Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 82: 329-332, 2011
Reseña
The final volume in an epic series on reptilian biology
C. Gans and K. Adler (eds.). 2010.
Biology of the Reptilia. Vol. 22 Comprehensive Literature of the Reptilia, compiled
by E. A. Liner. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, Contributions to
Herpetology No. 25. Ithaca, New York: 1366 pp.
Copies of the book may be purchased at www.ssarbooks.com or www.ssarherps.org.
Questions can be addressed to info@ssarbooks.com.
Oscar Flores Villela
Museo de Zoología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado postal 70-399, 04510 México, D.F., México.
University of Texas, Arlington, USA.
Correspondent: ofv@hp.fcienicas.unam.mx
With volume 22 of the scholarly series “Biology of
the Reptilia,” created and edited by the late Carl Gans,
this classic comes to an end after 42 years. I think it is
worthwhile to give a short overview of Carl Gans’s life
before reviewing this last volume of his monumental opus.
Gans died in November 2009, just months before this
volume was published.
Carl Gans was born on September 7, 1923 in Hamburg,
Germany. As a teenager he immigrated to the United
States. He attended high school in New York and then
earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering
from New York University in 1944. That same year he
joined the U.S. Army and served in the Philippines and
Japan until 1946. While working during the day for
Babcock and Wilcox Co. installing power boilers, he got
a Master’s Degree, also in Mechanical Engineering, from
Columbia University in 1950. Later he earned a Doctoral
Degree in Biology from Harvard in 1957, first working
under A. S. Romer and finishing with Ernest Williams. He
was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Fund from 1953 to 1955 studying reptiles in Brazil.
Carl Gans was Professor of Biology at the University of
Buffalo, from 1958 to 1971. He then became Professor
of Zoology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor
until he retired in 1998. He moved to Austin, Texas and
was Adjunct Professor in the University of Texas at Austin
until his death after a long illness, on November 30, 2009.
His library, about 20 000 titles, and correspondence has
been deposited at Ben Gurion University in Israel.
Recibido: 15 abril 2010; aceptado: 10 agosto 2010
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Carl Gans served the scientific community as
president of many societies including the American
Society of Zoologists, American Society of Ichthyologists
and Herpetologists, and the Society for the Study of
Amphibians and Reptiles. He was the editor of the Journal
of Morphology for 25 years. He served as chairman of the
Biology Department in the University of Buffalo and then
was chairman of the Zoology Department at the University
of Michigan, for many years. Many of the specimens Carl
Gans collected over years of field work are deposited at
several academic institutions, among them the Carnegie
Museum, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard,
California Academy of Sciences, and the Field Museum.
Among his many publications, over 700, there
is a variety of topics, from systematics to functional
morphology, evolution of vertebrates, breathing in frogs,
natural history, and many others; his publications appeared
in many prestigious journals, like Science, Nature,
Evolution, Ecology, Animal Behaviour, as well as the top
herpetological journals Copeia, Herpetologica, and the
Journal of Herpetology. One of his first books is entitled
“Biomechanics, An Approach to Vertebrate Morphology”
published in 1974. But Carl Gans’s major contribution
to biology and in particular herpetology, is the series,
“Biology of the Reptilia.” The publication of “Biology of
the Reptilia” extended for a period of 42 years, initiated
in 1969; in its pages scientists of different disciplines
and many countries wrote state-of-the-art syntheses
of different subjects from morphology, physiology,
neurology, ecology, and behavior. The series was never
intended to be taxonomic in focus, but in volume 2 there is
a chapter on taxonomic literature on reptiles by Carl Gans
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Flores Villela, O.- Reseña, Biology of the Reptilia. Vol. 22 Comprehensive Literature of the Reptilia
Figure 1. Carl Gans, photo courtesy of K. Adler.
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Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 82: 329-332, 2011
and Thomas Parsons, editors of that volume. The number
of authors and editors of the series is 169, from 21 different
countries, and from 5 continents. Many of the authors are
not necessarily known as herpetologists, but they are all
experts in their disciplines.
Volume 22 of this series has a Preface by Kraig Adler;
a Foreword by Harry Greene, followed by portraits of all
16 editors of the 22 volumes. An introduction by Ernest
Liner, who compiled the bibliography for this last volume,
precedes the body of the book. The main contents of this
volume presents, from pages 1 to 8 the reprinted table of
contents of all published volumes. The second section
lists in alphabetical order all contributors of the entire
series on pages 9 and 10. In the third section, which is the
largest in the book, Liner listed in alphabetical order 22
652 bibliographic references, from pages 11 to 1001. In
this part of the book the citation appears, after the citation
in parentheses the volume in which it was cited and first
page of the corresponding chapter where it was cited. The
fourth and last section of the book, from pages 1003 to
1366, contains a subject index for the entire 22-volume
series. For obvious reasons there is not an author index as
in all previous volumes.
It is convenient to point out a few points in relation
to this particular publication. Liner was confronted with
the fact that the format of bibliographic citation changed
throughout the publication of the entire series; this is
because it had 5 publishers, starting with Academic Press
in London, which published vols. 1 to 13; continuing
with John Wiley & Sons, publishers of vols. 14 and 15;
volume 16 was published by Alan R. Liss; the University
of Chicago Press published vols. 17 and 18, and finally the
Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR),
published the remaining four volumes including this last
one reviewed here. Liner presented all literature cited for
the entire series in this volume in uniform format. Another
important factor was that many original references were
inaccurate. Liner attempted to check every reference where
he suspected errors. In this respect Liner gets editors of
the previous volumes off the hook, by mentioning “Editors
simply cannot check all references to their source, ...
Some chapters in this series had over 1000 references.”
and making the purpose of this book more worthwhile.
In this respect it has been found that about 20% to 30%
of some bibliographic compilations have errors (Liner
and Hutchison, 1998). Some of the most common errors
are associated with the name of the author, the title of the
publication and the publication source. Regardless of who
compiles bibliographies all are prone to have errors in any
of these parts of a citation. For example, to find citations
to my papers in the citation index I have to check under
several combinations of my name Flores-Villela O; Flores
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O. Flores V.O.; Villela, O F.; certainly, some of these
variations are attributable to the authors who cited those
papers in the original publications but others are made by
the people at the ISI while capturing the references from
indexed journals. Liner spent 17 years working on this
project, compiling 22 652 references, which was a very
intense work; considering that the 17 771 citations that are
included in the 6 volumes of “Synopsis of the Herpetofauna
of Mexico” (Vol. IV does not contain a list of Mexican
literature) took Hobart and Rozella Smith a significant part
of their entire academic life.
Liner’s effort is not only prized for the compilation,
standardization, and correction of the literature, he also
made a big effort putting together the subject index for
the entire series. This last part of the book is an index
where each independent subject indexed for each volume
is condensed into a single index. This job must have taken
painful hours of meticulous work to merge the same key
word in different volumes, then similar words and terms
in to the appropriate one, and different variations of the
same theme in the proper order. For this part, each term is
followed by the volume and the page(s) where it is cited.
There are tens of thousands of words, technical terms, and
scientific names, as well as hundreds of thousands of page
references to them.
In brief this last volume of the “Biology of the
Reptilia” series would be an important addition to any
professional herpetologist’s library, if you have the entire
series. It is also of great value to reference librarians. Or
maybe the publication of this last volume will encourage
others, like me, to acquire the entire series; this volume
will also be useful for those that want to keep current with
the specialized literature, and can be used as an auxiliary
reference. I congratulate the editors and the compiler of
this “blockbuster” in herpetology.
The author acknowledges K. Adler for his
encouragement and revision of my English, R. Huey, H.
Greene, and S. Rogers for their help; and J. Campbell, for
the facilities I am enjoying while at the University of Texas
at Arlington.
Literature cited
Anonymous. In memoriam Carl Gans (1923-2009). The New York
Times, December 7, 2009.
Adler, K. 2010. Carl Gans (1923–2009) and the integrative biology of
reptiles. Russian Journal of Herpetology 17:78-80.
Greene, H. 2010. Foreword in Biology of the Reptilia: Carl Gans and
Biology of the Reptilia: a biographical appreciation. In Biology
of the Reptilias Vol. 22. SSAR, C. Gans and K. Adler (eds.).
Ithaca.1366 p.
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Flores Villela, O.- Reseña, Biology of the Reptilia. Vol. 22 Comprehensive Literature of the Reptilia
Liner, E. A. and V. H. Hutchison. 1998. Bibliographic accuracy:
importance in herpetological publications. Herpetological Review
29:71-74.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1971. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of
México. Vol.I. Analysis of the Literature on the Mexican Axolotl.
Eric Lundberg, Augusta, West Virginia. 245 p.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1973. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna
of México. Vol.II. Analysis of the Literature Exclusive of the
Mexican Axolotl. Eric Lundberg, Augusta, West Virginia. 367 p.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1976. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of
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México, Vol. III. Source Analysis and Index for Mexican Reptiles,
John Johnson, North Bennington, Vermont. 997 p.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1977. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna
of Mexico, Vol. V. Guide to Mexican Amphisbaenians and
Crocodilians. John Johnson, North Bennington, Vermont. 187 p.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1979. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of
México, Vol. VI. Guide to Mexican Turtles. John Johnson, North
Bennington, Vermont. 1044 p.
Smith, H. M. and R. B. Smith. 1993. Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of
México, Vol. VII. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. 1082 p.
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