Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm just to quick on the trigger these days.
Here's the two pics I forgot in the above
post.

John

Way to go! Those are amazing looking animals.

-Nathanael

i'm a noob- morocco was shut off before i knew what a uro was.
is werneri a type of nigriventis or a synonym or what? thanks.

That's a great question!
I was always under the impression
that the werneri was a U a nigriventris
and that the only classification significance
between the two was by locality and
of cours their physical appearances.

The nigriventris (moroccans) mostly from
Morocco and neighboring locales and that
the chunky sport model (werneri) was more
from areas such as Algeria and Tunisia.

I also see that some are classifying the werneri
as a sub species similar to the nigriventris. For
example, the California Academy of Science -
Research - Herpetology is also calling them a
acanthinurus sub species.

Below is the long URL which will take you to their
werneri page.

Hey Doug, you got any input/theories on this U a
werneri taxonomy?

John

http://www.calacademy.org/RESEARCH/herpetology/catalog/index.asp?xAction=Search&RecStyle=Full&Ssp=werneri&Genus=Uromastyx&Sp=acanthinurus&OrderBy=Family,Genus,Sp,Ssp,Country,State&SelectFromTable=HerpCat&PageStyle=Multiple&Page=1&SelectLst=CatalogNo, Museum, CatNo, Family, Genus, Sp, Ssp, Country, State, County

are these the "short tailed" ones? I love heavily bodied species.

werneri was originally applied to specimens of acanthinurus that had short tails. These were assumed to have come from Tunisia and "werneri" was more a race name than a true subspecies name.

Actually we need to terminate the werneri name as the only characteristic used to designate them (short tail) turns out to be like the color gene in Moroccans. You can get short and long tailed hatchlings within the same breedings. It;s not a race factor any more than yellow verses orange is a a race trait. It's just natural variation within U a nigroventris. The old theory that werneri comes from Tunisia has also not proven to be true either.

On another note - I was looking at your photo of your Moroccans that recently laid eggs and they look like this group I'm working with now. I strongly think those are a natural intergrade between Mali's and Moroccans. I'm betting if you flip them over and look at the bellies, they have Mali colored/patterned bellies. The key character that seems to set them apart from pure Mali's is the tail. I'm thinking someone collected some Uros at the upper western range of Mali's and found a population that at some point in the past overlapped with Moroccans. I got one in many years ago when Mali's were first coming into the country. Another breeder got in a gravid female around then and set up her offspring as a separate group. I recently bought 2 males resulting from the breeding of that group and they match your pair - typical Mali looks except for a Moroccan tail and in between Mali-Moroccan back pattern. My one male even shows some true orange pigment in the tail and lower spine. Olivier in France has some like this as well. We need to come up with a different common name to differentiate them from non-intergrades.

Doug