Holdings in the herpetology collection of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Vertebrate Zoology includes specimens from throughout Asia.
Recent
work by affiliates and staff includes fieldwork in the islands of the
Taiwan Strait, Guangdong Province, and the lesser populated regions of
Hong Kong. To date, more than 800 specimens have been collected,
representing more than 65 taxa.
While
new species have been discovered during this fieldwork, of perhaps
greater interest are the changes to geographic distributions of known
species. In many cases, species thought to be restricted to mountains
are also found on the offshore islands. This could mean that many of
these species once had continuous distributions across the highlands,
and that when sea levels rose some became isolated on what are now the
islands of the Taiwan Strait. Isolated from much of the human
residents, those populations held on while the mainland populations
largely succumbed to habitat alteration and other human-based
activities. This resulted in refuge populations in the isolated
mountains of the mainland, and the offshore islands.
The Yale Peabody Museum’s collections are available to legitimate
researchers for scholarly use. Loans are issued to responsible
individuals at established institutions. Loans and access to the
collection can be arranged through the Collections Manager.
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