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PROCEEDINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
Series 4, Volume 64, No. 8 
More than any other country in Africa, Libya is dominated by the Sahara Desert, which occu¬ 
pies more than 90% of its land area. The harsh conditions of the desert exclude many taxa and the 
large sand seas, in particular, are not only depauperate, but also exhibit especially low levels of 
endemism, as the relatively homogeneous substrate promotes genetic connectivity across the land¬ 
scape. The many rocky mountains and plateaus of the desert do provide opportunities for isolation 
and concomitant speciation, and this is seen in the Akakus Mountains in southwestern Libya, where 
the range-restricted Uromastyx alfredschmidti occurs (although it is a Central Saharan endemic, not 
a Libyan one). However, the modest elevations of Libyan landforms and the arid to hyperarid con¬ 
ditions surrounding them preclude the establishment of montane habitat islands that might support 
substantially greater or significantly different reptile faunas than the surrounding desert plains. For 
comparison, the highest point in the Ahaggar of neighboring Algeria is 2918 m, approximately 650 
m higher than Libya’s Bikku Bitti, itself part of the northern extension of the Tibesti Mountains, 
which rise almost 1200 m higher in Chad (Emi Koussi, 3445 m). 
Because of both difficulty of access and movement and its perceived low diversity, Libya has 
been a much less attractive destination for herpetologists than other areas of North Africa, a fate 
shared by Chad (e.g., Pellegrin 1936; Wake and Kluge 1961), and to a lesser extent, Niger (Roman 
1984; Trape and Mane 2015), to the south. In contrast, Libya’s neighbors on the Mediterranean 
have been the subject of much more dedicated herpetological study, both historically and recently, 
e.g., Egypt (Anderson 1898; Flower 1933; Marx 1968; Saleh 1997; Baha el Din 2006a), and 
Tunisia (Mosauer, 1934; Domergue 1953; Joger, 2003), not to mention Morocco, which continues 
to be the focal point of much research, both systematic and ecological (Bons 1959; Pasteur and 
Bons 1960; Bons and Geniez 1996). Even Algeria, which has also been plagued by periods of war 
and unrest since World War II, was the subject of much more extensive study, at least during the 
colonial period (Guichenot 1850; Pellegrin 1911, 1913, 1931, 1934; Angel and Lhote 1938). In 
contrast, although Libya has been included in general works on North Africa (e.g., Le Berre 1989; 
Schleich et al. 1996), and the small area of El-Kouf National Park has been well surveyed (Rese- 
tar 1981; Schleich 1987), it has never been the focus of herpetofaunal studies, and no “herpetology 
of Libya” has been published. Indeed, most of the published work on Libyan reptiles, including the 
two most comprehensive, nationwide publications (Zavattari 1934, 1937), consists of little more 
than briefly annotated lists of material collected. 
Cognizant of this lack of information, and taking advantage of an improvement in Libyan- 
American relationships, the senior author of this paper and David C. Blackburn, then of the Cali¬ 
fornia Academy of Sciences, applied for and received National Science Foundation funding for a 
project to explore the herpetofauna and other animal taxa of the oases of Libya and adjacent Egypt. 
However, just as work on this project commenced the events of the “Arab Spring” of 2011 over¬ 
took the region and precluded any field work in Libya. Although new material could not be col¬ 
lected, we continued with a museum-based program of study, examining critical collections of 
Libyan amphibians and reptiles and initiating an atlasing project on the basis of museum and liter¬ 
ature records in order to provide a baseline for herpetologists working in the region if and when 
political and security conditions are again conducive to field research. This reptile atlas will be fol¬ 
lowed by a similar product focusing on the frog fauna of Libya (Blackburn, in prep.). 
Physiography of Libya.— Libya has an area of 1,759,540 km 2 and lies in North Africa 
between approximately 19°30' and 33° North latitude and 9°30' and 25° East longitude. It borders 
the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt and Sudan to the east, Niger and Chad to the south and 
Algeria and Tunisia to the west (Fig. 1). It is traditionally divided into three major regions: Tripoli- 
tania in the northwest, Fezzan in the desert southwest, and Cyrenaica, occupying the eastern half 
of the country stretching from the Mediterranean to the Sudanese and Chadian borders. The major- 
