Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Someone seen Lamprophis like this before?
About four years old and still under 60cm long. Big eyes and atypical colouration (black fringed scales). Also differs in some scalation aspects.
Any comment appreciated.
Regards,
Mathias

Have you compared it to Lamprophis inornatus? That looks like an Olive House snake to me. Those can have black edged scales. Is the belly white (which would be the brown) or dark (it is the olive). Also I see that the stripes on the head that are unique to the brown are mising on this one.

Frank
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"The luxury of not getting involved departed with the last lifeboat Skipper..."

Also the head looks wrong for either (very stubby).

Another thing. Olives don't get as large as browns.

Frank
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"The luxury of not getting involved departed with the last lifeboat Skipper..."

Thanks for your reply. I see you get my confusion right. I looked up the scale counts and nothing does fit. The snake is about four years of age and aprox. 45cm long. (Eats good though).
The belly is creamish white, not that white my fuliginosus have, but not gray as inornatus (moreover these are big snakes ).
By olive do you mean L. olivaceus or the common name of L. inornatus. In Germany we call L. inornatus Olive Housesnake.
The head does not fit to fuliginosus but neither to olivaceus nor inornatus.
And yes...it does lack all head stripes.

I believe that would be L. inornatus. The common name, I think, for olivaceous, is the olive water snake.

~~Greg~~

That makes things clear.
But I don´t think it´s L. inornatus. I´ve seen some and they look considerably different.
Problem is, I don´t ave a clue where this snakes comes from. It´s an import, but the man I bought it from had no data concerning that animal.

That is certainly an interesting looking housesnake. It doesn't look like inornatus to me. It just doesn't have the right head shape.
Unfortunately, Housesnake taxonomy is a mess still. Some areas are probably oversplit and others probably undersplit. I frankly gave up trying to figure it out a while back.

Either way, neat looking snake. L. olivaceus is supposed to be black as an adult (unlike "black" fuliginosus which tend to be very dark green). I have only ever seen a couple of bad photos of olivaceus, so I don't know what its range of variation is.

Of course, the confusion about the common names isn't helping here (the Olive House Snake is L. inornatus, not L. olivaceus).

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Chris Harrison

Not all black L. fuliginosus are dark olive. I´ve both jet black and dark olive green morphs. (Pic of a jet black is attached).
L. olivaceus whereas is black with a certain shade of grey. They do have a different eye coulour though, something like orange.
It is perfectly clear to me that this specific animal is neither L. inornatus nor L. olivaceus. Both are different in looks and scalation. I was thinking of L. swazicus some times, but they have different scale counts, too.
You are perfectly right, the L. fuliginosus complex should be reviewed. There are so many variations.
I own the big Lowvelt Phase and the red to cinnamom Lowvelt phase, as well as blacks from ? and the light green morph from ?
The problem ist that you almost never get viable information on the exact location the housesnake has been collected.