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 quarterly or bi-annually.
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Created: 2 July 1997 / Last updated: 11 Feb 2008