Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Your post below about crotaphytus taxonomy really got me excited again about this field of study. I know there were a lot of proffessionals disinchanted with McGuire's reclassification of crotes. Like you many thought it was somewhat imcomplete. I have been following the Sauromalus taxonomy issue for 20 years now and am really not happy with Hollingsworth's reclassification of that genus and, like you, really think it needs to be researched. I think all these guys come from the Lee Grismer school. LOL. I am just a hobbiest with no proffessional qualifications so I am just going by my personal experiences and some field work I have done with Dr. Richard Montanucci out of CLemson University.

Are you doing this research as graduate work or something. I would really be interested as I think many here would be if you could give us a short indtroduction about yourself. Please don't think I am "calling you out" or anything like that. I just really like this topic and would maybe like to talk further about it with you.

Thanks for you time
Tom Greb

I would be more than happy to give an introduction. Currently I am attending the University of Utah as well as work with the Utah Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately the only Herptological contact I have in the academic world is Jack Sites of BYU who studies Sceloporus sp. Although I was fortunate enough to meet Wilmer Tanner at BYU on numerous occassions (He described C.collaris auriceps, C. vestigium, C. bicinctores, G. wislizenii punctatus, G. wislizenii maculosus, G. wislizenii neseotes). I am doing this study as a masters project even though right now I'm still an undergraduate. This project will take me quite a few years and may lead into a PhD dissertation. I wanted to clear up the confusion with not only the species of Crotaphytidae but the Subspecies as well and along the way I believe that as many as twelve more animals could be described. I've already come across museum material that looks quite unique. As well as a few male C. bicinctores specimens that look exactley like females but they have post anal scales and hemipenes but lack the gular pattern as well as the inguinal and auxillary patches that males of that species have. With this I will need to do more to find live specimens and study their habits but I think that they mimic the females so that they can sneek into a more dominant males territory in order to mate with his girls without him knowing. McGuire put out a paper last year about Crotaphytidae mtDNA sorting and his phylogeny conflicted with his previous one he published in 1996 based on morphology alone. In his new one C. collaris, C. vestigium, C. bicinctores, C. reticulatus, and C. nebrius are all paraphyletic which means that they can be split into more species. If they were to be condensed into already existing species then C. bicinctores would be placed in C. collaris as well as C. reticulatus. C. vestigium and C. grismeri would be placed in to C. insularis as well as some C. bicinctores which would mean that they would all have to be placed in C. collaris in order to keep monophyly. So instead of that they need to be split. In this though he still was not very thourough. There are bicinctores on the east side of the wasatch range near Hanksville, UT which are in close proximity to C. collaris auriceps and he used one population from Kansas, Oregon, Oklahoma, a few from New Mexico, Texas, and into Mexico. My goal is to take samples from every locale in every state U.S. and Mexico in order to get the absolute best idea of the way these animals evolved and are still evolving. So if people are interested let me know, ask a lot questions. And never take what anyone says as the absolute way it has to be, it may end up that way but do research to find out for yourselves.

If they were to be condensed into already existing species then C. bicinctores would be placed in C. collaris as well as C. reticulatus. C. vestigium and C. grismeri would be placed in to C. insularis as well as some C. bicinctores which would mean that they would all have to be placed in C. collaris in order to keep monophyly

What a mouthful! LOL!

Okay, so are you saying that the c. bicintores can be placed either in the c. collaris AND in the c reticulatus, or that both c. bic. and c. ret. can be placed within c. collaris? And then c.bic. can also be placed in c.insularis? And you want to argue that c bicintores needs to be in a class by itself?

I see the problem here, both in your explanation and in what happened to me when I was told that my male is a c.bicintores. Since he is really sub adult and just starting to color up, I wanted to see what he will look like when he is fully mature. Well, there is a miriad of possible color patterns that he could be when he grows up. Its the same when you look for "easterns" There is a drastic difference in the appearance between Easterns that occur in the middle to easternmost part of their range and the more western Easterns, like the Texas and Oklahoma Easterns.

Well, now my brain hurts!

I was just showing how much of a mess it would be to condense these species instead of naming new ones. They show in their DNA that they need revision and that one species is actually many. We just need to find were the boundaries are and define that differences now.

That makes sense to me. Will you keep us posted as you go?

Sure thing!!

Hey if you like send me your e-mail address at chuckwalla@bignet.net and I can forward your intro to Dr Montanucci as I know he has researched crotes inthe past and actually still has an interest in them. I think that he has good museum specimens and would probably be willing to help yopu out in anyway he can. He is a great guy. I am supposed to talk with him this weekend and will tell him about your research.
Tom

Hello,
I agree with McGuire's classification of the genus Crotaphytus but I do believe more DNA work is needed. I believe that eastern collaris are the same species as the western collaris and the differences you see are adaptations to the different environments as well as hybredization in the past with C. bicinctores. For instance, the C. bicinctores populations in southwestern Arizona contain C. collaris DNA in different amounts, in different locals. This suggest that they have hybredized at least 3 times with collaris over the past 2.5 million years yet they have retained the morphological characteristics of C. bicinctores. I'm currently working on a breeding project with 3 populations of southwestern Az C. bicinctores to see if the theory of Cytonuclear disequilibrium holds up. The pairs were collected and breeding will begin next season if everything works out. A large portion of the C. reticulatus population has lost their ancestrial DNA to past hybredization with C. collaris as well. I'm glad that the genus is still being looked at and the current classification is still
being challenged. I can't wait to hear more....