KC,
Thanks for the input.

At the time, the senior author was not aware that the dwarf morph occurred throughout S. Calif. and not solely in the San Bernardino and perhaps San Jacinto Mts.

The authors thought there was a sweet of characters that with reasonable confidence, one could readily distinguish between Southern and Northern Rubber Boas. That turns out not to be true if one is comparing the boas of the southern clade from the San Bernardino Mts. (and presumably from the San Jacinto Mts. which have never been studied) with members of dwarf populations from elsewhere in S. Calif. This is especially the case for the boas from the Mt. Pinos region which are extremely close in all respects to the boas in the San Bernardino Mts. except that the mtDNA results indicates the Mt. Pinos populations belongs to the northern clade.

Although the paper stated that the Northwestern and Sierra subclades were allopatric with the break occurring in the Mt. Lassen area, that is incorrect as there is no break whatsoever in the distribution of the species from northern Kern County all the way to British Columbia and east to Montana, Wyoming ,etc.

Richard F. Hoyer

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