164 
PROCEEDINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
Series 4, Volume 64, No. 8 
Figure 2. Map showing all 683 collecting localities recorded for Libyan reptiles in relation to the road system of the 
country. Although the roads appear to be numerous, many are small tracks through desert terrain. 
and a large number of online and hard copy gazetteers and many Libyan maps, including many 
available online, as well as an extremely useful paper by Torok (2012) which reproduced histori¬ 
cal maps of the Kufrah region. It was our experience that many earlier attempts at georeferencing 
(e.g., GBIF derived records and older published records) were unreliable, or highly imprecise. 
Thus, unless coordinates provided with the locality data were stated to be or could reasonably be 
assumed to be derived from GPS or detailed map coordinate data provided by the collector, we did 
not necessarily use coordinate data provided by museums (although these were retained in our mas¬ 
ter file). Likewise, older published coordinates were often unreliable because they were rounded to 
the nearest degree or quarter degree in some cases (e.g., the gazetteer provided by Kramer and 
Schnurrenberger 1963). 
Unfortunately many records, particularly those from the 19 th century, but also many well into 
