Guadeloupe-Ameive
| Guadeloupe-Ameive | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Pholidoscelis cineraceus | ||||||||||||
| ( Barbour & Noble , 1915) |
The Guadeloupe Ameive ( Pholidoscelis cineraceus , Syn . : Ameiva cineracea ) is a presumably extinct species of lizard from the family of the rail lizards . Although Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre had already mentioned Ameiven in Guadeloupe in 1667 , the first valid scientific description was only written in 1915 on the basis of three specimens (one male, two females) that were found in August 1914 at Petit-Bourg on the island Basse-Terre were collected.
features
According to Du Tertre, the ameives were 1 to 1.5 feet long. The male captured in 1914 has a head-trunk length of 150 mm. The dorsal and tail scales are keeled and straight. 18 to 20 ventral scales are arranged in a transverse row and 34 to 38 ventral scales are arranged in a longitudinal row. There are four toes on each foot. 74 to 78 scales can be seen under the toes. There are 56 to 63 femoral pores . The back is ash-gray to gray-green and shows three slightly darker, inconspicuous, elongated stripes. Two further lateral stripes are indicated on each flank. The flanks are bluish. The head and tail are olive green. The belly is straw-colored or milky white.
Way of life
The few records of the way of life come from the work l'Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français by Du Tertre (1667). The animals spent the daytime heat under the ground. They ate both vegetable and animal foods.
die out
Most of the population has probably been decimated by mongooses . The decisive factor for the extinction was apparently the Okeechobee hurricane , which devastated some islands of Guadeloupe in September 1928.
literature
- Thomas Barbour , G. Kingsley Noble : Lizards of the Genus Ameiva In: Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard College. Vol. 59, No. 6, 1915, ISSN 0027-4100 , pp. 453-455, digitized .
- Albert Schwartz , Robert W. Henderson: Amphibians and reptiles of the West Indies. Descriptions, distributions, and natural history. University of Florida Press, Gainesville FL 1991, ISBN 0-8130-1049-7 .