A lot of the "kenyans" we have now are crosses between the kenyan and the egyptian subspecies. The Bell line albinos come from the egyptians, and the paradox from the true kenyans. What we have in the pet trade was so interbred to create the morphs that we can't prove one is 100% kenyan (orange) or 100% egyptian (yellow).



The problem with this is that it is built on one assumption - that "kenyan" (colubrinus loveridgei) sandboas were orange and "egyptian" (colubrinus colubrinus) were yellow. While there may be a roughly north/south trend to go from yellowish to orangish ground color, I have seen yellowish sandboas that were imported out of Tanzania back in the 80s. So some snakes from the southern parts of the range can show the "egyptian" color characteristics. This is why the differentiation between the two subspecies (c. colubrinus vs. c. loveridgei) was sunk by Tokar. There is no such thing as 100% Kenyan, unless you mean snakes whose geographic origin was Kenya. By that logic, Dodoma snakes aren't Kenyans either, they are Tanzanian Sandboas.



Furthermore, along the same lines as the point you were making, when larger numbers of these snakes were being imported from a wider area of their range, importers sold the orange snakes as Kenyans and the yellowish snakes as Egyptians, regardless of their country of origin.
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Chris Harrison

San Antonio, Texas

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