Herping in 1988

[peterjohnson64]

Back in the days when I was learning Wordperfect 4.2 and Dbase 3 at Uni I was learning about herps by reading Harold Coggers ?Reptiles & Amphibians of Australia Volume 1?. I guess it was a bit of a bible for amateurs like me at the time.

But since I came on to APS I have noticed that everything I knew about reptiles was actually wrong. The latest being my Taipan/Fierce snake incident. So I thought I had better get back to the books. Well, hasn?t a lot changed since 1990?? I will run through some of the scientific ?Facts? of the 1988 edition of Coggers book. Quite interesting.

1. The fierce snake was Parademansia Microlepidpta and at the time Covacevich et al regarded it as congeneric with the taipan. Obviously, they won. But, before then, it wasn?t a taipan. AND Oxyuranus Scutellus was a taipan, not a coastal taipan.

2. Carpet/Diamond Pythons. There were only 3 sub-species of Morelia Spilota. Spilota Spilota ? being the Diamond (but not the high yellow ones), Spilota Imbricata (southern WA) and Spilota Variegata (the rest). I am still coming to grips with all these new carpet pythons.

3. Dymond Pythons from the Gosford region were basically the same as the Wollongong ones.

3. Stimmies/Macs/Childrens were all the one species called Childrens Pythons with a scientific name Liasis Childreni. So I guess they were also Olive pythons in a way.

4. Chondropython viridis. Green Tree Pythons before they were genus Morelia.

5. The white lipped python of the Torres Straight islands did not have a common name. It was merely Liasis Albertisii.

6. A Shingleback was Trachydosaurus Rugosus. Although I did realise it was reclassified as a blue tongue in the 90?s.

7. Bearded Dragons were Amphibolurus, not Pogona.

8. No rough scaled pythons existed.

9. and now the big one. The range of the Cane Toad. Take a line from Normanton in the north to Tweed Heads in the south and that was basically the western limit. How things change.

This is a 650 page book and all I did was look up the things I had personally made mistakes about in posts or had noted in my head that were different from what I knew. It would be interesting to know how many more changes have been made in such a short period.

 

[pugsly]

Very interesting pete, wonder how many changes the next 10 years will have for us!

 

[peterjohnson64]

Thats the point really. We make claims and people will laugh at us. All swans were white once. The earth was flat and you were a lunatic to suggest otherwise. I say that high yellow diamonds are actually intergrades so I am currently an idiot. But maybe in 10 years there will be a morelia spilota bullocki that is what we now think of as a port macquarie diamond!!!

 

[Linus]

I learnt all my snake facts at the same time Peter.(87-91) Then when I decided to re-enter the world of herps a couple of years ago after a 10 year break, I was bamboozled for months (and still am with some things) with regard to all the new species that seemed to have appeared in that time. I had never heard of Maccies or Cape yorks or even Splilota cheynei and all the diamonds I had kept were like the ones in your photos above.

It was a pleasant surprise though and this forum has been enoromously helpful in getting back up to speed.

 

[Retic]

I think the problem is that some of these changes make sense and others seem like change for change sake. Look at the range of the coastal carpet and look at how different they are inside that range yet they are classed as one species. It seems as though every carpet has become it's own species for no other reason that it's colouring. How many carpets are we going to have in 10 years ? Will we have carpets found south of the Brisbane river as a distinct species from those found on the North because they can and do look very different.
Naturalists years ago tended to over simplify and now they over complicate.

 

[Hickson]

1. The fierce snake was Parademansia Microlepidpta and at the time Covacevich et al regarded it as congeneric with the taipan. Obviously, they won. But, before then, it wasn?t a taipan.

Yes it was. It was also called the Western Taipan, or Small-Scaled Snake. Most people considered it a Taipan, especially when the toxicity of it's venom was known (back then, the Coastal Taipan was thought to be the most toxic before the discovery of microlepidota).

3. Stimmies/Macs/Childrens were all the one species called Childrens Pythons with a scientific name Liasis Childreni. So I guess they were also Olive pythons in a way.

Huh?

5. The white lipped python of the Torres Straight islands did not have a common name. It was merely Liasis Albertisii.

Cogger may not have given it a common name, but it was known back then as the White-lipped Python, or d'Albert's Python.

6. A Shingleback was Trachydosaurus Rugosus.

And still is.

Did he have an entry for the Pygmy or Adelaide Bluetongue (Tiliqua adelaidensis)?



Hix

 

[peterjohnson64]

Hix, I was merely commenting that childrens were then part of genus Liasis as are Olive pythons, but there were no Spotted Pythons or Stimsons Pythons.. And yes, there is Tiliqua Adelaidensis in the book.

 

[Hickson]

 

[Dicco]

Hix, Shinglebacks have been moved into Tiliqua, Trachydosaurus is now non-existant. Being related to Olive Pythons wouldn't have made them Olives back then Peter, they were still very different, like calling Morelia viridis a carpet Python, although in the same genus, they are very different in several ways.

 

[Hickson]

Hix, Shinglebacks have been moved into Tiliqua, Trachydosaurus is now non-existant.

:shock: :shock: :shock:

When did this happen?

:shock:

Hix

 

[Dicco]

I can't quite remember, but a couple of years ago I remember Trachydosaurus being the commonly used name, but I think recently Glenn Shea(sp?) classified them as Tiliqua and put Pink Tongues into Cyclodomorphus

 

[Hickson]

I heard some years ago (mid-90's) it had been suggested, but I thought it got poo-pooed by those in-the-know. If it was Glenn, I'll see if he'll supply me with a copy of his research - and then I'll tell him where he went wrong!



Hix