As many of you may have heard, Thomas Wilms et. al described two new species of Uromastyx last year from Yemen. He e-mailed some of us a copy of the final published article a couple of days ago along with some photos.
As it turns out, these were U. benti-type Uromastyx that we have been saying for some time should be split off into separate species. But since we have no collection locale data, we had no way to officially do it. In the interum we've been calling the one U. benti pseudophylbyi and the other U. benti benti. Well luckily Thomas ended up collecting specimens directly and additionally adding some genetic testing to verify there are indeed several separate species involved in the old U. benti group.
The one commonly know in the trade as the Mountain benti (generally small white spots - often slightly blurry-edged, moderate amount of blue in the cheeks, sides, etc, heavily reticulated background pattern) is apparently still U. benti. The Rainbow benti (large bright fishegg shaped to large barred white spots on a clearer background) is now U. yemenensis yemenensis, and the one commonly called the Orange benti (none to very minimal blue, nearly all brick orange background, white to off-white spots)is now U. yemenensis shobraki.
It's kinda good news and bad news. It seems the majority of the specimens we had been keeping over the years were U. yemenesis with very few being true U. benti. The good news is that while we were not the first to breed U. benti in captivity, it now seems we were the first to breed U. y. yemenesis - we just thought they were U. benti at the time so didn't think much of it. I sent photos off to Thomas to verify I had identified them correctly and he confirmed it today. On the bad news side, we only have one U. yemensis still in our possesion and almost all of what I've seen still in the country is U. benti. That's going to make it even harder to re-pair our last girl ("Daizy" - we've had her for around 10 years now) as I've not seen another U. y. yemensis in years.
Just thought you might find it interesting to finally hear what the new species look like - nothing really "new" as far as what we've seen but interesting from the scientific end of things. Plus for me at least, it's nice to see my suspecions of what's not the same species finally get verified! To get a better feel for what they look like go to our "Photo Gallery of our Breeding Stock" page, go to the link for "Orange benti" to see U. y. shobraki. (all those are supposedly that subspecies). Then back out and go the "Rainbow Uromastxy" page to see what I believe is now considered U. benti (the top pair) while the male "Bars" below "Pastel" is the best example of a U. y. yemenesis. Obviously we've not had time to change those pages to the current classifications yet but you should be able to get a feel for who's who.
FWIW
Doug
www.deerfernfarms.com
