Let me first say that I'd advise against taking CKing seriously. He's just grinding his axe. One brief point I'll make is that he's previously gone out of his way to point out at least one morphological difference distinguishing Pantherophis from Elaphe, but, now that it no longer suits his purpose, prefers to declare them `morphologically indistinguishable'.

Anyways. There aren't really definitive lists in taxonomy. IIRC, the species Utiger et al. place in the genus Pantherophis are Pantherophis guttatus, Pantherophis vulpinus, Pantherophis obsoletus, and Pantherophis bairdi. Burbrink split Pantherophis guttatus into three species, but he uses the name Elaphe for all of them, giving Elaphe guttata, Elaphe emoryi, and Elaphe slowinskii. Burbrink also split Pantherophis obsoletus into three species, calling them Elaphe obsoleta, Elaphe allegheniensis, and Elaphe spiloides. So, generally people choose which changes to follow and which to ignore. My preference is to accept Utiger et al's changes, as creating more cohesive and coherent groups from the previously unwieldy and disparate Elaphe, and to reject Burbrink's as unnecessary splitting. In practice, my impression is that a lot of people are using Utiger's genera and ignoring Burbrink's split of Pantherophis obsoletus, but that Burbrink's split of Pantherophis guttatus is more widely accepted, at least the emoryi part. His creation of Elaphe slowinskii seems a bit shakier.

Patrick Alexander

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