Sumba Ground Snake

description

Synonyms. None. Original name. Stegonotus sutteri Forcart, 1953: 379. Lothar Forcart (1902 – 1990; Fig. 17 L) was a Swiss malacologist and herpetologist, with a long career as Curator at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland from 1938 – 1967 (Wüthrich 1990), where he succeeded Jean Roux (1876 – 1939). The species epithet honors the Swiss ornithologist Ernst Sutter (1914 – 1999), a participant in the 1949 expedition to Sumba by the Museum for Anthropology and the Natural History Museum in Basel. The species description was provided in German and included three photographs (of the entire specimen, the tail, and the everted hemipenes) and two line drawings (of the head in left lateral and dorsal views). The photograph of Forcart (Fig. 17 L) is from Wüthrich (1990).

The taxonomic history of Indo-Papuan groundsnakes, genus Stegonotus Duméril et al., 1854 (Colubridae), with some taxonomic revisions and the designation of a neotype for S. parvus (Meyer, 1874)

discussion

Comment. Forcart (1953) considered his new species to be most closely related to Stegonotus plumbeus (Macleay, 1884). Only a year after its description, in a somewhat curious turn of events, he then placed it into the synonymy of S. florensis (Forcart 1954). It appears from Forcart’s (1954) explanatory text that he was prompted by the well-known and senior herpetologist Robert Mertens (1894 – 1975), curator at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, to rethink his description and to revise his assessment of the species.

The taxonomic history of Indo-Papuan groundsnakes, genus Stegonotus Duméril et al., 1854 (Colubridae), with some taxonomic revisions and the designation of a neotype for S. parvus (Meyer, 1874)

materials_examined

Holotype. NMBA 14872 (Fig. 29; Table 1), an adult male. Type locality. “ Zentralsumba, Lindiwatju 430 m ” [central Sumba Island, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia]. The specific locality “ Lindiwatju ” is indicated in a map of the major travel routes and sampling locations in the travelogue of the Basel museum’s Sumba expedition (Bühler & Sutter 1951: Fig. 2). However, as this village is not found on contemporary maps of Sumba Island, it requires some additional explanation. In Kapunduku, the local dialect of central Sumba, the term “ palindi ” is used to describe a hill or a house on a slope (Adams 1973, 1974). The term wacu (also spelled watju) means stone. The terms combined, as Palindi Wacu (or Lendiwacu on Google Maps), indicates a rocky outcropping. The location that fits the description and the map in Bühler & Sutter (1951) is at ca. 9.6556 ° S, 119.78 ° E. Collection. According to Forcart’s (1953) description, the specimen was obtained on 30 September 1949.

The taxonomic history of Indo-Papuan groundsnakes, genus Stegonotus Duméril et al., 1854 (Colubridae), with some taxonomic revisions and the designation of a neotype for S. parvus (Meyer, 1874)