BAUER, DEBOER, & TAYLOR: ATLAS OF THE REPTILES OF LIBYA 
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naican vertebrates collected by Francesco Testi (1922), Enrica Calabresi on the amphibians and 
reptiles collected in Cyrenaica by E. Festa (1923) and Giorgio Umani on the reptiles, and particu¬ 
larly snakes (1922, 1923) of Benghazi and other areas. Decio Vinciguerra published on the Italian 
Geographic Society expeditions to Giarabub (now Jaghbub) near the Egyptian border (Vinciguer¬ 
ra 1927; Gestro and Vinciguerra 1931) and to the Oasis of Cufra (Kufrah) in the far southeast of 
Cyrenaica (Vinciguerra 1931). Zavattari continued with substantial works on the fauna of Cyre¬ 
naica (1929, 1930), and Libya as a whole (1934, 1937). Giuseppe Scortecci, whose faunal works 
spanned all of Italian Africa was the last substantive contributor to Libyan herpetology during the 
colonial period, publishing chiefly on the desert herpetofauna of the province of Fezzan and the 
Oasis of Ghat (Scortecci 1934a,b, 1935a,b,c, 1937a,b, 1946) and the Tibesti region straddling the 
Libyan/Chadian frontier (Scortecci 1940, 1943), as well as on snakes of Libya more generally 
(Scortecci 1938, 1939) based on his own field collections as well as those of others. 
Field activity up to World War II resulted in the accumulation of substantial collections in 
European museums, most notably Berlin (which, in addition to material from Rohlfs and Ruhmer, 
obtained a large collection made by Louis Egmont Borowski, who served in the Ottoman army, 
lived for many years in Tripoli, and was eventually shot as a spy there; his collections have never 
been studied), Vienna (Klaptocz), and especially Italian institutions. In particular, the collections in 
Genoa, Turin, Florence and especially Milan, where Scortecci was based, received the majority of 
specimens. Most of these collections remain largely intact, although at least some Libyan materi¬ 
al, including apparently the type of Philochortus zolii, were destroyed when the Museo Civico di 
Storia Naturale in Milan was bombed in 1943 (Parisi 1944). 
Another institution of relevance was The Libyan Museum of Natural History (Museo Libico 
di Storia Naturale) established in Tripoli 1936 (Massed 2010, 2013; Latella 2013). The collection 
did include reptiles, but to our knowledge, no inventory of its collections exists and we could find 
no published references to herpetological material from this collection. The museum survived 
beyond the end of Italian rule and in the 21 st century existed as the Assaray Al-hamra Museums, 
housed in the castle of Tripoli (Masseti 2010). The museum had been in decline prior to the events 
of 2011, with only a fraction of the ornithological specimens of the pre-World War II period sur¬ 
viving (Masseti 2013). Some material was exchanged or donated to collections in Italy and sur¬ 
vives today. However, the fate of herpetological collections in Libya remains unknown. In this atlas 
we cite only a small number of specimens in other Libyan collections that have been reported on 
in the literature, none of them from the Assaray Al-hamra Museums. 
Following the defeat of Italy in North Africa in World War II, Britain administered the 
provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and France that of Fezzan until 1951, when the United 
Kingdom of Libya declared its independence under King Idris, who remained in power until the 
1969 coup staged by Muammar Gaddhafi, who remained in power of a totalitarian state until the 
“Arab Spring” and its aftermath in 2011. The political situation in the country has not since 
returned to stability and in 2014 a second civil war erupted. Not surprisingly, given the inhospitable 
political climate, relatively little herpetological work was conducted in Libya for much of the peri¬ 
od from the outbreak of the Second World War to the present. A notable exception was the work of 
Hans Schnurrenberger, who studied snakes in northwestern Cyrenaica and eastern Fezzan from 
1956 to 1961 and published a series of shorter papers, both alone (Schnurrenberger 1958a,b, 1959, 
1962, 1963) and with collaborator Eugen Kramer (Kramer and Schnurrenberger 1958,1959,1960), 
culminating in their monograph “Systematik, Verbreitung und Okologie der Lbyschen Schlangen” 
(Kramer and Schnurrenberger 1963), which remains the most comprehensive work to date on 
Libyian snakes. Much subsequent work was centered on Kouf (now El-Kouf) National Park in the 
Jabal al Akhdar area (Resetar 1981; Schleich 1987). 
