The world’s foremost reptile expert Ray Hoser has discovered and formally named another 13 new species of lizard in a series of peer reviewed scientific papers published earlier this week.

The most recent issue of Australasian Journal of Herpetology (AJH), (issue 39) published on 12 June 2019 contained scientific papers in which Hoser formally named 11 species of Australian dragon lizard in the genus Tympanocryptis, another in the genus Chelosonia and a gecko in the greater Hemidactylus group from south-east Asia. Hoser also named a spectacular large species of frog from north-east Victoria. That species is already vulnerable to extinction.
Besides naming new species, Hoser resurrected from synonymy, previously named species that had been long forgotten by other scientists.
Hoser notes that although many of these species are small and innocuous, they still merit conservation attention because of ongoing threatening processes.
The Snake Man Raymond Hoser has been a leader in science and conservation of wildlife for over 50 years.
He is known to pretty much everyone in the wildlife space as the leader in the fight to save rare and threatened species.
For decades he has been making important scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that have literally saved dozens of species from extinction.
In the 1980’s he was the first to mass breed snakes using methods that are now standard practice globally.
Hoser was also the first to mass breed snakes and lizards using artificial insemination using a method now used by zoos and private breeders across the planet.
Hoser was the first to dramatically improve the welfare of venomous snakes in captivity by developing a pain free way to surgically remove venom glands from snakes, thereby removing risk of venomous bite to handler and the need to attack them daily with sticks and tongs for wildlife shows.
Hoser has also appeared on countless TV wildlife documentaries, worked behind the scenes in many more, authored nine major books, contributed to dozens of others, authored hundreds of major peer reviewed scientific papers, collaborated with other scientists in countless scientific projects, publications and the like, got countless major awards, prizes and the like for his works, including an award two years running from the International Herpetological Society in the UK for best scientific paper published the previous year, and was also the first person on the planet to successfully develop dog snake avoidance training to protect people's canine pets from venomous snakebite.
But where the snakeman has become best known in recent decades is for his stellar work in discovering and cataloguing new species of reptile from across the planet.
Over decades, he has discovered and formally named hundreds of species of snake and lizard from all parts of the globe, as well as a smattering of species such as Alligator Snapping turtles in the USA, other Turtles from Australia, frogs, crocodiles, spiders and even a possum from Victoria, Australia.
In fact the Snakeman Raymond Hoser is often described as a taxonomist superhero in view of the sheer volume of species he has managed to discover and name, each of which has to be identified by way of extensive publication and formal diagnosis.
Of course no species can be conserved by people if it is unknown to science and this is exactly why Hoser has been so keen to catalogue the planet’s threatened biodiversity.
While how many species a person has discovered and named is not the only measure of the work done by a zoologist, it is one way to do so and is widely used. On that measure, Hoser easily outdoes all others in the reptile space. In fact no one born in the last 150 years has discovered and named as many species as Snakeman Raymond Hoser.
Hoser's total of named species, numbering in the hundreds is not likely to ever be reached by another scientist again, although there remain some thousands of unnamed species still to be discovered and formally named.
According to official databases such as "Zoobank" Hoser has named over 1,200 separate biological entities.
For those wondering why Hoser has become famous for naming new species, it is simple really. The names of Hoser, as regulated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature of the species appear in all relevant books and scientific paper and next to each scientific name is published the name of the discoverer, called name authority, and the year in which they published it. So in most books reptile, the name Hoser appears throughout!
Back in the 1800’s it was easy for scientists to discover and name new species as the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus devised the current system of nomenclature in the late 1700’s. So back then everything was fair game to be scientifically "discovered" and named for the first time. Since about 1900, all the easy to discover vertebrates had been named and it really did take a lot of work to go into the wilds to find and name new species.
Issue 39 of Australasian Journal of Herpetology (AJH) was scheduled to be published at the same time as Issue 38, in which a large number of other newly discovered species of lizard were to be formally named.
Over a dozen of these are also mainly from the Asia / Pacific region as well and in the main are species which have been overlooked by their deceptive similarity to other already known kinds.
However it was delayed by formal peer review, which is done for all papers in the journal before it can be published. The main paper was further disrupted by the unexpected naming of one of the candidate species by another herpetologist, meaning it had to be removed from the in press paper and it had to be further re-worked as a result. It is not allowed under International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to rename a species previously named by someone else, even if it appears that the other person may have chosen to "scoop" the later author.
The relevant paper is now likely to appear in issue 40 also due out in mid 2019.
New species formally named in all issues of AJH are supported by significant morphological and genetic differences.
In the case of the latter in AJH Issue 39, DNA evidence suggests that most newly identified species diverged from their nearest relatives by between 4 and 5 million years before present, and in all cases at least 2 MYA.
Hoser also notes his new discoveries highlight the still as yet, massively under estimated biological diversity of Australia, including in the most heavily populated south-east.
In AJH issue 39, Hoser warns that rampant over-development and pest species will almost certainly eliminate species before scientists get to identify or catalogue them. A separate paper also shows that so-called scientists have caused and continue to cause extinctions of species by pretending that they do not exist. In Victoria alone, one species (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla), is probably already extinct because of this and a second species, Rankinia jameswhybrowi is now at the same extinction risk.