The specimen was collected by Johannes Theodor Reinhardt, a Danish zoologist born in 1816 who visited Brazil on three occasions. Between 1845 and 1847, Reinhardt sailed aboard the corvette Galathea, a scientific expedition dispatched by the King of Denmark. After the Galathea docked in Rio de Janeiro in May 1847, Reinhardt left the expedition and traveled inland to Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, to meet his compatriot, the famed naturalist Peter Lund. On the way, he passed through Juiz de Fora, where museum records show he collected bird specimens on June 21, 1847. The museum entry for NHMD R4448 dates to February 6, 1849, meaning the worm lizard was almost certainly gathered during that same overland journey — a snapshot of Atlantic Forest life from a landscape that has since been transformed by nearly two centuries of urbanization.

The specimen’s identity has changed before. It was first catalogued as Amphisbaena vermicularis, a widespread species of Brazil’s open vegetation areas, until the renowned herpetologist Carl Gans reidentified it as A. prunicolor in his 1966 taxonomic review of the darwinii group. Gans cited another Minas Gerais specimen as A. prunicolor too, from São Cyprião, housed at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. But that record never quite fit. A. prunicolor is primarily found in southern Brazil, the southeastern edge of Paraguay, and Misiones, Argentina — far from the Minas Gerais highlands. A recent reanalysis of the Harvard specimen revealed it is actually A. metallurga, a species described only in 2015, with its collection locality corrected to the area of the current municipality of Alvorada de Minas. The Juiz de Fora specimen, however, remained unexamined until now.

Worm lizards of the genus Amphisbaena are among the most specialized reptiles on Earth. Fully adapted to a subterranean existence, they spend their lives tunneling through soil, their bodies reduced to ring-like segments called annuli, their eyes vestigial, and their limbs absent. This extreme specialization comes at a cost: their morphology is highly conserved, meaning closely related species can be nearly indistinguishable from one another. Some pairs, such as A. miringoera and A. mitchelli, are very similar, while others, like A. anaemariae and A. mebengokre, are practically indistinguishable. Even the European worm lizards Blanus cinereus and B. vandellii pose similar identification challenges. For NHMD R4448, the diagnosis therefore rested on a careful count of annuli, segments, and scales — the technical language of amphisbaenian taxonomy.

The specimen presents 183 body annuli, three lateral annuli, and 20 tail annuli, with autotomy on the eighth tail annulus — a breakage plane that allows the animal to shed its tail when seized by a predator. At mid-body, it has 12 dorsal and 16 ventral segments per annulus, three supralabials, three infralabials, one post-ocular, one temporal, a row of two post-genials, and a row of six post-malars. Four sequentially arranged pre-cloacal pores, six pre-cloacal scales, and 13 post-cloacal scales complete the picture. The animal measures 113 millimeters in snout-vent length with a 16 millimeter tail. These characteristics quickly separate the specimen from all Amphisbaena species except A. hogei and A. prunicolor, while aligning closely with A. metallurga — but the numbers ultimately point to A. hogei.

The case against A. metallurga is straightforward. Although about 10 percent of known A. metallurga specimens have four pre-cloacal pores, most have two, and the modal number of ventral segments is 14. The presence of 183 body annuli and 20 tail annuli would set a new lower limit for the species, whose known range is 185 to 199 body annuli and 23 to 25 tail annuli. Moreover, A. metallurga is known from mountainous areas at the eastern limit of the Atlantic Forest, in contact with the Cerrado, roughly 240 kilometers north of Juiz de Fora. The case against A. prunicolor is subtler. The two species are mainly distinguished by tail annuli counts — 18 to 27 in A. prunicolor and 15 to 19 in A. hogei — though one A. hogei specimen from Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, has 20 tail annuli, matching NHMD R4448. Analysis of raw data from 72 A. prunicolor specimens with intact tails shows that 51 have 21 or more tail annuli, mainly 22.

Size offers another overlooked clue. Adult A. prunicolor individuals average 178 millimeters in snout-vent length, with a range of 141 to 238 millimeters across a sample of 110 adults, while the largest known A. hogei specimen measures 176 millimeters. NHMD R4448, at 113 millimeters, could theoretically be a young A. prunicolor, but its geographic position aligns far better with A. hogei. Coloration, typically decisive, is unavailable in this old specimen — A. prunicolor tends toward brown-purple tones that can fade in very old animals, while A. hogei is typically light brown dorsally. Without coloration, morphological differentiation between the two species becomes genuinely challenging, which is precisely why the specimen sat misidentified for so long.

With the reidentification confirmed, the known distribution of A. hogei now stretches from Joinville in Santa Catarina in the south, to Itapeva in São Paulo in the west, Maricá in Rio de Janeiro in the east, and Juiz de Fora in the north. The species is essentially an Atlantic Forest endemic, inhabiting mainly the Serra do Mar coastal forests ecoregion, but also recorded in Alto Paraná Atlantic forests and its ecotone with the Cerrado and Araucaria moist forests. The Juiz de Fora record is the first in the Bahia interior forests ecoregion, an area with a more seasonal climate and semideciduous forests. The author also examined a specimen from Restinga de Grumari in Rio de Janeiro — the holotype of the unavailable name Amphisbaena carioca — and concluded it too belongs to A. hogei, noting that irregularities in the parietal region are common in some amphisbaenian species and that the desiccated state of the specimen may have exaggerated apparent differences in tail compression.

Despite its relatively wide distribution, most records of A. hogei are based on specimens collected more than half a century ago. The species may have disappeared from some localities, such as the city of São Paulo, due to urbanization — a sobering reminder that even common-seeming reptiles can vanish from transformed landscapes. Because of its small size and difficult diagnosis, more specimens in major zoological collections could be misidentified, highlighting the importance of broad analyses of museum material. The reidentification of NHMD R4448 shows that the answers to pressing conservation questions sometimes lie not in the field, but in the careful reexamination of specimens collected generations ago — a quiet triumph of museum science in the age of molecular biology.

Subject of Research: Herpetology and museum taxonomy

Article Title: Reidentification of a 19 th century specimen reveals the first record of Amphisbaena hogei Vanzolini, 1950 ( Squamata , Amphisbaenidae ) in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Article References: Costa, H. C. (2024). Reidentification of a 19th century specimen reveals the first record of Amphisbaena hogei Vanzolini, 1950 (Squamata, Amphisbaenidae) in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Evolutionary Systematics, 8(2), 273-278. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.8.129984

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/evolsyst.8.129984

Keywords: Amphisbaena hogei, worm lizard, Minas Gerais, Atlantic Forest, museum specimen, Reinhardt, taxonomy, reidentification, Brazil, conservation, herpetology, Evolutionary Systematics