BREVIORA Mmseiiiinii of Coeipsirative Zoology Cambridge, Mass. March 10, 19G4 Number 199 A NEW SUBSPECIES OF VARANL\S EXANTIIEiMATICU^ (SAURIA, VARANIDAE) Bv R. F. Laurent Dr. Williams asked me recently to study a small series of voimq: Savanna Monitors collected bv C. J. P. lonides in south-eastern Tanganyika, where many novelties have already been discovered. He had been impressed by their striking color pat-tern which is quite ditit'erent from the pattern exhil)it('d ])y other juveniles of the same species. In this, he was quite right. However, the morphological fea-tures selected by Mertens (1942) as characteristic of the recog-nized species and races of the genus Varanus did not suggest that the six critical juvenile specimens belonged to an undescribed form. In squamation tbey agreed perfectly "well with Voranus {Empayusia) crantluinaticus microstictKs Boettger. Neverthe-less, I believe that it is a serious mistake to ignore coloration when this character has the same degree of constancy as is generally considered significant for morphological characters. The difficulty here .seems to be that the diagnostic juvenile pat-terns gradually fade during the life of the monitors so that the adults are far more similar, uniform and dull, than are the juveniles. As a result, the number of specimens available for comparison is greatly reduced, the adults not being distinguish-able. When I compared the lonides specimens with other juveniles of Varanus e.ranthcDiaticus, I came to the conclusion that the sul)species recognized by Mertens are themselves geographically varialjle as far as their juvenile color pattern is concerned. The six juveniles from southeastern Tanganyika are alike, but obviously different from two specimens from Kenya ; like-wise, among the so-called southern alhigularis, two juveniles from Zulidand have a striped jiattern quite different from the
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