Reptile & Amphibian Forums

The herpetological taxonomy papers by Richard Wells and C. Ross Wellington are among the most controversial ever published. For reasons of nomenclature, they remain indispensable reading for anyone interested in Australian herp taxonomy, but are generally hard to get hold of.

In order to faciliate access to these papers, I have placed PDF scans of the following Wells & Wellington papers online:

Wells, R.W. & C.R. Wellington (1984) A synopsis of the class Reptilia in Australia. Australian Journal of Herpetology 1(3-4): 73-129. (Snake pages only)

Wells, R.W. & C.R. Wellington (1985) A classification of the Amphibia and Reptilia of Australia. Australian Journal of Herpetology, Supplementary Series 1: 1-61. (Snake pages only)

Wells, R.W. & C.R. Wellington (1987) A new species of proteroglyphous snake (Serpentes:Oxyuranidae) from Australia. Australian Herpetologist 503:1-8. (Description of Cannia weigeli - scan of faxed copy)

Thanks to Carl Sundberg for scanning these in and to Richard Wells for allowing me to post them.

Cheers,

Wolfgang
Wells & Wellington papers online

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Well,

I've got some of the papers as paper copies as well, but it's always good to have the stuff in eBook format so I can store my library (~550 ebooks on herp topics) on CD from time to time.

Cheers,
Wulf
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http://www.leiopython.de ,
http://www.herpers-digest.com

For those who subscribe to Hennig's definition of "monophyletic taxa", i.e. one ancestor and all of its descendants, there is a constant need to either lump excessively (thus ignoring morphological disparity) or split excessively (thus erecting or resurrecting taxa that are not morphologically distinguishable from one another). For those who favor splitting excessively because of their adherence to Hennigian taxonomic dictates, there is thus a constant need to come up with new names for old taxa and to define these otherwise undefinable, contrived taxa. Wells and Wellington have saved these Hennigians a lot of time by providing them an existing list of available names. There is no need to dream up new names and also no need to expend the effort to define otherwise undefinable, contrived taxa.

They don't work for me...

>>They don't work for me...

You need a recent version of Adobe Acrobat - at least version 5, and preferably 6, they don't work on version 4.

Cheers,

Wolfgang
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np
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http://www.leiopython.de ,
http://www.herpers-digest.com

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