What's new? (April 2012)
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24 April 2012
9,596 species (up from 9,547, i.e. plus 49, including resurrections etc.).
29,700 literature references (+401), including 177 published in 2012.
5,892 photos, representing 2,278 species (plus 161 species)
34 new species have been described in 2012 (so far).
More photos: we have added 672 new photos since the last release, most of which are from just 4 photographers, including several hundred photos of types and other specimens from the ZSM. On top of the 5,892 photos in the database we link to 2,750 photos in Flickr, 2,517 in CalPhotos, and 2,078 on other sites (including Reptarium and Arkive). As a result, you have access to photos of 3,312 species.
More links to literature sources. In the past 3 months, we have almost doubled the number of links from the literature references in each species entry to web sources such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library. At this point, almost 13,000 references (or 43% of all references) have links. Unfortunately, many of them require subscriptions or other access permissions. Let us know if you know of open access papers or even personal websites that we can link to. Check out Anolis carolinensis for an example.
Mailing list. More than 100 email addresses of our mailing list bounce back (and will thus be deleted). Please let us know if your email address changes or if you do not get email updates any more. Thanks!
28 Jan 2012
9,547 species (up from 9,487).
29,259 literature references (up from 29,023), including 775 published in 2011.
5,211 photos, representing 2,117 species.
126 new species have been described in 2011 (so far).
New feature: link to literature sources. While still under development, we have started to add links from the bibliographies in each species entry to publishers, journal websites, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and others. At this point, about 25% of all references have links. Check out an Platysternon megacephalum for an example.
11 Nov 2011
The current release has 25 new species, totaling now 9,487 species (up from 9,439). We are now at 84 species that have been described in 2011.
Note that there is a difference between the number of “new species” and the number of “species added”, mostly a result of subspecies that have been elevated to full species status (a few species sunk into synonymy too).
References: The database now contains 29,023 literature references (up from 28,633), including 611 published this year (up from 307). To put this into perspective: the Biology of the Reptilia Volume 22 is the “most extensive” reptile bibliography in book form with ~22,600 references (1400 pages!):
TIP OF THE MONTH (November): genus information
If you need to find information about particular genera, find the type species of this genus in the database. It often has information such as a diagnosis for the whole genus. We have started to add such information only recently and constantly add new information. Take a look at the genus Haitiophis to see an example.
We will add similar information for higher taxa such as families. In the long you will be able to find such parent-child relationships so that you can extract information about higher taxa by looking at their type species, type genera etc.
17 Sep 2011
We have finally set up links to iNaturalist.org and the IUCN Redlist pages. Please take a look at this example:
At iNaturalist.org, you can report your own observations, upload photos, and find maps of observations. Similarly, at the IUCN site you can find detailed distribution maps for many species and more detailed information about conservation issues.
The iNaturalist website can also be found by following the “Global Reptile Bioblitz” link at the left of the page.
If you haven’t seen it, you will notice that we have also improved our mapping tool, so you can see either rough range maps (with colored countries or states) or localities. The mapping tool is not perfect yet, we are working on further improvements.
The current release has also a number of new species, totaling now 9,439 species and 28,633 literature references, including 307 published this year.
Note that we have also reorganized our photo collection, now close to 5,000 photos which represent 2,019 species! We have also added an updated list of photographers to our “acknowledgements” page (see list near the middle of that page). Almost 250 people have contributed photos to our database by now! Thanks to all of you!
That said, we do have links to photos on the web of more than 4,300 species now, but unfortunately many links break sooner or later, so it would be great if we had those photos on our own server. That said, there are more than 7,000 species to go, so keep sending in photos, please!
One last word: The Center for North American Herpetology, “the most frequently accessed academic herpetological web site on the internet worldwide” (in their own words) just reported its 1,000,000th visitor since January 1998.
In the past year, since we have moved from JCVI to reptarium.cz we have had 269,053 visits from 152,455 unique visitors, totaling 1,704,784 page views. Just to put things into perspective.
1 Aug 2011
New release features a total of 9,413 species and 2,929 subspecies. 55 species have been described in 2011 (+36 since May release). 28,559 references in database (+339). New download version available.
1 May 2011
Total of 9,362 species (+ 42 since last update, including subspecies elevated to full species), 126 described in 2010 (+10), 19 from 2011 (+13). More than 28,200 references in database (+200).
3 March 2011
Total of 9,320 species, 116 described in 2010, 6 from 2011. More than 28,000 references in database.
6 Dec 2010
Today's new release features 9,285 species of which 102 have been described this year. We have also updated our photo library that contains more than 5,000 photos of almost 2,000 species now. The overview of higher taxa has been updated: links to families provide lists of species now; also, the overview of higher taxa now contains links to Wikipedia entries of these families.
5 Nov 2010
A new release of the database is available, featuring 9,247 species of which 79 have beendescribed this year. The resulting list of species can now be browsed by opening a species entry and clicking through the found set using a navigation list on the left. Also, photos can now be browsed within each species.
5 Sep 2010
With the help of Jirí Hošek from Reptarium.cz we have now installed a new search engine that you can access here. The new site also features an update with 9,205 species of which 50 have been described this year. We are now in the process of updating the family pages and move back the photos. We hope to complete these tasks by early October. A new download version should become available by that time as well.
24 July 2010
The J Craig Venter Institute no longer hosts the Reptile Database. The database is currently offline. We are working on a move to another site. If no alternative site will be found with a few weeks we will post a downloadable flat file by mid-August.
January 2010
New Release.
October 2009
We have just released the Oct 2009 version of the TIGR Reptile Database, listing 9084 species (up from 8,863 from June 2008), including 64 species described so far in 2009.
Please let us know if you note any omissions or errors. We are now in the process of updating the family pages as well. There are many changes which have been published but not integrated into the higher taxa.
The CD-ROM or download version has been released in July 2009 already, including a bibliography of >26,000 references that now shows which papers are available as pdfs.
18 June 2008
(Note that a new database version was released in January 2009 without a release note on this page).
Last week we have released the June 2008 version of the TIGR Reptile Database, listing 8,863 species. We have also released a new, slightly improved search engine, that allows users to search for exact matches, as many of you have requested. The improved search engine is still in beta-testing and thus not yet available from the main website but have a look at http://www.jcvi.org/reptiles/search.php (note that exact matches only make sense for genera and species names, not for most other fields as they usually contain a lot of information that is almost impossible to match exactly).
We are currently pondering the possibility whether we should move all our web pages on reptile families (http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/taxa.html) to Wikipedia and then link back from Wikipedia to the actual database at TIGR (i.e. the same way we link from the family pages to list all species of each genus, see http://www.tigr.org/reptiles/families/Agamidae.html for an example). If you are in the Wikipedia community we would appreciate if you could help us with that. Let us know!
The CD-ROM or download version will follow shortly.
News - 11 Feb 2008
After a longer hiatus we just updated our database again with a record of 8,728 species.
Based on current counts, 2007 was one of the most productive years in reptile taxonomy with at least 129 new species described, only second to the most productive. We are sure that we haven't got all new species though and thus may even reach or exceed the historical peak of 1854 (144 new species). There were only 2 other years in history during which more than 100 species were described as new: 1758 (118 species) and 1863 (114). Take a look and search the database for, say, "2007".
The peak in 1758 was obviously due to Linné's groundbreaking Systema Naturae (note the 250th anniversary this year!) while 1854 was the year when Duméril & Bibron published volumes 7-9 of their Érpétologie Générale in which they described 89 new species.
Note that the herpetological part of Linné's Systema Naturae is available for free on our website together with a number of other historical papers.
What's next?
We will also finish a DVD version of Duméril & Bibron's complete oeuvre within the next couple of months.
The CD version of the database has now more than 24,000 references of which about 16,000 are online.
News - May 2007
We are almost done with our transition to the new site. The search engine should work already although it still has a few quirks (such as missing carriage returns and diacritic characters). These will be fixed shortly. We also have to apologize for quite a few remaining broken links - they will be fixed within the next few weeks too. Please get onto our mailing list for updates: click here to send an empty e-mail to sign up. We keep your e-mail address private - no junk mail!
We are sorry that EMBL no longer supports the "EMBL" Reptile Database, so we had to remove their name from the title as well. EMBL thinks that reptiles have nothing to do with molecular biology which is, of course, only partly true as reptile taxonomy is more and more dominated by DNA sequence analysis. We do thank EMBL for more than 12 years of continuous hosting though. Please make sure you change links to the old EMBL address to the new one: http://www.reptile-database.org.
The database has therefore been renamed "The TIGR Reptile Database", based on our new host, The Institute of Genomic Research, now the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI).
Changes between June 2005 and October 2006
Note: This database is updated continuously, but new releases become publicly available only every 2 months now. However, we attempt to publish new releases in monthly increments starting in 2011.
Created: 2 July 1997 / Last updated: 01 Aug 2011