Well, being is I am the lad who first crossed them. That was many many years ago, and I have produced many many of them of several kinds of crosses. I may have an advantage. But I could be wrong. But in this case, the small one is very representative of a cross.

The first crosses were accidents. Years later they were not.

I am sure that LLL did not misrepresent them poorly, I am sure they are going by what they were told. The problem is, some folks bred crosses and called them pure. There were two breeders that I know of that did this. One from SoCal and one from central Cal. One simply offers a play on words, as in, he calls them true Sand monitors, which all the gouldi complex are commonly called sand monitors. So any cross between them would be sand monitors as well.

The other was told by the person who bred them and sold them to them, but they refused to change their naming. As when they bought them, they were called pure or true sand monitors.

You must rememeber, most, if not all people in the states did not know much about this group and back 15 years ago, not much was known by anybody, including literature. So monitors were bred to anything that looked similar. As you can tell, most of the gouldi complex appears very similar. There are sutle differences, in color, pattern, size, egg type, head shape, tail scalation and structure, etc. But overall, they appear similar, much like the indicus and doreans types do.

After spending some years in Australia, I realized that some of the books(most) had made mistakes in idendifying animals from this group. As books now do with doreanus and indicus. I can imagine in the future, if these became commonly bred, that this same confusion were be dicussed. The reason, now we do not know type of indicus or doreanus from the other. So if we breed what we call doreanus now, and later it turns out they were of two different species then what do you do? You call them crosses.

Because of the confusion, there is one basic way to approach it, the individual specimen, must appear to represent a pure flavi to be called one. If not, its not. As we have no idea of the genetic origin of these animals, not even the first ones.

Even the Pure gouldi out there are questionable, as I asked Dallas zoo how they knew their goulds were goulds, and their responce was the same, because thats the name they came in as.

If any of you go to Oz and go bush, all the locals will call these monitors, Sand monitors, no matter what kind they actually are. Unless the person your with is very Keen on this group. Cheers FR

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