History of Discovery of the New Zealand Lizard Fauna

Abstract

Knowledge of the New Zealand lizards began with the arrival of the Māori in the thirteenth century, who largely applied their ancestral Polynesian names and attitudes to lizards. These relied heavily on mythology and folklore. The first European discoverers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries noted the presence of lizards without providing any further detail, and it was not until the 1820s that the first specimens were collected and the 1830s when these were formally named. The 1840s saw three scientific expeditions visiting the country: the French aboard the Astrolabe and Zelée (1840), the United States Exploring Expedition (1840) and the English Antarctic Expedition aboard the Erebus and Terror (1841). Together with the first major wave of settlement by the New Zealand Company, and by the French at Akaroa, significant herpetological collections began to arrive in museums in Europe and America, and many of the common New Zealand lizards were described, particularly by John Gray at the British Museum, Constant Duméril and Gabriel Bibron at the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, and Charles Girard in Washington. This era ended in the 1860s with the Austrian Novara Expedition and a late flurry of descriptions by others. The formation of the New Zealand Institute in the late 1860s provided the opportunity for local naturalists to describe the fauna they collected, and Walter Buller, Frederick Hutton and William Colenso, in particular, began to describe new species. By the 1880s, when George Boulenger at the British Museum published his syntheses of the world’s herpetofauna, a basic framework of local lizard diversity had emerged. After half a century during which little taxonomic work was done, a monograph of the local lizard fauna by Charles McCann provided the next platform for research and was followed by the burgeoning of field-based ecological studies. New revisions of the skink fauna began in the 1970s, with contributions by Joan Robb, Brian Gill, Graeme Hardy and Geoff Patterson, and emphasised the application of modern genetic techniques to field-based studies of different morphotypes, gradually refining previous concepts. Recent taxonomic study of the gecko fauna has progressed at a slower rate, with many species still to be formally described.