Herpetofauna of the eastern African forests - Biogeography and Ecology of the Rain Forests of Eastern Africa - page 174

diversity and endemism the herpetofauna of the
other Easten Arc forests is exremely rich, yet it
is only within the last five years that we have
gained a further appreciation of this from studies
in the Uzungwa and other mountain forests, and
are now in a posiion to reassess Loveridge's
earlier work.
I wish, however, to emphasise that there are
vast areas of forest in Tanzania unvisited by biol-
ogists, and range extensions and species new to
science have recently been found even in those
areas collected by Loveridge, so it is clear that we
have a long way to go before our understanding
extends to all of the forest amphibians and repiles
of eastern Africa.
The study of the evolutionary relaionships in
amphibians and repiles has changed greatly from
the days of simply naming new taxa, and whenever
possible I have tried to incorporate studies of
ecology and physiology when these are of com-
paraive interest or significance to eastern Africa.
For practical reasons many of the available
modern techniques of faunal analysis have not yet
been used in easten Arican forests, and the
application of improvements in both laboratory
and field techniques will sill depend on inter-
ested individuals willing to live and work inside
the forest. It is my hope that the informaion
presented here will encourage both field workers
and those with a more experimental approach to
study the fascinaing herpetofauna of the easten
forests of Africa and that the renewed interest in
these forests will simulate the consevaion of
their unique flora and fauna.

Tanzania and elsewhere in eastern Africa. Uth-
moller considered repiles of mountain forests,
but his studies focused on the northen volcanic
mountains of Tanzania (Uthmoller, 1937, 1941a,
b, 1942). Loveridge (1957) produced a regional
checklist in which he summarised taxonomic and
distribuional indings.
Despite the establishment of a strong taxo-
nomic foundation and the popularisation of his
expeditions (Loveridge, 1932b, 194 7, l 953a,
1956), few workers followed Loveridge's exam-
ples of fieldwork and taxonomic studies. Some of
the species endemic to easten Africa are sill
known only from a single type specimen or from
the type series. With the exception of the work by
Schiotz (1975) on treefrogs, no comprehensive
study has been published on any group of
amphibians of the eastern forests since that of
Loveridge. The situation regarding reptiles is
similar. Spawls (1978) provided a distributional
list for snakes in Kenya which includes some for-
est localiies and Rasmussen (1981) and
Wederkinch (1982) records of snakes and·lizards
from the Usambara mountains. In a series of
taxonomic revisions dealing mainly with southern
African forms, Broadley (1966, 1968, 1971, 1980)
also included relevant eastern African species.
Brygoo & Roux-Esteve (1981) revised the forest-
dwelling fossorial skinks of the genus Melanoseps.
Except for these studies, very little recent infor-
maion eists in summary form on the forest
repiles of eastern Africa. Thus, at a ime when
herpetological communiies in forested areas in
West Africa, Central America, Asia and
elsewhere are undergoing intensive, detailed eco-
logical invesigation (see Toft, 1985 for review),
those of the forests of eastern Africa are sill
largely undocumented and unstudied.
Anyone attemping to examine the distribuions
of amphibians and repiles in easten Africa
immediately faces problems regarding both the
collecion and the idenificaion of individual
specimens and the localiies where the material of
others was collected. Even as expert a collector as
the resourceful Arthur Loveridge found it was not
an easy matter to collect long series of crypic,
forest-dwelling amphibians and repiles and the
vagaries of the weather seem often to work against

Previous sudies
Early explorers, travellers and biologists collected
amphibians and reptiles from widely scattered
localities in eastern Africa. While many early
workers specialised in the descripion of new taxa,
Barbour & Loveridge (1928) first monographed
the results of intensive collecing and called atten-
ion to the high levels of endemism in the Usam-
bara and Uluguru mountains in Tanzania.
Loveridge (1932a, 1933, 1935, 1937, 1942a, b)
later extended this work, providing basic taxo-
nomic and zoogeographic studies for both