Ciao Steno,

well, I guess Richard will tell something about the thoughts they had in those years.

2) Underwood and Stimson (1990...3 years before Kluge) reached the same position preferring the Morelia genus instead of the original one...

As far as I remember their work (don't have it in front of me now), Underwood & Stimpson's basic thought was that australasian pythons have one ancestor, the african ones have another. They separated them into two tribes "Moreliini" for all of the australasian ones and "Pythoniini" for all the african ones. Then they placed almost every australasian python into "Morelia" and all the africans into Python. This sure was an interesting ideology, but obvious was not the right phylogeny, as Kluge (1993) later showed. Kluge's phylogentic arrangement seems quite robust anyway.
Have a look at Morelia fusca, Morelia childreni, Morelia amethistina, Morelia olivacea and others. The external morphology - in my opinion - does not allow to lump them into one genus Eventhough they might have the same ancester (as we actually all have the same microbes as ancestor *smile*).

Underwood and Stimpson did not examine much specimens other than the ones stored at the BMNH, and therefore they didn't have represenative samples from around the distributions of these specimens. They acutally didn't look at some species, but only took their data from literature. This in fact may have led to the phylogenetic results they came up with. Comparing Underwood & Stimpson (1990) with Kluge (1993) you will find that Kluge contradicts much of their work.

Hope this isn't that wrong and I could help a little bit

Cheers,
Wulf
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http://www.leiopython.de ,
http://www.herpers-digest.com

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