomous snakes came from Indonesia. This study emphasizes that trade is a notable threat to natural snake populations, apart from habitat destruction such as deforestation.

Photos. Since our last release in April, our users (you!) have sent us 1,209 photos of 678 species — also a new record! That makes it a total of 15,446 photos of 5,151 species in the database (>45% of all species). If we add photos from outside sources (from Calphotos, Flickr etc.) to which we link, we have photos of about 65% of all species. Only iNaturalist has more species covered by photos, namely about 6,000 species. Obviously, we work with and link to iNaturalist and encourage everybody to submit their observations there, but since you can simply email your photos to photos@reptile-database.org that may be even easier :) We will provide more details about online photos of reptiles in our next newsletter and let you know which species are not covered by any major database or citizen science project.

The new photos in this release were contributed mainly by Laurie Vitt (570 photos), Paul Freed (151) and Suranjan Karunarathna (98) who donated two thirds of the new crop. The remaining photos were submitted by the following photographers: Abdel Bizid (45), Akshay A. Khandekar (6), Albedi Andrade (2), Alejandro Comte (1), Alex Slavenko (21), Andy Boyce (2), Anthony Cheke (1), Aviad Bar (31), Avrajjal Shosh (1), Ayushi Jain (1), Bekkay el Bekkaoui (2), Bill Duellman (1), Brad Maryan (1), Brian Bush (16), Christian Molls (3), Daniel Ariano Sánchez (4), Davi L Pantoja (1), Dineth Danushka (3), Elí García Padilla (1), Ely D Gómez (9), Eskandar Rastegar Pouyani (1), Esteban Alzate (1), Estefany Cano (3), Evan Quah (1), Fernando Castro-Herrera (2), Frank Tillack (1), Fred Kraus (5), Gabriel Martínez (36), Gernot Vogel (3), Harald Nicolay (3), Harsimran Singh (1), Jian Wang (3), Jin-Long Ren (9), John Cann (24), Jorge Alberto Zúñiga Baos (1), Juan M. Daza (3), Karim Daoues (12), Kurt Orionmystery (5), Lee Grismer (1), Luis Ceríaco (4), Lukáš Pola (2), Mahdi Rajabizadeh (1), Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte (20), Márcio Borges (1), Maria Kaufman (2), Mark Sabaj (1), Michael Poole (1), Nelson Jorge da Silva Jr (1), Paul Henric P. Gojo Cruz (8), Peter Uetz (4), Petrus de Ruijter (3), Pham The Cuong (6), Rafaqat Masroor (2), Rafe Brown (8), Rafe M. Brown & Marites B. Sanguila (4), Rasoul Karamiani (3), Rodrigo Castellari Gonzalez (3), Roger A. Anderson (1), Rubén Alonso Carbajal-Márquez (2), S.R. Ganesh & S.R. Chandramouli (5), Salman Baloch (1), Sebastian Kirchhof (2), Shai Meiri (4), Soheil Sami (4), Stephen Richards (2), Suneth Kanishka (8), Tiago Gomes dos Santos (3), Tim Colston (1), Tim van Wagensveld (1), Tony Jewell (3), Werner Conradie (6), William R. Branch (3), Youcef Islem Bezzaz (2). As always, thank you so much — we really appreciate every one of your contributions!

Species descriptions and etymologies. With this release we have descriptions or diagnoses of more than 5,000 species (only partially overlapping with photos, so that we have either photos OR descriptions of almost 8000 species). If we also count comparisons that include many other species, we may be close to 10,000 species with some kind of descriptive information (see Diploderma menghaiense as a rather extreme example). On top of that, we have now etymologies of more than 50% of all species (5,892 species to be precise). Still a long way to go but we are getting there. Let us know if you want to contribute any kind of data, ideally for a larger number of species :)

Spanish common names: with the help of William Farr, we have added hundreds of Spanish vernacular names to this release, mostly of Mexican species. If you have lists of Spanish names for other Latin American species, please let us know. We would be happy to add them as well.

5000 recipients of this mailing list. 5,000 seems to be the magic number this time, so it may sound like a coincidence, but our mailing list also exceeded 5,000 email addresses this time around — although about 20% of them are already defunct and bounce back, so we have removed them — which leaves still more than 4,000 people. Feel free to pass this newsletter on to your friends and ask them if they got it — they may not have received it due to an old email address or a full mailbox (which gives us a “quoata exceeded" error). Thanks for your continuing interest and support!

Social media officers wanted. After Mark Herr and Amy Macleod stepped down as social media editors, we need help on that front! If you like reptiles and you don’t have enough to post on your Facebook page or Twitter feed — join us: as you can see in the intro above, there are plenty of news we need to tweet or post about. Let us know if you are interested.

Books received
Stephen Spawls & Bill Branch (2020) The dangerous snakes of Africa. Bloomsbury Wildlife, London etc., 336 pp. The best thing about this book is that the authors not only describe all the 137 species of dangerous snakes of Africa, but also the 70 other snakes that look like dangerous snakes. With 400 color photos and maps of all the dangerous species (but no maps for the harmless ones, unfortunately) the book is the only book that covers the whole continent at such depths (although, to some extent, 3 other books are similar in scope, namely Dobiey & Vogel’s 2007 Terralog book, and the rather obscure 2013 books published for military personnel by Shupe and Brown). At on online price of £24 ≈ US$32 for the paperback (£22 ≈ US$30 for the pdf) the Spawls & Branch book is a bargain everybody with an interest in African herpetology or venomous snakes should have.

Hans-Dieter Sues (2019) The rise of reptiles - 320 Million Years of Evolution. Johns Hopkins University Press, 400 pp, US$85 (hardbound). This large-format book traces the fossil history of reptiles with frequent reference to living clades of reptiles (for those that are still extant, obviously, although there are far more fossil species than extant ones). Sues puts both fossil and extant reptiles into a phylogenetic context in about 20 cladograms, so you can understand both their origin and relationships. The format is twice the size of Spawls & Branch, lavishly illustrated with more than 350 photos and diagrams (even most fossils are shown in color) and just the references fill 68 pages, so it’s the most up-to-date and complete summary of reptile paleontology you can get. You can take a peek at Google Books and find a more detailed (very positive) review by Walter Joyce in Herpetological Reviews, 51 (1): 169-170.

Interview and Youtube videos on the Reptile Database. If you don’t have enough on reptile databasing yet, Peter gave an interview on the Reptile Database on Jayaditya Purkayastha's herp-related interview series in June that you can watch both on Youtube and listen to as podcast. Similarly, he also gave a short presentation on the database in Masud Salimian's Facebook series on Wild Snake Ecology Other presentations are available on Youtube, so for those of you who are not that much interested in the boring details of reptile databasing, there are other, more interesting biological topics too.

2 May 2020 -- New Release!

With a slight delay, we just released a new version of the Reptile Database (originally scheduled for release in April).

Since our last release in December, we have added 106 species to the Reptile Database, of which 81 have been newly described during the past 4 months or so. The new species count for 2019 stands now at 220, an all-time high. In addition to new species, 76 names have changed, including 35 species that were moved to other genera. This includes 6 new genera, namely the colubrid genera Baliodryas and Trimerodytes, the new gymnophthalmid genera Centrosaura, Rheosaurus, and Wilsonosaura, a new agamid genus, Pelturagonia, and the new viperid Metlapilcoatlus (for some former Atropoides). 13 subspecies were elevated to full species and another 18 species were revalidated from synonymy. Four species were synonymized since our last release, resulting in a total of 162 name changes in a mere ~4 months, or at last one new species or changed name per day. Unusual times indeed. The good news is that you can find all changes, as usual, in our updated checklist, available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/.

Since our deadline for this release (about 2 weeks ago), another half dozen new species have already been described. You can see a continuously updated list of new species on our new species page.

What is a species (or subspecies), anyway? With unabated splitting, this remains a relevant question and we re-iterate our recommendation to read the recent essays by David Hillis on the topic, both in the Journal of Herpetology and in Herpetological Review. We usually follow the literature when new species are described, even when the evidence for a new species is not fully convincing (although in certain cases we do decide to hold back on adding them), hoping that someone will clarify or synonymize those new names. In many cases we do consult with independent experts or our scientific advisory board. As David predicted, the pendulum seems to swing back, at least in some cases, such as Eurasian vipers, many of which are now thought to be synonymous.

New checklists. In this release, we have integrated the new checklists for the Mexican states of Sonora, San Luis Potosi, and Durango (Lemos-Espinal et al. 2018a, 2018b, 2019) and the new Atlas of Brazilian snakes (Nogueira et al. 2019). In addition, we have also incorporated the new checklist of Chinese reptiles, including their Chinese common names (generously provided by Kai Wang). Just these 5 papers update the information of more than 1,100 species, not counting countless other singular observations and reports.

Literature database. Just after our last release in December, we have crossed the 50,000 references mark in our literature database (now at 50,550 references), of which 392 were published this year, and 1739 publications published in 2019). Our literature curation team is working hard to read those papers and help to transfer that information into the database. Let us know if you want to join by reading papers and sending us your excerpts :)

Habitat data. So far, we have not added much habitat data, but such data is becoming available on larger sets of species, so we have started to add some of those. One of the first large-scale studies added to the database, was that of Harrington et al. 2018 who identified more than 600 (partly or fully) arboreal snakes. Including those, we have habitat data for about 2,000 reptile species now, although many more are needed for global macro-ecological analyses. This data will be searchable in a forthcoming release. Let us know if you have any other datasets that you want to be imported!

Temperature-dependent sex determination. There are various interesting data points in the database that may not be obvious. For instance, you should be able to find most reptiles with temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) in the database, although there is no direct way to search for this trait. However, you can search the references for “temperature-dependent” and you will get 23 species, at least 18 of which show TSD (if you know others, please let us know!). The mechanism of TSD appears to have finally been solved, at least in Trachemys scripta elegans, in a recent study by Weber et al. 2020, which reminded us of this phenomenon. They show that temperature regulates the expression of Kdm6b, a histone demethylase, which is responsible for testis development. At warmer, female-producing temperature, STAT3 is phosphorylated and silences Kdm6b transcription to repress testis development.

Photos. Since our last release in December, our users (you!) have sent us 584 photos of 340 species. That makes it a total of 14,256 photos of 4,860 species in the database. If we add photos from outside sources (from Calphotos, Flickr etc.), we have photos of 6,813 species or >60% of all species. The new photos were contributed by the following photographers: Alan Watson Featherstone (7 photos), Alexander Pieh (8), Andre Koch (3), Andrea Gläßer-Trobisch & Dietmar Trobisch (11), Andrej Susor (1), Brad Maryan (1), Brian Bush (59), Brooke Bessesen (1), Carlos Rivero Blanco (3), Carmelo Lopez (15), César Luis Barrio Amorós (4), Cristopher Antúnez Fonseca (1), Daniel Hofer (3), David Thomas (2), Diego Miguel Garces (1), Ed Galoyan (84), Edgar Lehr (1), Elson Meneses-Pelayo (1), Ely Gomez (25), Frank Ziemann (2), Fred Kraus (3), Gary Brown (6), Geoff Carpentier (16), Gerald T. Dunger (4), Gernot Vogel (1), Hamzeh Oraie (3), Hans Wolf (9), Harald Nicolay (14), Harith Morgadinho Farooq (24), Hector M. Diaz Perdomo (1), Henrik Bringsøe (3), Ishan Agarwal (1), Jean-François Trape (2), Jesús Alberto Loc Barragán (1), Juan Manuel Pérez Iglesias, Maximiliano Pardo, Samuel Ernesto Olivieri Bornand (4), Karim Daoues (1), Kell Nielsen (2), Krishnan Kalpat (1), Leonardo Barros Ribeiro (3), Luis Ceríaco (2), Marc Faucher (1), Mauricio Ocampo (3), Mauro Teixeira Junior (82), Mendis Wickramasinghe (3), Montri Sumontha (5), Nick Poyarkov (2), Pablo Garcia (3), Paul Freed/Barbara Lester (38), Peter Janzen (5), Peter Uetz (35), Philippe Geniez (3), Robin Gloor (1), Salvator Carranza (13), Sandeep Das (3), Saunak Pal (3), Seyed Mahdi Kazemi (3), Sofia Velasquez (3), Soheila Javanmardi (7), Achim Ritter (1), SR Ganesh (4), Steve Spawls (21), Tony Gamble (3), William Farr (6), and Yahaya Musah (2). As always, thank you very much!

Genus photos wanted! The 14,256 photos in the database represent 1,037 genera, about 86% of all reptile genera. However, we do not have any photos of 172 genera (representing 408 species). If you happen to have any of these, please let us know — we would love to post them! A list of these genera is available (as Excel spreadsheet).

Volunteer wanted for bioinformatics project related to reptile photos. We are looking for a student or other volunteer who wants to practice his/her programming skills (e.g. in Python, R, or some other scripting language). It’s (hopefully) a relatively small project, involving the extraction and databasing of photos from pdfs. One of our collaborators has developed a tool to extract photos and their captions from pdfs, and we need someone who is interested in processing that data, mapping photos back to papers and taxa. Let us know if you are interested. This may also lead to a publication relatively quickly.

21 December 2019 -- New Release!

This release concludes another record-breaking year, with more than 200 new species of reptiles described (although only 195 of those reached us in time for this release with another 6 after our deadline). Since 2006 more than 100 new species have been described every year, but only 2014 and 2018 exceeded 180 new species… unitl now, that is.

While we usually accept the peer-reviewed literature as far as new descriptions go, please keep in mind that there is also increasing evidence of oversplitting in (reptile) taxonomy (e.g. Chambers & Hillis 2019).

Species database. Over the past 4 months, the number of reptile species increased from 11,050 to 11,136, i.e. an increase of 86 species. 7 species have been revalidated from synonymy and 12 subspecies were elevated from subspecies to full species. In addition, 19 species moved to another genus (mostly Ptychozoon to Gekko) and 6 changed their spelling (including gender, partly because of genus changes). Finally, 11 species and subspecies were synonymized, resulting in a total list of 138 new, changed, or deleted species names. Note that we also have a new crocodile this time, Crocodylus halli, split off from Crocodylus novaeguineae by Murray et al. 2019.

A complete list of species and changes since the last release is available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2019_12.xlsx.

>For new species that were published since our deadline for this release (Dec 15), please see our update page at http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/new_species.html. This list also includes the species that haven’t made it by our deadline last week.

New (and old) genera. Two new genera of snakes have been established since our last release: Arcanumophis SMAGA et al. 2019 (with a single species, Arcanumophis problematicus (previously Liophis problematicus), and Kladirostratus CONRADIE et al. 2019, with K. acutus and K. togoensis (both formerly in Psammophylax).

Among lizards, Chaitanya et al. 2019 resurrected Dravidogecko (formerly synonymized with Hemidactylus) while Wood et al. 2019 synonymized Ptychozoon with Gekko and erected several new subgenera. VÁSQUEZ-RESTREPO et al. 2019 proposed two new genera for several species of Echinosaura, namely Centrosaura VÁSQUEZ-RESTREPO et al. 2019 and Rheosaurus VÁSQUEZ-RESTREPO et al. 2019. Unfortunately, the latter two reached us too late for this release, so they will only be in the next release of the database.

New checklists and geographic updates. This release includes the latest checklist of Ecuador (Torres-Carvajal et al. 2019), and the Key to the Snakes of the Philippines by Weinell et al. 2019, an extension of the Synopsis of the Snakes of the Philippines by Leviton et al. 2018.

Geographic records and social media. In a notable paper, Marshall & Strine 2019 investigated 302,386 locality records from GBIF and 44,687 geo-tagged records from Flickr to see if social media can provide new data to reptile distribution data (specifically snakes). While they found relatively little new distributional information from social media it will be interesting to see whether this extrapolates to other sites such as iNaturalist or Herpmapper (or a combination of them).

Literature update. This release of the database contains 49,782 references, compared to 49,134 in the August release, i.e. an increase of 648 publications. That includes 1510 papers published in 2019.

New photos. During the past 4 months, 58 photographers have submitted 440 new photos of 218 species. Over the past year we have added 1,193 photos of 606 species (or ~3 photos a day). We have now 13,692 photos of 4,688 species (= 42% of all species) from more than 900 photographers, not counting another 557 or so species that have photos from other  sources such as Calphotos, Flickr and Reptarium, adding up to 20,723 photos of 5,245 species (or 47% of all species) total. that said, we still do not have photos of almost 6000 species).

These 58 photographers submitted new photos this time: Alessandro Catenazzi (1 photo), André Koch (3), Ángel Sosa (3), Aoi Bringsøe (3), Asghar Mobaraki (7), Ashok Mallik (2), Avi Zobel (3), Awal Khan (3), Brian Bush (70), Christo Deysel (5), Daniel G. Mulcahy (1), David Thomas (16), Dick Sage (2), Diego Demangel (1), Ely David Gómez Fonseca (9), Faa Ganda (2), Frank Glaw (5), Fred Kraus (1), Gernot Vogel (14), Harald Hinkel (1), Harald Nicolay (3), Henrik Bringsøe (99), Ibuki Fukuyama (1), Igor Joventino Roberto (1), John Lyakurwa (37), Kell Nielsen (24), Kurt Orionmystery G. (3), Luis Ceríaco (3), Luis Enrique Vera Pérez (3), Manuel Iturriaga Monsisbay (10), Marc Faucher (3), Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte (1), Margareth Voelger S. (3), Mauricio Ocampo Ballivian (4), Mickael Sanchez (24), Miguel Vences (2), Morris Flecks (1), Paul Carter (2), Paula Maldonado (1), Peter Janzen (1), Peter Uetz (15), Raul Ignacio Diaz  (1), Richard Krebs (5), Ron Johnstone(1), Rute Norte (1), Saly Sitthivong (1), Spartak Litvinchuk (1), Stephen Mahony (1), Stephen Zozaya (3), Suranjan Karunarathna (8), Susan Prochaska (3), Tatyana Sapelko (3), Taylor Edwards (5), Tejas Thackeray (1), Valter Weijola (1), Victoria Ershova (2), Vincente Niclos (7), and Vlad Cioflec (3). As always, a million thanks to all of you :)

Please keep sending photos to photos@reptile-database.org.

Global type catalogue of reptiles. Our global type catalog of reptiles has now been published in Zootaxa (open access). Please let us know if you have any corrections, so we can keep this up-to-date. We have also implemented a mechanism to check new database entries (i.e. new species) for consistent and non-redundant collection acronyms.

The disconnect between DNA and species. DNA sequences play a critical role for classifying species and their proper placement in phylogenetic trees, hence it is critical that new (or existing) species are correctly mapped to DNA sequences. As you can see from the taxonomic changes listed above, this is a non-trivial problem, given that species concepts and species definitions change — but their labels on photos or specimens in collections often do not, at least not automatically. On top of that, many publications use temporary species names (e.g. “Liolaemus sp. 1”) that often get only resolved to species names in subsequent papers. However, many of these temporary names not only persist but actually increase in number, and thus cause an increasing disconnect between species and DNA sequences. We believe that this problem can only be solved by experts updating their sequence entries in GenBank and thus the NCBI taxonomy. For more details see our (open access) paper in Zootaxa by Garg et al. 2019.

Thanks to Amy Macleod for her help with our social media efforts. Amy stepped down from her role last summer, but Mark Herr will stay on board and reactivate our online activities soon.

Literature editor (not curator!) wanted. In order to cover the flood of published papers we need someone who can help us to process publication alerts, tables of contents, and other sources of literature citations. Note that this is not the same as literature curation, so you don’t need to read any of these papers — you just have to help us get the citations into our database. While this can be done manually, some scripting or automation skills would be advantageous, although two people can also work together on this task (i.e. one automator and one manual editor). Literature editors will also be credited by authorship on Reptile Database publications. Details available upon request.

Financial disclosure. In 2019 we received a total of $45 [sic!] in donations via our Paypal account (see link on homepage) — Thanks to the 2 donors! That amount helped to cover some of the hosting fees for the site.

12 August 2019 -- New Release!

This is yet another record-breaking release, with more than 11,000 species of reptiles (possibly more species than birds! — see below), less than 1000 species with subspecies, and more than 7000 species with DNA sequences. Read on for details ...

Species database. Over the past 4 months, the number of reptile species increased from 10,970 to 11,050, i.e. an increase of 80 species. More than 100 new species were described during the first 6 months of 2019, well on track for a record-breaking year 2019. 75 new species have been described since our April release, 13 species have been revalidated from synonymy and 5 subspecies were elevated from subspecies to full species. In addition, 15 species moved to another genus (mostly colubrids and skinks) and 5 changed their spelling (including gender, partly because of genus changes). Finally, 26 species and subspecies were synonymized, resulting in a total list of 150 new, changed, or deleted species names. A complete list of species and changes since the last release is available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2019_08.xlsx.

For new species that were published since our deadline for this release (July 25), please see our update page at http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/new_species.html.

More reptiles than birds? According to eBird, there are 10,721 bird species worldwide although these numbers vary depending on the source (see global bird checklists available from Avibase). Based on that, there are now more reptile species than bird species. However, birds still have way more subspecies than reptiles, namely 17,991 subspecies of birds while reptiles have only 2,310 subspecies (or 3,304 if you include nominate subspecies). In general, ornithologists seem to like subspecies more than herpetologists, so there appear to be cultural preferences at play.

Subspecies remain in decline. This is the first release of the Reptile Database that has fewer than 1,000 species with subspecies, 994 to be precise. That is, 994 species have a total of 2,310 subspecies (not counting nominate subspecies such as Ablepharus chernovi chernovi). In the last release (April 2019) we still had 1,004 species with 2,331 subspecies. That is, 20 subspecies were either elevated to species (5) or synonymized with other (sub-) species (14), including one subspecies that was moved to another species, namely Anolis whitemani lapidosus. Given the often subjective status of species vs. subspecies we plan to move subspecies to their own database entries in a future update. This will have other advantages, at least in terms of data management. More on that in the next release.

Other (selected) taxonomic news. Hussam Zaher and colleagues published a new phylogeny of all snake species which we partly adopted. Independently, we have also added 3 new genera, namely Fowlea THEOBALD 1868 (resurrected by Purkayashta et al. 2019), Proahaetulla MALLIK et al. 2019, Smithophis GIRI et al. 2019. Ren et al. 2019 also resurrected Trimerodytes COPE 1895 (for Sinonatrix and Opisthotropis balteata) although we haven’t adopted this genus yet.

New checklists and geographic updates. This release also contains updated checklists for Gujarat, India (based on Patel & Vyas 2019), Nayarit, Mexico (Woolrich-Pina et al. 2016), the Caribbean (Hedges et al. 2019), and Angola (Branch et al. 2019). These four regions cover 107, 121, ~800, and ~280 species, respectively, or a total of about 1,300 species. In addition to these we have added numerous updates or single species from individual papers (such as those from Check List or Herp Reviews).

Literature update. This release of the database contains 49,134 references, compared to 48,012 in the April release, i.e. an increase of 1,122 publications. That includes 997 papers published in 2019.

New photos. During the past 4 months, 78 photographers have submitted 341 new photos of 166 species. We have now 13,253 photos of 4,571 species (= 41% of all species) from about 880 photographers, not counting another 1,700 or so species that have photos from other (linked, public) sources. Altogether we have photos from at least 56% of all species (but still no photos from almost 5000 species).

These 78 photographers submitted new photos this time: Akshay Khandekar (9), Alessandro Paterna (5), Alex Acuna (6), Ali Gholamifard (2), André Koch (1), Angie Morris (1), Anna Geraskina (2), Attapol Rujirawan (1), Avrajjal Ghosh (6), B.H.C.K. Murthy (1), Bill Branch (1), Carlos Hernandez Peraza (2), Catherine Lanneluc (2), Claudio Reyes-Olivares (9), Clive Hammans (3), Criss Acuña (5), Cristian S. Abdala (4), Daniel Jablonski (2), Diego Ramírez Álvarez (6), Dominique Tavenon (1), Elizabeth Corry (1), Elson Meneses-Pelayo (5), Ernesto Palacio (2), Fernando Castro (4), Floyd E. Hayes (2), Frank Gloystein (4), Fred Kraus (2), Freddy Burgos (1), Hayden Davis (5), Ishan Agarwal (2), Ivan Ineich (1), Ivan Sazima (6), Jean-François (7), Jennifer Daltry (1), John Lyakurwa (2), Jorge Armin Escalante Pasos (7), Julie Underwood, Auckland Zoo (1), Krishna Khan (1), Kurt H.P. Guek (13), Luis Calizaya (1), Luis Enrique Vera Perez & Jorge Alberto Zuniga Baos (2), Manuel Godoy (2), Manuel Iturriaga Monsisbay (18), Marc Faucher (7), Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte (1), Marco A.L. Zuffi (2), Marina Doronina (4), Max Hammermann (11), May Lin Win (4), Meghna Limboo (3), Michael Koehn (3), Miguel A Carmona (4), Mirko Barts (1), Mohd Abdul Muin (2), Patrick Malonza (4), Peter Uetz (32), Pratyush Mohapatra (4), Rachel Batista Alvarez (5), Ricardo Marques (5), Richard Sage (14), Rodrigo Castellari Gonzalez (3), Rohan Pandit (2), Roman Zuev (5), S.R.Ganesh (4), S.R.Ganesh & S.R. Chandramouli (8), Samuel Lalronunga (1), Sang Ngoc Nguyen (1), Stephen Mahony (12), Sumit Nath (1), Sunandan Das (3), Teddy Angarita (4), Thomas Ziegler (7), Václav Gvoždík (10), Vishal Santra (4), Vivek Philip Cyriac (5), Vlad Cioflec (3), W. Guzmán (1), Wayne van Devender (1). As always, a million thanks to all of you :)

The new pictures will go online with a little delay in a few days.
Please keep sending photos to photos@reptile-database.org.

Books received

The Book of Snakes: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species from around the World, by Mark O’Shea. 2018. University of Chicago Press. 656 pages. This is a book for the snake lover, portraying 600 mostly representative species (out of 3789 in the Reptile Database) across all families of snakes. Each species us covered on a page, with photos, distribution data, and brief natural history accounts. The 600 species are also cross-referenced in the Reptile Database. Andrew Durso has just published a very positive (and fairly extensive) review in Copeia (107 [2]: 383-385) so we do not have to repeat all the praise here. Let’s just add that this pretty big book is very reasonable priced, with a welcome and significant discount for the eBook (although the latter is, apparently, not available everywhere).

Snakes of Central and Western Africa, by Jean-Philippe Chippaux & Kate Jackson 2019. Johns Hopkins University Press, 448 pp. This monumental work covers the snakes of a huge area, ranging from Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad in the North to Angola in the South, including Congo, Rwanda and Burundi in the East. It is thus a perfect complement to other recently published surveys of the African herpetofauna, such as the Field Guide to East African Reptiles by Steve Spawls et al. and the books by the late Donald Broadley (and co-authors) on the snakes of Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. The region covered by Jackson and Chippaux actually includes that of Trape and Mané’s Guide des serpents d’Afrique occidentale, which covers Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but unfortunately is only available in French. Snakes of Central and Western Africa is a taxonomic reference, intended as a guide to identify the 300 or so snake species in the covered region. It achieves that by detailed description of characters, extensive keys, and numerous photos, drawings, and maps (all maps are dot maps with individual localities). The only snakes that are only cursorily described (on 7 pages) are the 50 or so blindsnakes in the region, which is reasonable as they are rarely found and difficult to ID without expert knowledge. Most other species are described in sufficient detail to ID them, often with multiple photos to illustrate color or regional variation. We would have preferred the information to be a bit more structured, e.g. with separate headings for description, size, range, diet, etc., but this information is probably more readable in its current format. Overall, a must-read for everybody interested in African snakes!

Global type catalogue of reptiles. With the help of many collection managers and other experts we have compiled a catalogue of all primary type specimens. Updated type information, which also uses standardized collection acronyms across all primary types, is available in this release of the database. A paper on this project is in press in Zootaxa but you can download the data tables already. We have identified hundreds of species without known type specimens and about 80 species for which we couldn’t find any type information. Let us know if you have any information on these cases.

First Reptile Database Expedition to Nepal. The Database team (Paul and Peter) will go for their first herping expedition this fall, visiting Nepal. If you happen to be in Nepal this October, please let us know -- you are invited to join us for a herping trip!

SEH Meeting. If you happen to be at the Annual Meeting of the Societas Europaea Herpetologica (SEH) in Milano, Italy, in Sep 2019, stop by at our poster or meet us for a coffee.

22 April 2019 -- New Release!

Species database. Over the past 4 months, the number of reptile species increased from 10,885 to 10,970, i.e. an increase of 85 species. A total of 180 new species were described in 2018, only 1 short of the record 181 in 2014. 68 new species have been described since our November release, 10 species have been revalidated from synonymy and 23 subspecies were elevated from subspecies to full species. In addition, 32 species moved to another genus (mostly colubrids and skinks) and 28 changed their spelling (including gender. Finally, 13 species were synonymized, resulting in a total list of 175 new, changed, or deleted species names. A complete list of species and changes since the last release is available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2019_04.xlsx.

Other taxonomic news. This release also features one new subfamily Xylophiinae DEEPAK et al. 2019 that includes the 3 species of Xylophis, and 5 new genera, including Kuniesaurus SADLIER et al. 2019, Palusophis MONTINGELLI et al. 2019, Yanomamia MACHADO-PELLEGRINO et al. 2018, Austroablepharus COUPER et al. 2018, and Tropicagama MELVILLE et al. 2018. We haven’t follwed a few other changes yet, e.g. the reclassification of writhing skinks (Lygosominae) by Freitas et al. 2019 who restrict the genus Lygosoma to Southeast Asia, resurrect the genus Riopa for a clade of Indian and Southeast Asian species, expand the genus Mochlus to include all African species and describe the new genus Subdoluseps in Southeast Asia. They also synonymize the genus Lepidothyris with Mochlus. We postpone these actions for the time being as we got the paper only a few days before the deadline for this release, and because Freitas et al. cover less than half of the species in these genera in their analysis, but we will revisit the study by the time the next database version is released (probably in August).

Updates. You can follow updates on this and other issues continuously on our new species page or on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds.

Literature update. This release of the database contains 48,012 references, compared to 47,050 in the November release, i.e. an increase of 962 publications. That includes 409 papers published in 2019 (in 2018 we added a total of about 2,000 papers). In order to keep up with integrating data from all these papers …

Literature curation help still needed. In order to keep up with the flood of publications, we would like to renew our call for help with curation. If you enjoy reading reptile papers, especially related to taxonomy, phylogenetics, and biogeography, please let us know. Actually, we are happy to cover all kinds of other topics, given that we are adding natural history data to the database too, but we cannot do all the curation ourselves, so topics outside taxonomy are even more dependent on your help. We are experimenting with a new model now where we put papers on cloud storage, so our curation team (you?) can access them and annotate them online. Email us for more details.

New photos. During the past 5 months, 52 photographers have submitted 411 new photos of 245 species. We have now 12,910 photos of 4,484 species (= 41% of all species) from about 830 photographers.

These 52 photographers submitted new photos: Akshay Khandekar (2 photos), André Koch (1), Anna Gnetneva (4), Apostolos Christopoulos (1), Carl Franklin (10), Colin Tilbury (2), Daniel Velho (1), Daniella França (1), David Prötzel (1), Eli Greenbaum (1), Ely D. Gomez F. (5), Eric Vanderduys (3), Fernando J.M. Rojas-Runjaic (1), Gary Brown (1), Gustavo Blanco Vale (6), Hans Esterbauer (1), Hans Wolf (5), Harald Nicolay (6), Henrik Bringsøe (81), Henrique Costa (4), Igor V. Doronin (1), Ishan Agarwal (8), Ivan Ineich (2), Johann Friml (1), John Cassell (13), Jorge Alberto Zuñiga-Baos (4), Juan P. Hurtado-Gomez & A.F. Duarte (1), Julien Fonteneau (1), Kai Wang (2), Lenise McAuliffe (4), Li Ding (1), Luciana Chiyo (11), Luis M. P. Ceríaco (3), Marc Faucher (5), Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte (4), Mario Cabrera (1), Michel Peero (3), Mikael Lundberg (1), Montri Sumontha (1), Morris Flecks (1), Paola Carrasco (1), Patrick Malonza (4), Patrick Malonza (1), Paul Freed (104), Peter Hinow (1), Pieter Theron (28), Robert Harrison (1), Roy Barnes (6), Sudesh Batuwita (1), Suranjan Karunarathna (2), Vincent Vos (56), Werner Conradie (1).
As always, a million thanks to all of you :)

The new pictures will go online with a little delay in a few days.
That said, please keep sending photos to photos@reptile-database.org.

How to cite the Reptile Database?
Occasionally we get the question how to cite the Reptile Database. The simplest way is to cite it in the format
Uetz P, Freed P, Hosek J (Eds) (2019) The Reptile Database, http://www.reptile-database.org
although you can also cite one of our papers, e.g.
Uetz, P. & Stylianou, A. (2018) The original descriptions of reptiles and their subspecies. Zootaxa 4375: 257-264.
but it depends a bit where you cite it, as you should follow the citation format of your publication.
Let us know if you have questions.

Gekkota Mundi II — Gecko meeting in Tel Aviv, Israel, 26-28 May 2019
Gekkota Mundi will be held at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, Israel, starting on May 26, 2019. The meeting will bring together gecko biologists, students and enthusiasts from all around the world who work actively in fields related to the evolution, ecology, behavior, biogeography, physiology and conservation of geckos (Squamata: Gekkota). Following the success of previous symposia (in Fremantle, WA, Australia), the newly opened Steinhardt Museum is now hosting this exciting event. The Reptile Database will be present and present an update on geckos in the database and what we plan to do to improve gecko taxonomic information. Visit https://gekkotamundi-ii.weebly.com for more details.

Support the Reptile Database by joining SSAR. The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) has supported the Reptile Database in recent years. SSAR is a not-for-profit organization established to advance research, conservation, and education concerning amphibians and reptiles, and one of the largest herpetological societies world-wide. As a member of the SSAR you will join a large network of professional herpetologists and herp-related researchers, receive subscriptions of the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Reviews, as well as discounts on books and meetings. On top of that, you will support the Reptile Database.

14 Nov 2018

We just released a new version of the Reptile Database which went online on Nov 14.
As always, we have plenty of updates and changes:

Species database. Over the past 4 months, the number of reptile species increased from 10,793 to 10,885, i.e. an increase of 92 species. 77 new species have been described since our July release, 10 species have been revalidated from synonymy and 35 subspecies were elevated to full species. In addition, 57 species moved to another genus (mostly Japalura and Sibynomorphus) and 5 changed their spelling. Finally, 7 species were synonymized, resulting in a total list of 191 new or changed species names. A complete list of species and changes since the last release is available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2018_11.xlsx.

Anolis taxonomy. A few years ago, Nicholson et al. (2012) suggested to split up the largest of all reptile genera, Anolis (>400 species), into 8 genera, namely Anolis, Audantia, Chamaelinorops, Ctenonotus, Dactyloa, Deiroptyx, Norops, and Xiphosurus. While there were good (phylogenetic) reasons for that, the new genera were not easily diagnosable and thus they weren’t widely adopted. A few months ago, Nicholson et al. 2018 renewed their proposal from 2012 (with a few modifications) and hence we had to decide whether we adopt this new classification in the Reptile Database. Although we have added almost 200 new or changed names in this release (see above), we haven’t renamed the species of genus Anolis yet. This would have changed another ~350 names.

While we may do that in the future, it remains a controversial action — even the scientific advisory board (SAB) of the Reptile Database is divided about this: of the 15 members who expressed an opinion (requested on short notice) 3 prefer the existing solution, 6 were in favor of the Nicholson taxonomy, but 5 would prefer the use of subgenera (1 member abstained).

The matter doesn’t get easier by the fact that Nicholson et al. misspelled about two dozen Anolis names, including 5 new species of their genus Deiroptyx (spelled as Derioptyx). All of the above is reason enough for us to postpone a decision for now.

In the meantime, you can find the Nicholson et al. 2012 names in the database, e.g. by searching for “Dactyloa”. However, this is not entirely reliable, as a few species have been assigned to Dactyloa that are not in Dactyloa fide Nicholson et al. We will add the new Nicholson names to the next release of the database and provide some more details of how to find them in the next newsletter. For more details about the topic see also a recent discussion on Anole Annals.

Updates. A number of taxonomic changes did not make it into this release, but they will be in the next one. For instance, Cox et al. 2018 revised the snake tribe Sonorini and synonymized the genera Chionactis and Chilomeniscus with Sonora. You can follow updates continuously on our new species page or on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds.

Literature update. This release of the database contains 47,050 references, compared to 46,318 in the July release, i.e. an increase of 732 publications. So far, we have added 1,250 papers published in 2018, although we expect this number to reach close to 2,000 once we have captured the backlog from this year (in 2016 we added 2,027 papers published in that year, in 2017 it was 1,952). In order to keep up with integrating data from all these papers …

Literature curation help still needed. In order to keep up with the flood of publications, we would like to renew our call for help with curation. If you enjoy reading reptile papers, especially related to taxonomy, phylogenetics, and biogeography, please let us know. Actually, we are happy to cover all kinds of other topics, given that we are adding natural history data to the database too, but we cannot do all the curation ourselves, so topics outside taxonomy are even more dependent on your help. We are experimenting with a new model now where we put papers on cloud storage, so our curation team (you?) can access them and annotate them online. Email us for more details.

New checklists and geographic datasets. Since our last release several checklists have been published and their data added to the database, e.g. comprehensive checklists of Angola (Marques et al. 2018, Branch et al. 2018).

New photos. During the past 4 months, 56 photographers have submitted 551 new photos of 358 species. We have now 12,504 photos of 4,413 species (= 40% of all species) from almost 800 photographers.

The new photos in this release were contributed by Anastasia Fedotova (1 photo), Annabelle Vidal Bertuccioli (3), Anton Voronin (4), Antonio Cadiz Diaz (3), Beate Pfau (4), Bill Love (5), Cherylea O'Brien (1), Chethan Kumar (1), Daniel Ariano-Sánchez (2), Darren Pietersen (5), Dick Sage (3), Fano Ratsoavina (4), Fidélis Júnio Marra Santos (2), Frank Teigler (5), Gary Brown (10), Guang-Hui Zhong (1), Hank Jenkins (1), Harikrishnan (74), Hector M. Diaz Perdomo (11), Igor Doronin (2), Igor Joventino Roberto (1), Johann Chretien (6), John Liles (1), John Lyukurwa (6), John Lyukurwa & Glory Summay (4), Luis Alberto Rueda Solano (3), M.Cristina Carboni (2), Manuel Iturriaga (3), Marc Faucher (5), Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte (5), Maria José Uribe (3), Marinus Hoogmoed (1), Mario Yánez-Muñoz (3), Omar Torres-Carvajal (1), Omkar Adhikari (4), Paul Freed (196), Qi Shuo (10), Raquel Betancourt (2), Renato Recoder (1), Richard Gibson (78), Run-Bang Zhou (6), Saeed Hosseinian (2), Sagar Khunte (7), Saunak Pal (6), Stewie Theron (2), Sunandan Das (4), Tatyana V. Sapelko (3), Teresa C.S. Avila Pires (2), Tomas Mazuch (4), Vicente Nicols (17), Vincenzo Rizzo Pinna (3), Vladimir Turitsin (3), Vyacheslav Yusupov (8), Yiyin Chang and Marina Sentis (2), Yusuf Kumlutas (2), Zeeshan Mirza (2). Note the outstanding contributions by our own Paul Freed, Richard Gibson, and Harikrishnan who contributed a combined 348 photos! As always, a million thanks to all of you :)

As always, the new pictures will go online with a little delay in a few days.

iNaturalist: We are big supporters of iNaturalist and believe that all reptile observations should be reported (and databased) at sites like iNaturalist, including those that are published in journals such as Herpetological Review or Check List (which unfortunately rarely happens). We have worked with iNaturalist for several years and link to their observations. In fact, iNaturalist has observations for almost 5,000 reptile species, although not all of them may be what they call “research grade” (i.e. with a confirmed identity). It turns out that of the 4,413 species that we have photos of, 2,962 have also been reported in iNaturalist. This means that iNat has photos of about 2,000 species that we do not have ourselves (although you can access them through the Reptile Database). By contrast, we have photos of 1,451 species that iNaturalist doesn’t have. When both the Reptile Database and iNaturalist photos are combined, they represent a total of 6,429 species, or 59% of all reptile species world-wide.

Given that almost 1000 lizard species are known from only their type localities (or very small ranges), and many more species probably from only a handful of specimens, we are curious to see when our photographers (you!) and iNaturalist enthusiasts will track down these much harder-to-spot 40% or so of rare species.

That said, please keep sending photos to photos@reptile-database.org (or iNaturalist).

Etymologies: With this release, you can find the etymologies of more than 5,000 reptile species in the database, including those of all new species (we had 4,830 species with etymologies in the previous release). For instance, we are pretty sure you would not have guessed that Gehyra polka DOUGHTY et al. 2018 was named after the polka dot patterns on the dorsum of this species. The Bohemian ‘polka dance’ was fashionable in the mid-19th century, but only ‘polka dot’ is in use today. The word may have been a modification of the Czech pulka, meaning ‘half’, in reference to the quick steps employed in the dance. By contrast, Anolis dracula YÁNEZ-MUÑOZ et al. 2018, was not named after Bram Stoker’s horror novel “Dracula” but rather the Dracula Reserve in Ecuador, which is sponsored by the Orchid Conservation Alliance of the University of Basel Botanical Garden. The Reserve has a high diversity of orchids of the genus Dracula, which, fittingly, means "little dragon", an allusion to … the mythical Count Dracula in Broker’s vampire novel. The name was applied to the orchid because of the blood-red color of several of the species, the strange aspect of the long spurs of the sepals.

Unfortuntely, most authors weren’t as original as the aforementioned ones, hence the most common species epithets among reptiles remain variations of Latin words such as “ornatus, —a, —um” (33 species), “lineatus” (29), “maculatus” (28), or “fasciatus” (25). The most popular herpetologists after species were named include Albert Günther (1830-1914, 27 species), George Albert Boulenger (1858 - 1937, 25 species), Thomas Barbour (1884-1946, 16 species), and Edward Harrison Taylor (1889-1978, 15 species). The database will also tell you which “Günther” or “Taylor” a species is named after, e.g. there are 3 species that weren’t named after Edward Taylor but rather after British Captain R H R Taylor (Latastia taylori, Lycophidion taylori, and Dasypeltis taylori).

Support the Reptile Database by joining SSAR. The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) has supported the Reptile Database in recent years. SSAR is a not-for-profit organization established to advance research, conservation, and education concerning amphibians and reptiles, and one of the largest herpetological societies world-wide. As a member of the SSAR you will join a large network of professional herpetologists and herp-related researchers, receive subscriptions of the Journal of Herpetology and Herpetological Reviews, as well as discounts on books and meetings. On top of that, you will support the Reptile Database.

If you have a knack for words, please let us know. There are a couple thousand more species we need to collect the etymologies for.

As usual, please send us any corrections, additions, papers, or comments, or post them to our Facebook page.

25 August 2018 -- Did you know?

There are 21 reptile species whose genus and species names are identical:

Agama agama (LINNAEUS 1758)
Ameiva ameiva (LINNAEUS 1758)
Basiliscus basiliscus (LINNAEUS 1758)
Calotes calotes (LINNAEUS 1758)
Caretta caretta (LINNAEUS 1758)
Cerastes cerastes LINNAEUS 1758
Chalcides chalcides (LINNAEUS 1758)
Chitra chitra NUTAPHAND 1986
Clelia clelia (DAUDIN 1803)
Cordylus cordylus (LINNAEUS 1758)
Enhydris enhydris (SCHNEIDER 1799)
Hypnale hypnale (MERREM 1820)
Iguana iguana (LINNAEUS 1758)
Naja naja (LINNAEUS 1758)
Natrix natrix (LINNAEUS 1758)
Ophioscincus ophioscincus BOULENGER 1887
Plica plica (LINNAEUS 1758)
Scincus scincus (LINNAEUS 1758)
Strophurus strophurus (DUMÉRIL & BIBRON 1836)
Suta suta (PETERS 1863)
Tetradactylus tetradactylus (DAUDIN 1802)

This is not just a curiosity, it can lead to problems when you search for a species name that also occurs as a genus name. More than half of these species were described by Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) -- he seems to have had a penchant for such names :)

2 July 2018 -- New Release!

The latest release of the Reptile Database went online a few days ago, on July 2.
As usual, herpetologists (and thus we) weren’t exactly idle, so we made literally thousands of edits to this release. Here are some highlights:

Species database. Over the past 4 months, the number of species increased from 10,711 to 10,793, i.e. an increase of 82 species. 66 new species have been described since March 1. 9 species have been revalidated from synonymy and 16 subspecies were elevated to full species. In addition, 8 species moved to another genus and 4 changed their gender. Finally, 10 species were synonymized, resulting in a total list of 113 new or changed species names. A complete list of species and changes since the last release is available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2018_07.xlsx.

New man-made species. Note that we decided not to accept the two recently described “synthetic” species, Aspidoscelis neavesi and A. priscillae. Both species were created by crossing sexual species, so that the resulting hybrids turned out to be asexual, parthenogenetic offspring. Such hybrids occur naturally and thus have been recognized as valid species for decades. In fact, more than 70 parthenogenetic reptile species listed in the Reptile Database are of natural origin and have been established in nature for a long time (note that quite a few of them have been shown to be only facultatively parthenogenetic). While the experiments by Cole et al. 2014 and 2017 (who created them) provide interesting insights into the origin of parthenogenetic species, their new lab-made clones do not occur in nature, which is the main reason why our Scientific Advisory Board voted not to recognize them at this point, at last not as regular species. Nevertheless, you can find their names in the database as synonyms under their parental species, Aspidoscelis inornatus, A. uniparens, and A. exsanguis. By the way, the IUCN also released a similar statement on synthetic species.

Literature update. This release of the database contains 46,318 references, compared to 45,535 in the February release, i.e. an increase of 783 publications. In order to keep up with integrating data from all these papers ...

Literature curation help still needed. In order to keep up with the flood of publications, we would like to renew our call for help with curation. If you enjoy reading reptile papers, especially related to taxonomy, phylogenetics, and biogeography, please let us know. Actually, we are happy to cover all kinds of other topics, given that we are adding natural history data to the database too, but we cannot cover all these other topics ourselves, so they are even more dependent on your help. We are experimenting with a new model now where we put papers on cloud storage, so our curation team (you?) can access them and annotate them (e.g. using Acrobat Reader or Preview on Macs). Email us for more details.

Social media updates. About 6 months ago we started to post new species on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, managed by our social media editors Amy McLeod and Mark Herr. If you want to know whether there are new reptile species please follow those posts. We have also started a new web page with database updates before they go online in the public web database. We are planning to expand those posts to other taxonomic and possibly other herpetological updates.

That said, since our deadline for this release, 3 new species have been described. You should be able to see them on the aforementioned sites within a few days.

New checklists and geographic datasets. Since our last release almost 1000 entries have had their distribution data edited. Among countless small edits and updates, we have used the latest Field Guide to East African Reptiles (see below) to update the data on Eastern Africa, and the checklist for Guerrero (Mexico, 182 species!), based on Palacios-Aguilar & Flores-Villela 2018.

How up-to-date is the database? In case you wondered ... there is no simple way to measure this. However, one approximation is the most recent paper cited in each species entry. By that measure, only 49 species don’t have any citations before 2000, but 10,418 species have citations after 2010, and 5874 have citations published after 2015. Notably, 1,777 species have been updated with citations published in 2018 (although there are more that were updated this year without 2018 citations!). That is, overall we are quite up to date :) But let us know if anything is missing.

New books received

Spawls, Steve; Kim Howell, Harald Hinkel, Michele Menegon 2018 Field Guide to East African Reptiles. Bloomsbury, 624 pp. This new monumental field guide covers much of East Africa, namely Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. These countries are home to almost 500 reptile species, all of which are covered in the book, almost all by color photos and maps, descriptions and other details about their natural history. Note that this edition is an updated version of the original first edition published in 2002 which covered 432 species. As the authors emphasize, not only dozens of new species have been described, including many that have been split, but more than 100 also had their names changed. At £31 (British Pounds) or about US$ 45 it is a great deal, especially since there is no better, more up to date treatise of this area. The publisher also offers an eBook version, including pdfs, but the ebook preview we have looked at seems to have lower resolution images. Thus, you may see scales in the printed book, but not in the eBook, although this may be different in the various formats offered. In any case, an essential book if you are interested in African reptiles.

New photos. During the past 4 months, 64 photographers have submitted 692 new photos of 342 species. We have now 11,954 photos of 4,309 species (= 40% of all species) from about 760 photographers.

The new photos in this release were contributed by A. A. Nadolnyi, Adriana Dado, Alfred Schleicher, Alvaro Camina, André Koch, Antoine Fouquet, Antonio Cadiz Diaz, Brian Bush, César J. Pollo, Christopher C Austin, Colin Tilbury, Cristian Hernán Fulvio Pérez, Daniel Velho, Dave Showler, David Hodkinson, Diego Paucar, Elí García-Padilla, Frank McCann, Frank Tillack, Gary Brown, Hector M. Diaz Perdomo, Henrik Bringsøe, Igor Doronin, Marina Doronina, Igor Joventino, Ishan Agarwal, Israel Solano Zavaleta, Ivan Ineich, Jake Wilson Binaday, Jannico Kelk, Jingsong Shi, John Lyakurwa, Jorge Alberto Zuñiga Baos, Laurent Chirio, Luciano Javier Avila, Luke Bloch, Luke Verburgt, M. M. Beskaravayniy, Manuel Iturriaga Monsisbay, Marc Faucher, Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte, Marcos Di Bernardo, Maren Gaulke, Marina Doronina, Maxim A. Koshkin, O. V. Kukushkin, Olga Alishevskaya, Patrick Campbell, Paul Freed, Peter Soltys, Pongpol Adireksam, Roberto Sindaco, Roman Zuev, Ryan Ellis, S. V. Leonov, Sagar Khunte, Siria Ribeiro, Stephen Mahony, Stephen Zozaya, Steve Wilson, V. Deepak, V. Giragosov, V. S. Marchenko, O. V. Kukushkin, and Werner Conradie.

The most generous photographers this time were Laurent Chirio with 180 photos, followed by Gary Brown with 116, our own Paul Freed with 70, and Marcelo Ribeiro Duarte with 54. As always, our sincerest thanks to all contributors!

Please keep sending in those photos — we still have ~6000 species to cover!

Bioinformatics summer projects. If you are interested in helping out at the Reptile Database with your programming or other computer skills, you are welcome to join us for a number of smaller projects, e.g. aiming at text mining, data analysis, or reformatting project (e.g. converting bibliographies to a format that we can import). Most of these are not very demanding, but some experience with a programming language (Perl, Python, R etc.) or database application (SQL, Access, Filemaker) would greatly help. We also have some projects aiming at the automated extraction of images from pdfs or from other sources to set up a database of (copyrighted) images for further image analysis or character extraction. Finally, we are eager to expand data analysis to geographic or phylogenetic data. Please contact us for further details.

European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As widely announced in the media, the GDPR has gone into effect on May 25, 2018 and requires organizations that hold private data to inform their users about their data usage. We don’t have any lengthy Terms and Conditions, in fact, we don’t have any Terms and Conditions. The only information we have of you is your email address (and your name, at least if it’s part of your email address). You can opt out from this mailing list with two clicks at the bottom of this email (click the email link and then the send button — that’s it), and your information will be deleted too, just to let you know.

28 February 2018 -- New Release!

15 October 2017 -- New Release!

Species database. The number of species has grown from 10,544 in the May release to now 10,639 (+95 species). Overall, 212 new taxa have been added or changed their status or name. More specifically, we have added 75 new species, revalidated 18 species from synonymy, and elevated 28 subspecies to full species. Furthermore, 58 species moved to a new genus, most notably 22 species of Amphiglossus were re-assigned to the new genera Brachyseps and Flexiseps, 15 species of Riama moved to Andinosaura and Oreosaurus, and 8 species of Niveoscincus are now included in Carinascincus. Finally, the genera Aspidoscelis and Pholidoscelis underwent a "gender operation" and are now masculine. For a complete list of all changes, see our updated checklist that has a list of all 212 changes, available for download at http://www.reptile-database.org/data/Reptile_checklist_2017_10.xlsx.

More new “last-minute” species. Since we closed this new release last week, 4 new species have been described, including an artificially created tetraploid Aspidoscelis that reproduces by parthenogenetic cloning. This all-female species of whiptail lizard originated in the laboratory from hybridization between Aspidoscelis uniparens (triploid parthenogen) and Aspidoscelis inornatus (diploid bisexual species). See Cole et al. 2017 for details. The other three are Ptyodactylus rivapadiali Trape 2017, Mimophis occultus Ruane et al. 2017, and Hemidactylus kangerensis Mirza et al. 2017.

Genus-level changes. Remember that you can find details on genus-level changes in the entry of the type species of that genus. For instance, the gender change in Aspidoscelis is explained in the entry of Aspidoscelis sexlineatus, its type species (see Etymology). Obviously, you don’t have to remember all type species of the 1,192 reptile genera, but you can usually find them by doing a quick search for, say, “Aspidoscelis type species genus” — or simply look up the type species in the checklist (first column of the spreadsheet). Similarly, you can find diagnoses for many genera in their type species. However, quite a few are still missing. If you happen to know a published diagnosis of a genus (or species, for that matter), please let us know, so we can add them.

Higher taxa: The same goes for higher taxa. Since we do not have a separate database for higher taxa (which we should eventually get), we have to work around this limitation by adding information on higher taxa to the entries of their type species or type genera. That is, the type genera of many families or subfamilies are also included in the type species. For instance, Leptotyphlops nigricans is the type species of Leptotyphlops Fitzinger, 1843 which is the type genus of the family Leptotyphlopidae. Hence the diagnosis of the family is in the entry for Leptotyphlops nigricans. Not ideal and somewhat confusing, but at least a temporary solution.

Literature database: In our previous release (in May) we had 41,897 references in the database. This number has increased by 2,929 references to 44,826 in this release. That is, we added about 20 new references every day during the past 4.5 months! Admittedly, we cheated a bit to achieve this, but see below (under Journal coverage) for details. 28,452 publications (63.5%, up from 25,547) are now linked to online sources.

Original references. Among other things, we have also completed the original references for all currently accepted species and subspecies (yes, there were quite a few references missing for certain subspecies). When we did an analysis in August, 13,047 currently recognized species and subspecies of reptiles had been described by a total of 6,454 papers and books. For 1,052 species a total of 2,452 subspecies (excluding nominate subspecies) had been catalogued by last August, down from 1,295 species and 4,411 subspecies in 2009, due to the elevation of many subspecies to species. For more details, see our upcoming analysis in Zootaxa, to be published as an open access paper soon. You will be also able to download the complete list of original references then. You also may want to compare this to our 2010 analysis, also available for free at Zootaxa.

Journal coverage. While we try to cover the current literature fairly comprehensively, at least as far as taxonomy and biogeography is concerned, there are significant gaps in the older literature. For instance, we do not have complete coverage of important journals such as Copeia or Herpetological Review. We try to complete these journals if we get complete datasets for import. For this release we have imported complete citation records for Litteratura Serpentium (now 1357 papers) and Salamandra (now 966 papers), both of which became available online recently. Notably, there are only 4 other journals that have more than a thousand papers in the database, namely Sauria (1075), Copeia (1133), Herpetologica (1085), and the Herpetological Review (4064). If you are involved with any journal, please let us know, as we need your help to complete journal coverage in the Reptile Database. That said, we thank the publishers who donate their journals to the Reptile Database so we can ensure their full coverage, including Biogecko, Sauria, Reptilia, Draco, and Phyllomedusa.

That said — feel free to send us your papers or links to papers, but if you have deposited your papers on Researchgate, you may have heard that they may be removed soon. The same could happen to Sci-Hub, if you have ever used that.

New geographic checklists. In this release we added a lot of data for Mexico, based on the recent checklists by Johnson et al. 2017 (endemic species of Mexico), including checklists for Jalisco (Cruz-Sáenz et al. 2017), Yucatan, Quintana Roo, and Campeche (González-Sánchez et al. 2017). We also added the data for Paraguay from Cacciali 2016. Nevertheless, it remains quite a pain to extract data from checklists as long as we do not have access to machine-readable data, so please help us to extract that stuff or send us tables or lists, so we can easily import them.

By the way: last week, a summary of reptile distributions of the world, using data from the Reptile Database and led by Shai Meiri, was published. We hope to incorporate the range maps from this paper as soon as the embargo period is over.

New taxonomic checklists. We also integrated the updated TTWG Turtles of the World 2017 checklist and the new SSAR checklist of North American reptiles However, for the latter we used the online version, which, ironically, seems to be less up-to-date than the print edition.

Talking about publications, here is a free eBook: Guide of Amphibians and Reptiles of São Tomé and Príncipe

New photos. This release adds 378 photos of 208 species from a total of 80 different photographers. We are thus adding photos of 123 species not shown before, many of which have been described only during the past few months. Dozens of these photos are truly stunning. As usual, the photos will go online separately from the taxonomy in a few days, so please be patient. We have now 10,596 photos of 3960 species or more than 37% of all reptile species! Still 6679 species to go, so please keep sending photos :)

The 80 photographers this time include (sorted by first name): Aaron Griffing, Abdoul Karim Samaké, Adriana Bocchiglieri, Agustin Camacho, Andrea Currylow, Anna Gnetneva, Anton Svinin, Antonio Cádiz-Díaz, Aurélien Miralles, Axel Kwet, Butch Beedle, Camilo Andres Montes-Correa, Carlos Javier Pérez Alvarado, Christopher Schoenen, Daniel Velho, Danko Taborosi, Deepak Veerappan, Dmitry Potashkin, Edvárd Mizsei, Eric Smith, Fernando Castro, Fred Kraus, Freddy Grisales-Martínez, Freddy Hordies, Fundacion Neotropico, Geoff Patterson, Gilson Fuenmayor Rivas, H.T. Lalremsanga, Hans Brunings, Hector M. Diaz Perdomo, Héctor Regidor, Henning Larsen, Hidetoshi Ota, Ian Recchio, Igor V. Doronin, Indraneil Das, Jakob Hallermann, Javier Sunyer, Jean-Claude Jamoulle, Joan Young, Jorge Alberto Zuniga-Baos, Juan E. Garcia-Perez, Kirati Kunya, Kurt Orionmystery, Luciana Signorelli, Luis Querido, Lutz Obelgönner, Manuel Itturiaga Monsisbay, Marc and Peggy Faucher, Marina Doronina, Mark Pestov, Mark-Oliver Rödel, Matthew Heinicke, Naman Trivedi, Nasrullah Rastegar-Pouyani, Nelson Martín Cerón de la Luz, Nikolai Ashurov, O. V. Belyalov, Pablo Velozo, Paul Freed, Peter Janzen, Peter Uetz, Rachel Hopper, Rishi Baral, Roman Nazarov, S.R.Ganesh, Samuel Lalronunga, Sang Nguyen, Santosh Bhattarai, Sérgio Morato, Stu Nielsen, Stuart Nielsen, Sudesh Batuwita, Surya Narayanan, Takaki Kurita, Tatjana Dujsebayeva, Tom Waalders, Tonatiuh Ramírez Reyes, Valter Weijola, Vinh Quang Luu, Vishal Santra. Thank you all — you guys did a terrific job, as did Paul Freed, our photo editor!

Diagnostic photos. In order to use our photo collection for better species identification, we are trying to get more standardized photos, e.g. close-ups of the head of an animal from the side, top, and bottom, so details such as scales can be seen. If you have any of these, even from common species, please send them. In the long run, we also want to point out diagnostic features on these photos, e.g. particular scales, using arrows etc. If you are interested in helping out, please let us know. There is a lot of work to be done!

Editors and curators needed. We do not have much information on life history, conservation or well-organized data on alien species. If you are interested in any of these aspects please let us know. We would love to add such information but don’t have the man-power at this point.

Social media editor wanted. Similarly, we are looking for someone who can help us post more up-to-date infos on new species or papers on Twitter of Facebook. Ideally these things should be automated. If you are interested and knowledgeable about that kind of activity, please get in touch.

24 December 2016 -- New Release!

As our personal X-mas present we just released a new version of the Reptile Database which brings us…

• 34 new species in this release (or 142 new species this year so far) with a few that did not make our deadline for this release.
• A total of 10,499 species, including 80 new and changed names in this release alone (see our checklist for details)
• 662 papers added to this release, or 1,595 references published this year, bringing our bibliography to a total of 40,550 references.

New photos. We have added 118 new photos of 81 new species from 26 photographers, including Achyuthan Srikanthan, Carmenmaria Mejia, Carlos E. D. Cintra, Alessandro Catenazzi, Trent Bell, Harshil Patel, Igor Doronin, Igor Joventino Roberto, Kristen Olson, Libio Roy Santa Cruz Farfán, Nguyen Ngoc Sang, Peter Janzen, Salvador Carranza, Samuel Lalronunga, Shai Meiri, Ishan Agarwal, Manuel Iturriaga, Ingrid Kvale, Peggy and Marc Faucher, Sven Mecke, Chethan Kumar Gandla, George Dannhauser, Alireza Zamani, Naser Sanchuli, Frank Glaw and Miguel Vences. Thanks to all of you! Without you our database would be only worth half as much! (note that new photos go online a few days after the database itself goes public, so please be patient if you don’t see your photos yet).

Taxonomic and phylogenetic news
Besides all the new species, 3 new genera, and a number of other changes that are too numerous to list here, there were a lot of other new studies. For instance, Rodrigues & Diniz-Filho 2016 presented a revised phylogeny of turtles covering 300 species (87% of the total diversity of the group). Lee et al. (2016) updated the phylogeny of elapids and Alencar et al. (2016) revised the phylogeny of viperids On top of that, Figueroa et al. (2016) re-analyzed the phylogeny of Extant Snakes (including a new subfamily Ahaetuliinae, and a new genus, Mopanveldophis). We have accommodated taxonomic changes from these studies in the Reptile Database.

User survey
In order to understand your needs better and ultimately to serve you more effectively, we have set up a brief user survey that should take less than 5 min to complete (10 questions only). Please take the survey here. After you complete the questions you will see the results immediately.

The Reptile Database is now supported by SSAR — SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF AMPHIBIANS AND REPTILES
Founded in 1958, SSAR is now the largest global herpetological society devoted to research, conservation, and education about amphibians and reptiles. Among its many activities on behalf of the world-wide herpetological community, SSAR now provides financial support to The Reptile Database because of the utility of this website to all herpetologists—academics, conservationists, educators, and serious amateurs alike. Membership in SSAR now directly helps to maintain this database.

Members of SSAR receive the “Top 100” award-winning Journal of Herpetology and the world’s most widely used herp news bulletin, Herpetological Review. Both are full-color, quarterly publications, each containing about 800 pages per year and available in hard-copy and on-line. SSAR also publishes the Catalogue of American Amphibians and Reptiles, an open-access serial covering the herps of the entire Western Hemisphere, Herpetological Circulars (booklets), and three book series—Contributions to Herpetology (monographs), Facsimile Reprints (classic works), and Herpetological Conservation (topical subjects). Members receive discounted prices on all publications, as they do on registration fees at SSAR’s annual meetings.

To become a member of SSAR go to: http://www.ssarherps.org (click on “Membership Information”) or write: SSAR, P.O. Box 4022, Topeka, KS 66604, USA (telephone: 785.550.6904).

Teaching Herpetology?
If you teach a herpetology class in the spring, please get in touch. We have already developed a few resources that you can use in class and that should contribute to our database. We would be also very interested in developing more such materials. Please send us your thoughts and suggestions.

If we have missed anything, please send us corrections or comments. As usual, we also need your photos, papers, books, or even your direct contribution if you have any unspent X-mas budget — use the Paypal link on our home page.

We wish you a pleasant holiday season, Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

20 August 2016 -- New Release!

Total number of reptile species: 10,450 (previous release, April 2016: 10,391)
New species added since last release: 54
New species described in 2016: 108 (by Aug 11, our latest deadline)
New species records: 59 (including 12 revalidations and elevations from subspecies)
Changed names: 68 (including synonymizations, revalidations, new genus assignments)
See the species checklist for details and a list of new and changed names.

References: 39,888 (previous release, April 2016: 38,902)
New references added to this release: 986
References published in 2016: 1,023

New photos: Over the past 4 months we have added more than 300 photos from 55 photographers, namely (sorted by first name) Adavanne Shivaprakash, Alejandro Solorzano, Alexander Haas, Ali Gholamifard, Andrea Molyneaux, Arlindo de Figueiredo Béda, Aurélien Miralles, Bill Love, Bruno Gattolin, Carlos Cintra, David Andrés Velásquez, Diederik van der Molen, Diego Santana (via Henrique Costa), Elyas T (Iran), Graham Reynolds, Guido F Medina-Rangel, Gustavo Campillo, Herbert Rösler, Hermann Seufer, Igor Doronin, Ivan Ineich, Jaime Troncoso, Jean-Claude Jamoulle, John Philipps, John Philipps, John Regan, Jordi Janssen, Jorge Alberto Zuniga-Baos, José Luis Pérez Gonzalez, Josh Rich, Ke Jiang, Ken Krysko, Lee Grismer (via Anthony Cobos), Libio Roy Santa Cruz Farfán, MA Muin, Michael, Neang Thy, Nguyen Ngoc Sang, Orlando Mercado, Paddy Ryan, Parag Dandge (via Norbert Kissler), Parham Beyhaghi, Peggy Faucher, Peter Schulze Niehoff, Porag Jyoti Phukan, Rob Bryson, Roberto García-Roa, Samuel Lalronunga, Sven Mecke, Tiffany Doan, Tomas Mazuch, Vincenzo Rizzo Pinna, Vishal Santra, Zeeshan Mirza. Thanks to all of you! Note that your photos will only go online in a week or two as we upload them separately.

Photo submissions: in order to facilitate photo submissions we have set up a special email address: photos@reptile-database.org. Please submit photos (or questions about photos) to this address. Obviously we are primarily interested in species which have no photos in the database yet (still about ~4000). We can also send you wish-lists for certain geographic areas or taxonomic groups. Please check the species entries for photos / species needed.

Reptile Genetics News
Another lizard genome has been published, the genome of Pogona vitticeps (Georges et al. 2015), which has also been anchored recently to chromosomes (Deakin et al. 2016).

First parthenogenetic Liolaemus. Although there is some evidence for (facultative) parthenogenesis in Phymaturus patagonicus, Abdala et al. 2016 have now described the first unisexual Liolamus species, Liolaemus parthenos, that appears to be parthenogenetic (Copeia 104: 487–497).

Karyotypes: given that there are lots of karyotypes published and catalogued we would love to add this information to the Reptile Database. Please let us know if you like to volunteer as Karyotype/Cytogenomics editor for the database.

Literature Editor wanted: We are looking for one or more literature editors who are willing to collect new literature records and convert them into our database format. This will take you up to 10-15 min a day. You will primarily follow the table of content alerts that journals send out as well as a few other sources such as Google alerts, tweets etc. In return, we will give you access to up to 10 articles per week, including our large digital library and papers behind paywalls. Please contact us for further details.

Biological editors wanted: if you are interested in certain biological questions, we may want you as specialist biological editor. For instance, we have started to add data on reptile reproduction, but this data needs to be curated and updated. While we have basic reproduction data (mostly parity states, i.e. oviparous / viviparous) we would be happy to add others as well, e.g. litter size, mating seasons, etc. However, please don’t send us data on individual species (”Species X is oviparous”); instead, a “reproduction editor” would collect for whole genera or larger groups, as a table, so we can import that information more easily and in a more consistent format. Please contact us for details.

Filemaker developer wanted: We are looking for a Filemaker database developer who can help us with runtime development, mobile app development, and general scripting.

US Mirror site. In collaboration with the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) we are planning to set up a mirror site of the Reptile Database in the US. Remember that the database is currently hosted by Reptarium in the Czech Republic. Please let us know if you have the infrastructure to host such a site. We have a small amount of money to spend on that so we do not completely rely on your goodwill. Please contact us for details.

Web site redesign. In the same vein, we are looking for help with the redesign of the database site. Let us know if you are knowledgeable about web design and if you are interested in volunteering. We do actually have a bit of money to spend on both the hosting and the web design but it’s not a whole lot, but the herp community would certainly be grateful!

The Reptile Database as book on demand? We wonder whether there would be interest in the Reptile Database (or parts of it) published on paper (or as eBook). If you are interested in working on a book publishing on demand project, please let us know. Obviously, this would be a semi-commercial project to support the rest of the database, so you would be paid for that. We will keep the rest of you posted on where this is going.

17 April 2016 -- New Release!

With the arrival of spring, reptiles are not just coming out of hibernation, but also keep being discovered. In this version we have...

10,391 species of reptiles (up from 10,309 in December 2015), including 54 new species that have been described this year, 16 subspecies elevated from subspecies, and 11 species revalidated from synonymy; another couple of species have been described in 2015 but were not included in our last release. 60 species have been transferred to other (or new) genera recently and 13 species had their names changed. Overall, this release of the Reptile Database has 172 new or changed names compared to the last release (in December), not counting the 17 species that have sunk into synonymy since then. Due to the long list of new names, we cannot mention all of them in this newsletter. For a detailed list see our updated checklist (as an Excel spreadsheet; the list of changes is in a separate sheet).

More new species: a few new species reached us after the deadline for this release, namely Liolaemus uniformis Troncoso-Palacios et al. 2016, Rhadinella dysmica CAMPILLO et al. 2016, and (Para-) Laudakia microlepis taftanica SANCHOOLI et al. 2015. They will be in the next release of the database, scheduled for late July / early August 2016.

38,902 references in the literature database (up from 38,122 in December 2015, i.e. plus 780 publications, of which 375 have been published in 2016). 22,093 references have links to online sources, although many of those are unfortunately behind paywalls (unless you are subscriber or at an institution with a subscription). On the bright side, 2,748 have links to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and thousands more are available through other open access resources. Please let us know if you know of any sources that we should add.

New photos. Since December, we have also added 346 photos from 78 photographers (for a total of 9,191 photos representing 3,433 species), including (alphabetical by first name) Aaron Piras, Abdur Razzaque, Abel Antonio Batista Rodriguez, Agus Camacho, Alejandra Alzamora, Allan Finlayson, Angel Sosa, Awal Riyanto, Bart van Hoogstraten, Brian Hubbs, Chairunas Adha Putra, Cynthia Marcinkowski, Daniel Cruz-Sáenz, Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, Eli Greenbaum, Eman El-Abd, Eric Smith, Fariborz Heidari, Faure, Ludovic, Fausto Starace, Gergely Babocsay, Gernot Vogel, Greg Geller, Gunther Köhler, Gustavo Florez, Harsimran Singh, Helen Pheasey , Henrik Bringsøe, Idoia Chicoy García, Igor J Roberto, Ishan Agarwal , Iván García, Ivan Ineich, Jaime A. de Urioste, Jean Marc Brun, Jean-Francois Trape, Juan Pablo Hurtado, Julie Ray, Kamran Kamali, Karl Brennan, Ken Krysko, Krishna Khan, Kristine Grayson-Dattelbaum, Krystal Tolley, Laurie Vitt, Leonardo Carvalho, Luis Alejandro Rodriguez, Luis Elizondo Lara, Manuel Acevedo, Maria Breitman, Mark Auliya, Mark O'Shea, Martin Whiting, Mathias Behangana, Mauricio Ocampo, Mauro Teixeira, MazeduI Islam, Montri Sumontha , Nathanaël Maury, Nonn Panitvong, Olivier Pauwels, Oscar Arribas, Parham Beyhagi, Paul Freed, Paul Smith, Pedro Bernardo, Peter Janzen, Philip Jordaan, Philipp Wagner, Pradeep Kulkarni, R Graham Reynolds, Raz Martin, Rob Bryson/Jason Jones, and V. Trounov. Thanks to all of you! (But also remember: there are 6,958 species to go, so please keep sending photos :)

Photos of Bangladeshi reptiles wanted. IUCN Bangladesh is going to publish a report about Bangladeshi reptiles and asks for photos to illustrate its reptile diversity. If you happen to have any photos of reptiles from Bangladesh (even if they were taken outside Bangladesh), please contact Dr. Farid Ahsan (faridahsan55@yahoo.com) for details.

Selected taxonomic news
Zheng & Wiens 2016 recently presented an updated squamate phylogeny that we have also used to update the higher taxa in the database. We have modified their tree to include species numbers (and a few other updates). Note that Zheng & Wiens maintain the superfamily Lacertoidea which includes the Gymnophthalmoidea of Goicoechea et al. 2016 (the latter use 2 superfamilies instead, see below). In addition, Streicher & Wiens (2016) have updated the phylogenetic tree of snakes just a few days ago with a follow-up paper that slightly changed the topology shown in the Zheng paper. This affects the position of the Bolyeridae and Xenopeltidae relative to the pythons and boas, and possibly a few others.

In a detailed analysis of teioid lizards, Goicoechea et al. 2016 re-arranged the Gymnophthalmidae with new subfamily groupings (especially the Cercosaurinae), new and revalidated genera (Loxopholis), including re-arrangements of Leposoma and Arthrosaura. Several Ameivula were moved to the new genus Glaucomastix, and most Ameiva to the resurrected genus Pholidoscelis Fitzinger 1843. A few additional changes were independently suggested by Torres-Carvajal et al. 2016, who focused on the subfamily Cercosaurinae. Goicoechea et al. 2016 also erected the superfamily Gymnophthalmoidea. We have now updated our Higher taxa page and all affected species entries to incorporate these changes.

Updated geographic checklists
The following checklists have been incorporated into the Reptile Database: snakes of Niger (following Trape & Mané 2015), Brazil (with about 800 species of reptiles one of the most diverse countries in the world, following Costa & Bernils 2015), snakes of Venezuela (Natera-Mumaw et al. 2015), and Micronesia (Buden & Taborosi 2016, see below).

Large-scale datasets
We have recently started to include larger datasets into the Reptile Database, and we make these datasets available on our data page (or at least link to the original data source).
Reproduction. We have now included the reproduction data from Pyron & Burbrink 2013 as well as Feldman et al. 2015 i.e. whether a species is viviparous or oviparous (or both). In some cases we also have additional data such as clutch size etc. This data is now stored in a separate field.
Etymologies. We have now etymologies for >4000 species. You can find the etymologies for genera in the entry of the type species. If you don’t know the type species of a genus, try the species of a genus that has been described first, or search for the genus name in combination with the string “type species genus” using the Quick search (on our Home page). Or you can look up the type species in our checklist. Obviously, there is a long way to go to complete all etymologies, so if you know of any that are still missing from the database, please use the contact link at the bottom of each species page and let us know.
NCBI taxonomy. We have also updated the NCBI taxon IDs in this release, now available for more than 6000 species (which means that there are DNA sequences for all of these species in GenBank). We haven’t solved the problem of mismatching names in NCBI and the Reptile Database but we are working on it. You can find the NCBI taxon ID and the link to the NCBI database at the bottom of each species page. Please visit the NCBI Taxonomy web page for additional details.
Other data. Please let us know if you know of other data sets that should be imported into the Reptile Database. We already have a few on our list but there are certainly others that should be of interest to herpetologists!

Older versions of the database: You can find older version of the Reptile Database at Figshare.com (see links on our data page), e.g. if you want to go back to a version that is cited in a paper. Currently we share the complete current (this!) version only with academic collaborators, so please let us know if you want to collaborate :) If we ever manage to get more stable funding for the database we will post complete downloadable versions immediately after release.

Books received
Buden, Donald W. & Danko Taboroši (2016). Reptiles of the Federated States of Micronesia. Island Research and Education Initiative, 311 pp.

New herp journal: Boletín Chileno de Herpetología, http://www.boletindeherpetologia.com/articulosarticles.html

World Congress of Herpetology, Hangzhou, China, Aug. 15-21, 2016
If you happen to go to the WCH this year, please stop by at our symposium “Herpetological information in a networked world”. In fact, we are still looking for 1 or 2 speakers who are willing to talk about citizen science, digital libraries (BHL, EOL, etc), mobile apps, or social media. We are working with the organizers to coordinate our symposium with a related one on herpetological journals, organized by Robert Jehle and Erin Muths. Please contact us for more details or visit http://wch8.worldcongressofherpetology.org/ for more details.

The (ecological) value of snakes. A few months ago we received a question from a student who asked “What would happen if all snakes disappeared?” She apparently had a discussion with some friends who “would not mind at all if there were no snakes”. We didn’t really have a very scientific answer to this question but shortly after that inquiry Willson and Winne (2015) published a paper about aquatic snakes inhabiting an isolated 5.4-ha wetland in South Carolina. The two authors calculated that the snakes (at a peak density of 171 snakes per ha) consumed a total of over 200 kg (>55,000 individuals) of amphibian prey annually. This can probably be extrapolated to snakes in many other areas, and thus translates to a pretty large number of mice, rats, and other pests that snakes are getting rid off. So, snakes do have some measurable value after all :)

This newsletter is currently mailed to more than 3000 people. Because most mail hosts, including Gmail (which also hosts our institutional mail server at VCU) allow only 1000 emails to be sent per day, we are planning to move to a Google Group. So, you may be getting the next Newsletter from the Reptile Database Google Group, just in case you wondered. As a related issue, we have another defunct 500 or so email addresses. Please let us know if your email changes, so we can replace it. Bouncing email addresses are deleted from this list.

Please let us know if we missed anything, and send comments, corrections, additions, new papers or photos, etc.!

22 Dec 2015 -- New Release!

It is hard to believe but the Reptile Database turned 20 years a few weeks ago. Peter Uetz posted the first list of reptile species on the web server of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (where he was a graduate student) in November 1995. Coincidentally, the EMBL also maintained the EMBL DNA sequence database and thus the first searchable reptile database went online just a few months later, using the same interface as the sequence database (now hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK). In fact, soon after that we had a function to retrieve DNA sequences of reptile species! Our database is therefore probably one of the oldest taxonomic online databases worldwide, just 5 years younger than the WWW itself (which went online with the first web page on Dec 20, 1990). A more detailed history of the database has been submitted to Herpetological Review and will be published in their first issue of 2016.

New species
The current release features 10,309 reptile species, 40 more than the previous release (Aug 2015) which had 10,269 species, and 190 more than the Dec 2014 released one year ago. However, we have added “only” 102 species described in 2015. The remaining additions are revalidations of synonyms and elevations of former subspecies. See our checklist including a list of changes for details. In addition, 8 more species have been described since the deadline for this release about a week ago (!) but are not available in the online database yet, namely Cyrtodactylus petani RIYANTO et al. 2015, Cyrtodactylus soudthichaki LUU et al. 2015, Synophis bogerti, S. zamora, and S. insulomontanus TORRES-CARVAJAL et al. 2015, Synophis zaheri PYRON et al. 2015, Amphisbaena metallurga COSTA et al. 2015, and Japalura vela WANG et al. 2015. Let us know if we missed any other ones!

New literature
Since the Dec 2014 release we have added 2,502 references, increasing the number of papers and books from 35,614 to 38,116 in the current release. That is, on average we have added about 7 papers per day, even though “only” 1,507 of these have been published formally in 2015. The others were publications from previous years, including some historical papers and books. Over the past 10 years we added an average of 1220 new references per year, i.e. 3-4 every day!

Not surprisingly, we need more curators! If you like reading reptile papers (and extracting the gist of them) please let us know (inlcuding your field of interest). We have a backlog of more than a 1000 papers right now. Some instructions can be found on our curator page.

Extinct species
The Reptile Database also contains a number of extinct species, especially species that went extinct in recent history (within the past couple of hundred years). However, there is no precise number as several dozen species haven not been found for decades and are “probably” extinct. Once in a while such “extinct” species are re-discovered. (Our literature database has 142 references that contain the term “rediscovery” in their title evern though some of them refer to “rediscoveries” in certain localities). You can search for “extinct” or “possibly extinct” species using the quick search on our home page.

By the way, Ceballos et al. 2015 reviewed the number of species that have been evaluated by the IUCN (100% of mammals and birds, 88% of amphibians, but only 44% of reptiles, many of which are threatened.

New photos
We have uploaded 784 photos of 280 species since the last release, increasing the number of photos to 8,840, representing 3,292 species (not including those species that we display through external sources such as Flickr or CalPhotos). The new photos were submitted by a total of 50 photographers. However, the bulk of photos came from just two individuals this time, Sebastian Lotzkat (519 photos) and Uwe Schlüter (129 photos). Sebastian is now on par with Paul Freed (our photo editor) as the number 1 photographer (both with 576 photos -- congratulations!). The other photographers this time were Alex Slavenko, Ashok Captain/A. Biju Kumar, Awal Riyanto, Brad Maryan, Chris Harrison, Conrad Hoskin, Diego Demangel, Eli Greenbaum, Fanomezana Ratsoavina, Federico Arias, Fenoy Xavier, Javier Torres Lopez, Jian-Huan Yang, Jim Conrad, Josef Kiechle, Laurie Vitt, Levi Gray, Luke Verburgt, Mark O’Shea, Nicole Schneider, Niranjan Sant, Pablo Venegas, Patrice Hugues, Patrick Prévost, Paul Carter, Prathamesh Dange, Raimundo Lopez-Silvero Martinez, Regina Ribeiro, Reinaldo de Medeiros Jr, Robert Sprackland, Roy Santa Cruz Farfán, Salvador Carranza, Samuel Lalronunga, Shai Meiri, Stephen Busack, Thasun Amarasinghe, Tomas M. Rodriguez Cabrera, Tomas Mazuch, Truong Quang Nguyen, Victor Acosta Chaves, Vimukthi Weeratunge, Vivek Philip Cyria, cVivek Sharma, Vladimir Bobrov, Yehudah Werner, and Zeeshan Mirza. Thanks to all of you!
If you have submitted photos but are not listed, your photos will be uploaded with the next release -- sorry!

Updated checklists
We have updated the checklists for the following geographic areas: Argentina: Chubut (following Minoli et al. 2015), Australia (Cogger 2014), Brazil: Bahia (Freitas 2014), Cambodia (Grismer et al. 2008), Europe (Kwet 2015, Kwet & Trapp 2014), Guyana (Cole et al. 2013), India: Tamil Nadu (Bhupathy, Subramanian & N. Sathishkumar 2013), Kerala (Palot 2015), Mexico: Chiapas (Johnson et al. 2015), Thailand (Chan-ard et al. 2015, but see the critical review by Pauwels 2015).

Note that we do not curate County records (most of the Geographic Distribution notes in Herpetological Review), but we add new state and country records. If you are interested in curating checklists or older issues of Herpetological Review (now open access, please let us know (e.g. as student project in class).

Selected taxonomic news
An updated squamate phylogeny was presented by Zheng & Wiens 2015.

Colli et al. (2015) reorganized the family Gymnophthalmidae with redefinitions of the subfamily Ecpleopodinae, a novel subfamily Bachiinae (to include the genus Bachia, previously Cercosaurinae), included Riolama in Cercosaurinae, and redefined the Gymnophthalminae with the tribes Chirocolini, Iphisini, and Gymnophthalmini.

New reptile genomes
The first gecko genome (that of Gekko japonicus) and that of the corn snake were published recently.
The authors of the corn snake genome also created a Reptilian transcriptomics database.

Other things of interest
• Russell Mittermeier et al. investigated turtle hotspots around the world.
• Mario Schweiger tracked down many references and information (e.g. distribution) on Podarcis subspecies, and posted many of the original descriptions on http://www.vipersgarden.at (links are in our species accounts).

Phylogenetics editor wanted
Although taxonomy depends on good phylogenies, we have neglected that area due to the lack of manpower. If you are interested in phylogenetics and want to help us with trees, please let us know. There are a number of ways to go about this, e.g. linking to trees online, extracting them from the literature and posting them on our site, or posting them to other sites such as Wikipedia and link there. In addition, we would love to list species that are included in published trees, but since it is usually a pain to retrieve such species lists from papers we often don’t do it (even though we do cite the papers in at least one species account, often type species or genera). We also would love to work with the Open Tree of Life and other initiatives but need help to do so.

Master’s theses and student projects
If you are a student (or professor) interested in biodiversity informatics or a taxonomy-related project for a master’s thesis, please let us know.
Students interested in programming (Perl, Python, Filemaker, etc.) are especially encouraged as we have numerous projects to be solved but too little manpower.

If you are teaching a spring class in herpetology, please consider using some of our teaching materials or suggest others that make use of the Reptile Database.

New books received
Pough et al. (2015) Herpetology, Sinauer, 591 pp.
We will have a detailed review in our next newsletter (let us know if you have an opinion or if you have found errors).

Grants and funding
Although we made great progress during our 20 year history, obtaining funding turned out much more difficult. We only had two small grants from the European Union (as part of their Species 2000 and 4D4Life initiatives) which expired a long time ago. Ironically, when we submitted a grant proposal to the US National Science Foundation several of the reviewers criticized that the database had no long-term maintenance plan. Yes, admittedly — it’s difficult to have long-term plans without funding. But hey, I (PU) am only halfway on my way to retirement, so there is a decent chance that we can keep going for another 20 years without funding.

However, if you happen to submit grants to any agency that have a significant taxonomic or databasing component (e.g. the Genealogy of Life FY 2016 program), please consider budgeting a few k$ for the Reptile Database. We are happy to collect and store your data, even long term (currently we have older versions on figshare). Mere mortals can also donate through Paypal on our home page.

12 August 2015

Although we planned to release this database version earlier, actually before the SSAR herp meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, the amount of new data delayed us more than expected. But finally, after a longer hiatus (since our last newsletter from 23 March 2015), we just released a new version of the Reptile Database. The wait was worth it because it seems like we have a record amount of new data, including ...

10,269 species, 91 up from 10,178 in March. 72 new species have been added in 2015 so far, and another 19 revalidated or elevated from subspecies status (see below for details).

37,093 references, 815 up from 36,278 in March (including 761 published this year).

2014 was hottest year in history. As with climate change, the last 10 years were the hottest in history, but especially in reptile taxonomy. Every year in the past decade had at least a 100 new species described, a number that was reached only 5 times before 2005 (namely in 1758 with Linnaeus himself, then in 1854, 1863, 1864, and 1887). It turns out that a record 180 species were described in 2014. This number includes a few species that we added only recently (in fact, we received the 180th species, Cynisca ivoirensis, only after our deadline yesterday, so it will show up only in the next release).

Species with changed information. As far as changes go, we have updated or added information to about 2000 species just this year. Given the large number of small changes, additions, corrections, etc. it’s practically impossible to produce a list of all individual changes. However, we have added a list of name changes to our checklist (downloadable as Excel spreadsheet). This list shows the 128 species names that were added, revalidated from synonymy, elevated from subspecies, or changed their genus.

More higher taxa. Recently, we have added several categories to the higher taxa field in our database. You can now search for these keywords in the higher taxon field: Squamata, Caenophidia, Alethinophidia, Anguimorpha, Scincoidea and a few others. These keywords essentially follow the classification of Pyron et al. 2013 (but do not include the most recent groups suggested by Reeder et al. 2015 such as Teioidea). We will add those once we have sifted through their 70+ supplemental figures and tables :)

Buy a species name! Most of you have probably heard of the BioPat initiative that allows you to help taxonomists and in return they will name a species after you (or after your suggestion). Now you can also buy a species name on eBay, as various media have reported. If you can afford it, that is: http://go.nature.com/ziq152.

Species Named After BHL. Although you can buy a species name, it may be more original to name it after a really useful service like the Biodiversity Heritage Library (or the Reptile Database, just to name a few:). This is exactly what some malacologists have done: A new land snail species from Laos, Vargapupa biheli was named in honor of BHL to express thanks for "the multitude of rare literature made available to us. The name 'biheli' is an acronym derived from the name BIodiversity Heritage LIbrary."

New checklists. We have updated several species lists based on recently published checklists, e.g. those for chameleons and Phelsuma geckos (after Glaw & Rösler 2015), lizards of the Amazon (Ribeiro-Júnior 2015a,b), lizards of Togo (Segniagbeto et al. 2015), lizards (or reptiles) of the Mexican states of Jalisco (multiple sources), Morelos, Hidalgo, and Oaxaca, and pythons (Barker et al. 2015).

New photos and photographers. Thanks to the tireless help of our photo editor, Paul Freed, we have added 711 photos illustrating 556 species (!) by 41 photographers since the last release (including 419 photos by Paul himself!). The photographers who donated photos this time are Abhinava Mukherjee, Alexandre Teynie, Bhargavi Srinivasulu, Bruno Gattolin, César Luis Barrio Amorós, Claudia Koch, Daniel Velho, David Alfonso Bejarano Bonilla, Dhofir Tri Dharmawan, Frank Glaw, Miguel Vences, Geoff Patterson, Helianne de Niemeyer, Herbert Becker, Hinrich Kaiser, Ibrahim Elkhalil Mohamed, Jaime Troncoso-Palacios, James Culverwell, Jean-Claude Jamoulle, Joe Tuck, Johan Chaves, Juan Salvador Mendoza, Luciano Avila, Mauro Hernan, Ngo Van Tri, Nigel Voaden, Nikolay Poyarkov, Patrick David, Patrick Prevost, Paul Freed, Pier Cacciali, Ricardo Buff, Ross Wanless, Ryan van Huyssteen, Sandy Leo, Si-Min Lin, Soheila Javanmardi, Stephen Schmidt, Trent Bell, Vishal Santra, and Young Dae Kim. Thank you all for your generous help! If you have submitted photos which are not in this batch, please be patient — we will add them soon!

We now have 7675 photos of 3064 species on our server, with photos of another 3000 species or so linked in and displayed from Calphotos (~800), Flickr (~900), and many other sites. This translates to more than 6000 species in the database that have photos. We are pretty sure that this is the most comprehensive database of reptile photos online (not counting search engines such as Google images).

Neverthless, there are still 4000 species to go — please help us to get photos of those too!

More reptile genomes. Among the latest reptile genomes published is that of Ophisaurus gracilis, now Dopasia gracilis, an anguid (limbless) lizard (Song et al. 2015).

Books received: Gunther Köhler & Hannes Zorn (2015) Chuckwallas, Herpeton Verlag, 142 pages + 199 color photos. This definitive guide to chuckwallas (genus Sauromalus) provides a comprehensive survey of the taxonomy, biology, and husbandry of the 5 species in the genus. It describes even fossil species, the climate, diet, behavior, ecology and conservation of this groups of lizards. Detailed instructions describe how to keep and breed chuckwallas. The only limitation is that it is in German, but you can still enjoy the nearly 200 color photos if you cannot read the text.

Herpetological bibliography of Europe. The Field Herpetology special interest group of the German Herpetological Society (DGHT) has released an illustrated Herpetological bibliography of Europe that features almost 900 illustrations of European herps (in German).

Forgotten species wanted: Christopher Kemp, a science writer, is looking for “forgotten species”, i.e. they're collected in the field and then wait decades, or even centuries, in collections until they're finally described and named. We have provided some but for a book project he is especially interested in species that are morphologically distinct, not just cryptic species. Let him know at <cjkemp@gmail.com>. BTW - the subject has been addressed by Fontaine et al. 2012 who found that the average “shelf life” of species was 21 years between collection and description.

Use the Reptile Database in class. If you happen to teach a class in Herpetology, the end is near — at least of the summer break. Please consider giving some homework to your students that benefits their readings skills as well as our data collection efforts. For more information see our Teaching page. We have many more ideas, e.g. having your students involved in a small research project using bioinformatics, data mining or analysis, or other data-driven studies. For instance, we need help finding the coordinates of type localities. Let us know if you are interested.

23 March 2015

New RELEASE!

10,178 species, up from 10,119 in December (plus 59, including revalidations and elevations). 165 species were described in 2014 and 13 described so far this year.
36,278 references, up from 35,615 in December (plus 663, including 96 published this year, and a record 1,652 published last year).

Bibliographic database. Of the 36,000+ references now in the database, about 21,000 have links to online sources, although many of them are admittedly still behind pay walls. However, many are not, including about 3000 papers and books with links to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Let us know if you see any papers that are online but have no links (and send the URLs to us, so we can include them). Among the new literature that went online for free is the Biology of the Reptilia.

Selected taxonomic news

Turtle phylogenetics. A new phylogenomic analysis of turtles has been published by Crawford et al. 2015 who provide the first genome-scale analysis of turtle phylogeny which includes 32 turtle taxa representing all 14 recognized turtle families.

The first reptile species that has been created in the lab. Aspidoscelis neavesi is the first known tetraploid amniote that reproduces through parthenogenetic cloning by individual females. Aspidoscelis neavesi originated through hybridization between Aspidoscelis exsanguis (triploid parthenogen) × Aspidoscelis inornata (diploid bisexual or gonochoristic species) in the laboratory. The authors speculate that such tetraploids may also be found in nature.

New Editors

As announced previously, we have started to recruit editors (or curators) to keep up with the large number of papers published and the number of photos submitted. We welcome Vivek Sharma as new editor for India, Sebastian Lotzkat for Panama and Costa Rica, Mark O’Shea for the snakes of Papua New Guinea, Andrew Durso for freshwater reptiles, and Amr Salah for Egyptian reptiles. If you are interested in acting as an editor please let us know. Your job will require to look through recent papers and to send us relevant bits and pieces of information from these papers (we can send papers!). See our editor page for more details.

Photos and photo editors. Paul Freed and Sven Mecke are our new photo editors and have processed their first 400+ hundred photos which will be going online in a few days.

Photographers whose photos are being uploaded this time include Alan Giraldo, Alessandro Catenazzi, Ar Shakti Nanda, Arne Rasmussen, Brad Maryan, Breno Hamdan, Bruno Miranda, Cameron Siler, Carmelo Lopez, Chiramjib Debnath (via Joydeb Majumder), Chris Rego, Claudia Koch, Colin Bryant, Dick Sage, Diego Ramirez, Henrik Bringsøe, Jaime Troncoso-Palacios, Jakob Hallermann, J. Cairos, Jean-Claude Jamoulle, Jorge Alberto Zuñiga Baos, Joydeb Majumder, L. David, Luis Alberto Rueda Solano, M.R. Low, Marco Freitas (via Breno Hamdan), Nathanaël Maury, Nigel Voaden, Rick West, Subhendu Mallik, Thomas Calame (via Vin Luu), Tom Ferrara, Tony Wales, William W. Lamar (via Rick West). Many thanks to all of you! (Those who are not in the list, will have their photos uploaded soon. Please be patient or send more photos :)

New country checklists: We have updated the database using a number of recently published checklists, including those for Nicaragua (Sunyer 2014), Honduras (Solis et al. 2014, McCranie 2015), Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria (snakes, Trape et al. 2014), and Iran (lizards, Smid et al. 2014). Note that when you search for distribution = Guinea you will also find Papua New Guinea and Equatorial Guinea, so we suggest to combine this search with a keyword from the title of Trape et al. 2014, e.g. reference = “Philothamnus”.

Kenya Reptile Atlas: There is also a new atlas for Kenyan reptiles.

Other herpetofaunal sites: Our Link page has a links to various herpetofaunal sites. Let us know if you know of others that we should add.

Genera and type species: You can find all type species of all reptile genera in the Reptile Database now. Unfortunately we do not have a separate data field for that information (yet), so you will have to use a workaround to find the type species in the Comments field: use the quick search to find a genus name plus "type species", e.g. “Pogona type species”. The type species is often the oldest name in that list, here Pogona barbata (CUVIER, 1829). However, you can also find a list of type species in our updated downloadable checklist.

Why is this relevant? Although we do not have a separate database for higher taxa, you can often find information about a genus (or family etc.) in the species entry of the type species. For instance, several hundred type species have diagnoses for the genus. For instance, the diagnosis of the genus Pogona is in the entry of its type species, Pogona barbata.

Currently the type species remain unclear for only 3 genera, namely Dalophia, Pseustes, and Phrynonax. Let us know if you can provide insight into those.

User survey. We are planning a conduct a user survey soon to get more feedback about how we can improve the Reptile Database. If you have experience with online surveys, please let us know. We would appreciate some help, including the analysis of the results.

15 Jan 2015

1 Dec 2014

With an unusually long delay since our last newsletter, we would like to inform you about the latest release of the Reptile Database which was released a few days ago. This version features

10,119 species (including 139 described this year), up from 10,038 in August,
35,615 references (including 1,203 published this year), up from 34,104 in August, which resulted in almost 200 new and changed names.

You can download a complete list as an Excel spreadsheet. The checklist also contains a list of changes (in a separate sheet). The format is not perfect but we are working to improve it. The next release should have a complete and detailed list of changes in the format “old name > new name”.

Selected taxonomic news

Homalopsidae: Murphy and Voris (2014) suggested a number of new genera and revalidated a few more, leading to 28 genera for just 53 species.

Boidae: Pyron et al. 2014 suggested to split the monophyletic boas into multiple families; we did not follow this suggestion following a discussion with the Scientific Advisory Board (see below). However, the new suggested families (such as “Sanziniidae) can be found in the database.

More species and genera split, including Lampropeltis, Blanus, Crotalus triseriatus, Hemidactylus fasciatus, and Pelomedusa subrufa. Guo et al. (2014) split the fairly large genus Amphiesma (43 species) into 3 genera: Amphiesma, Hebius, and Herpetoreas. Only Amphiesma stolatum remains in the genus.

For other changes, please search the database (e.g. year or reference = 2014) or take a look at the updated species checklist.

New journals and journal features

We have finally completed the import of all Herpetology Notes papers (i.e. references) even though not all papers are completely indexed. We are also indexing the new journal BioGecko.

The almost 1,000 papers of the journal Sauria are now cross-referenced individually so you can order individual articles (or journal issues). Please support the publisher (and us) by ordering a few papers :)

New books received

Stipala, J. 2014
Mountain Dragons - In search of chameleon diversity in the highlands of Kenya.
Jan Stipala, 124 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9928176-0-2

Scientific Advisory Board

Recently we constituted a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) who will advise the Reptile Database on general strategic decisions but also on controversial taxonomic issues. One of the first recommendations of the SAB was not to adopt the suggested Boid taxonomy suggested by Pyron et al. (2014, see above). We continue to consult individual experts in more special cases, e.g. on individual species or genera. There is a consensus that all published taxonomic changes should be in the Reptile Database but when it comes to valid names we can only show one “accepted” name for any given species even if several are in use. Instead of flip-flopping between names with each new publication, the result will be a bit more conservative but also more stable.

New Editors

In order to manage data curation and data import better, we have started to recruit editors for special tasks.

Photo editor. Paul Freed and Sven Mecke are our first volunteer photo editors. They will receive the photos we get, edit them, verify correct identifications with experts, find photos of species not pictured etc. This will also allow us to process photos faster. We are still looking for a photo editor taking care of turtles. Let us know if you are interested. See also the note about photos under “Other News”.

Taxonomic editors: Similar to the photo editors, we are looking for volunteers who are willing to help with the curation of papers. Initially we will start with editors for turtles, crocodiles, and squamate families (or genera if they have a substantial number of species). The taxonomic editors will receive papers from which they are supposed to extract information that is relevant for the database such as taxonomic or nomenclatural changes, new distribution records, or databasable life history data. Please let us know if you are interested in helping with any particular taxonomic group.

Other news

The Reptile Database in teaching. You can help to improve data curation for the Reptile Database by using it in your class. If you are teaching a herpetology (or taxonomy) class, you can have your students curate papers, editing Wikipedia pages (that link to the Reptile Database), ID species, or find and analyze other information. We always have a large backlog of papers that need to be curated, including simple cases with new distribution data or more complicated ones. Please get in touch if you are interested. We have designed a few exercises and assignment for classroom use. Please let us know what you think and if you have suggestions for improvements.

Photos. We have again a large number of new photos (>1,500). However, they are added to the database independently of text, and thus have not been updated yet. This will probably take another few weeks or so, just in case you do not see the photos that you have submitted. In any case, more photos are always welcome! Please send photos (with location or coordinates) to info@reptile-database.org. You can find more instructions at the bottom of this page: http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/introduction.html.

Bounced emails. This mailing list returns an increasing number of bounced emails, reaching a total of about 300 now or almost 10% of all recipients. Please take a look at this list and let us know if you recognize any of the email addresses. Please inform these people or send us their current email addresses. Also, some of you may not have received our last newsletter because it has ended up in your spam folder.

Google Maps. We often use Google Maps to verify the localities reported in papers. However, Google Maps shows different maps in different countries. For instance, Google Maps in India shows Arunachal Pradesh as part of India. However, Google Maps in China shows Arunachal Pradesh as part of China. Although we will replace our current approximate maps by “real" distribution maps sooner or later, such details are important when you search the Reptile Database for geographic areas (or if you need a list of all Indian or Chinese reptiles). Right now, we treat Arunachal Pradesh as part of India. Finally, there are different names in different Google Maps versions. For instance, in the international version you can see the “Persian Gulf”. However, in Arabian countries it is called the “Arabian Gulf”. There are a number of other contentious borders or names, so please keep this in mind when you search the database.

New countries and states. In the course of history new countries keep forming, such as the new countries that used to be Yugoslavia or North and South Sudan (which used to be Sudan). However, there are also new states, such as the new state of Telangana in India, and the Indian government apparently discusses the creation of another 21 new states (the current states are fairly new too, many having been formed only in 1956). Obviously, this can cause headaches for us as we try to keep tabs on reptiles in those states, especially when they are species-rich such as those in India. Keep us posted if you see discrepancies or errors.

JournalMap: This new web service and database offers a scientific literature search engine that empowers you to find relevant research based on location and biophysical attributes combined with traditional keyword searches. Give it a try.

Funding. We still do not have funding for the Reptile Database. If you plan to submit a grant related to reptile taxonomy or with databasable information, please consider including the Reptile Database as a subcontractor or collaborator. Of course, you can also budget personnel to curate data for us.

Donations: Since it is gifting season, we also offer (or rather accept) donations now. We usually use the little available money we have to buy literature, travel to libraries, or pay students to enter, scan, or process data. If you have a few spare bucks, you can donate them to the Reptile Database via Paypal:

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