Hi Jan,

forget it!
Ray obviously has never made any mtDNA analysis that would support his arrangements. Otherwise he would be stupid not to provide them in his paper, wouldn't he

At least most of his proposals concerning python taxonomy are primarily taken from McDowell's (1975) assumptions. McDowell knew why he didn't write a taxonomic paper introducing the proposed (sub-)species. He didn't have enough evidence and it would have been plenty of work to get the evidence!
But Ray doesn't care about evidence anyway. He's a splitter not a lumper and he uses some of the written proposals as evidence for his taxonomic arrangements.

He writes his papers in a way that they fit to the ICZN rules at a minimum and leaves the work for subsequent workers that do proper work, such as descriptions and diagnosis.

No one would really separate species by saying the one is more aggressiv than the other and often reaches larger average size

To me it's just a sort of craving for recognition by Ray, renaming almost every python species. At least his name pops up in the synonymy list of the specimens. And if by chance he was right in splitting something, the subsequent work(s) will have to use Ray's names for their findings. They did the work, Ray gets the credits...

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

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