1 



INTRODUCTION 



Sixty-four years after its publication, Robert H. McCauley, Jr.'s 77?^ Reptiles of Maryland and 

 the District of Columbia remains the only work of great importance in Maryland herpetology. This 

 book, published by the author in 1945, was based on his Ph.D. thesis completed in 1940 at Cornell 

 University. Although McCauley's thesis bears a curiously modest and misleading title, A 

 Distributional Study of the Reptiles of Maryland and the District of Columbia, the thesis is in fact a 

 thorough, 394-page treatment of the biology of the state's 42 species of turtles, lizards and snakes. It 

 differs in only one significant aspect from the published version: this difference is the omission, in 

 the book, of the locality lists for ten species: Chelydra serpentina, Sternotherus odoratus, 

 Chrysemys picta, Terrapene Carolina, Coluber constrictor, Elaphe obsoleta (current name 

 unsettled), Heterodon contortrix (= platirhinos). Matrix (= Nerodia) sipedon, Storeria dekayi and 

 Thamnophis sirtalis. Of the two reviews of McCauley's book that I am aware of (Mansueti 1945; 

 Conant 1946), Mansueti only alludes to this deficiency and Conant makes no mention of it (while 

 making a baseless charge that the book "has a tendency toward verbosity"). McCauley himself gave 

 no specific reason for his decision, except to suggest in the individual accounts that these ten 

 species were widely distributed and thus, one presumes, in little need of documentation. However, 

 for two species, S. odoratus and S. dekayi, he had relatively few records, including large sections of 

 the state with no documentation. McCauley had somewhat better coverage for H. contortrix (= 

 platirhinos); nonetheless, he provided locality lists for other species with roughly the same 

 distribution and number of records. The remaining seven species are indeed widespread in the state; 

 even so, for the sake of completeness McCauley should have listed them. 



At the time McCauley was preparing his thesis, the serious study of herpetology in Maryland 

 was nascent and systematic resources were few. Only the National Museum possessed a collection 

 of any consequence, and its collection was largely confined to the District of Columbia and the 

 adjacent suburbs of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. As such, McCauley felt compelled 

 to seek records wherever he could find them. Thus during the course of his field work, he examined 

 specimens in the collections of 17 high schools and trusted the reports of several residents he met. 

 Owing to the abundance of voucher specimens and records in permanent collections, a search of 

 secondary educational institutions is unlikely today. 



Of the 40 collections that McCauley (1940, 1945) cited (there are slight differences between the 

 two works), only nine are extant and eight of these were well established in McCauley's time: 

 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP), American Museum of Natural History 

 (AMNH), Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM), Cornell University (CU), Field Museum of 

 Natural History (FMNH), Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (MCZ), National 

 Museum of Natural History (USNM), and University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ). 

 The remaining collection, that of the Natural History Society of Maryland, was newly formed and 

 apparently uncataloged since McCauley cited no catalogue numbers. Among smaller collections 

 that are no longer in existence but whose specimens (at least some of them) survive, there were 

 seven. The collection of Elias Cohen was largely of living specimens when McCauley saw it (E. 

 Cohen, personal communication), and what was preserved likely went to the Natural History 



