LSUMZ Herps Collection

Description

The collection of reptiles and amphibians is comprised of more than 140,000 specimens. The collection is extremely rich in snake species, with 359 genera and 954 species represented. The remaining herp groups are represented as follows: lizards (165 genera, 776 species), tuataras (1 genus, 1 species), turtles (54 genera, 104 species), crocodilians (8 genera, 15 species), frogs (143 genera, 682 species), salamanders (38 genera, 151 species), and caecilians (12 genera, 19 species). The collection contains 52 holotypes (specimens representing species new to science), which is a disproportionately large number for a collection of this size. The herpetology collection is worldwide in scope. The snake skeletal collection is among the largest and most diverse in the world. The collection of amphibians and reptiles from the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí is the largest in the world, and the collections from Honduras and Peru are among the top five in the world. Approximately 55-60 percent of the currently recognized genera of snakes are represented in the collection.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 98,523 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Downloads

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file	download 98,523 records in English (5 MB) - Update frequency: unknown
Metadata as an EML file	download in English (9 kB)
Metadata as an RTF file	download in English (7 kB)

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

LSUMZ Herps Collection

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 84786a2e-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a. Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by U.S. Geological Survey.