Description
The AMNH collection of amphibians and reptiles ranks among the world's five largest herpetological collections. The separately catalogued collections of amphibians and reptiles total more than 335,000 specimens, of which more than 13,000 have more than one type of preparation. The holdings of the Herpetology collection are computerized; however, inventorying the collection and proofing the database are ongoing processes. The Herpetology collection may be thought of as an ever-growing library of the world's amphibian and reptile faunas. It is an irreplaceable international resource that deserves the best of care.
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 349,178 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.
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:
AMNH Herpetology Collection
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is American Museum of Natural History. 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: 71d0dff0-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a. American Museum of Natural History publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
- Content Provider
- Content Provider
Geographic Coverage
The scope of the Herpetology collection is global. Aside from the United States, areas especially well represented include Mexico, Panama, much of South America, Africa, Madagascar, Pakistan, China, New Guinea, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
The collection covers a very broad taxonomic range. All living orders and families of the Amphibia and Reptilia are represented, as are about 80% of the genera. The collection contains over 6,900 species representing roughly 58% of the world's described herpetofauna. On average, 76 species names per year (range 20-171) have been added to the Herpetology files over the past 40 years, with approximately 2,970 species or 25% of the world's estimated 12,000 amphibians and reptiles having been added in a little over a quarter century.
| Class | Reptilia (reptiles), Amphibia (amphibians) |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1815-01-01 / 2014-04-16 |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 71d0dff0-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a |
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| http://ipt.vertnet.org:8080/ipt/resource?r=amnh_herps |