Abstract
Examination of five juvenile preserved specimens of Platyplectrurus trilineatus , an endemic, poorly-known Uropeltid snake species from the Western Ghats Mountains of Southwestern India provided further insights into its taxonomy. The sample examined here agreed well with the existing descriptions in literature in colouration and most aspects of scalation but had larger range of ventral scale count and smaller supraocular relative to prefrontal. Character definition (in the case of ventrals) and ontogenic variation (in the case of supraocular size) might have possibly created these discrepancies. These differences indicate that a better sampling of both specimens and characters would throw more light on this species. Keywords: morphology; characterization; lepidosis; habitus; colouration DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/tapro.v3i1.3228 TAPROBANICA , April, 2011. Vol. 03, No. 01: pp. 11-14
Highlights
Rajendran (1985) collected this species and provided further morphological characterization based on his specimens
The revised scalation value presented here is largely a result of differences in character definitions in the method of counting ventral scales, which varied in previous works and mine (i.e., Gower & Ablett, 2006)
The size of supraocular relative to prefrontal differed from literature (Boulenger, 1890; Smith, 1943; Rajendran, 1985)
Summary
Rajendran (1985) collected this species and provided further morphological characterization based on his specimens. I discovered five specimens labeled as “Platyplectrurus madurensis”, which I identified as P. trilineatus (see Kalaiarasan et al, 1995; Ganesh, 2010), with unknown collection locality, in the museum of the Chennai Snake Park.
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