Oligodon sp.

Grismer, L. Lee, Neang, Thy, Chav, Thou, Wood, Perry L., Jr & Oaks, Jamie R., 2008, Additional Amphibians And Reptiles From The Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary In Northwestern Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia, With Comments On Their Taxonomy And The Discovery Of Three New Species, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 56 (1), pp. 161-175 : 172

Oligodon sp.

( Fig. 19)

Material examined. – LSUHC 7883 : Che Teal Chrum, 8 Aug.2006 .

Remarks. – Due to a peculiar misplacement of type material, Günther (1861) described and redescribed ( Günther, 1864) two different species of Oligodon from separate collections under the name Simotes taeniatus . Malcom Smith brought this to the attention of George Boulenger who rectified the situation with the description of the subspecies S. t. mouhoti (Boulenger, 1914) based on Günther’s (1864) material and some additional specimens. Smith (1943), however, considered S. t. mouhoti a junior synonym of S. taeniatus (now Oligodon taeniatus ), which was followed by Taylor (1965). In fact, Taylor (1965) conflated the putatively diagnostic characters of these taxa in his key, diagnosis, and description of O. taeniatus .

We obtained a female (SVL 310 mm) from Che Teal Chrum that had a mixture of the diagnostic characters of Oligodon taeniatus and O. mouhoti (as diagnosed in part by Campden- Main, 1969; Günther, 1864; Smith, 1943; and Taylor, 1965), as well as some unique features. Like O. taeniatus , it lacks a large black, dorsal band at the base and tip of the tail as seen in O. mouhoti (see Cox et al., 1998:60). It has a head pattern and dorsal stripes similar to that of O. taeniatus in that the cream-colored vertebral stripe encompasses the vertebral scale row and is bordered by irregular, dark, paravertebral stripes although the dark lateral stripes are more faint like that in O. mouhoti . It has 17 dorsal scale rows at midbody like that of O. mouhoti whereas O. taeniatus has 19. This specimen represents a new species currently being described (Patrick David, in press).