When you make comments such as "Officially, the scientific names seem to change faster then the common names" you aren't saying much. But when you diss taxonomists, you're showing how little you care to know, while having no reservations about commenting.

The currently-recognized subspecies here were established in a paper by Robert Mertens in 1963, but Mertens was cautious and regarded exanthematicus and albigularis as regional representatives of a single, wide-ranging species. Where their ranges approach one another in Sudan and (maybe) Ethiopia, you have big 'exanthematicus' and small 'albigularis' that are also very similar in other features. They aren't common there -- look at Mark Bayless's very comprehensive paper (2002) on the distributions of all Varanus species in Africa (J. Biogeography 29: 1643-1701) and see how many specimens have ever made their way into museums from Sudan and Ethiopia.

It was Boehme (1988) who next took a hard look at the exanthematicus-group monitors in NE Africa while trying to decide if the specimens from Yemen should be described as a new species, or as another regional variant in the exanthematicus group. Boehme decided that albigularis and exanthematicus were in fact different species (as was V. yemenensis), and that's been accepted for the last 15 years.

All of this is based on morphology, scale counts, hemipeneal features and so forth, and it would be very nice to see some DNA sequencing work done on the exanthematicus group. It's a large job -- are you offering to go to Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Zaire, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and other garden-spots to collect monitor DNA? No? Stand up, Frank, why not?

Before you take cheap shots, show us that you know what you're talking about.

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