ZOOLOGICAL SERIES OF FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Volume XX CHICAGO, OCTOBER 31, 1936 No. 19 PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT OF CORAL SNAKES OF SOUTH AMERICA THE UBIW-V OF THE BY KARL P. SCHMIDT N'OV 1 6 1936 ASSISTANT CURATOR OP AMPHIBIANS AND REPTILES UNIVERSITY OF HJUMOK The difficulties attending a definitive revision of the genus Micrurus due to the dearth of material for study have been empha-sized in previous papers on this notable genus of snakes. Thanks to the opportunity to examine collections in European museums pre-sented by my tenure of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow-ship in 1932, and to the cordial cooperation of colleagues, I have been able to combine observations on specimens available in both Ameri-can and European museums. Further acknowledgment of aid received from friends and colleagues is deferred for a more extended publication. Some order now begins to appear in the chaos of synonyms, and it is possible to define some of the taxonomic problems and to arrange the valid forms in a preliminary way. When this is done, the list proves to be extraordinarily at variance with the treatment of the genus by Boulenger in the Catalogue of Snakes in 1896, and equally diver-gent from the opinions of Amaral as expressed in his Lista remissiva dos Ophidios da Regiao Neotropica in 1929. As a basis for further examination, and I hope for discussion, I offer a list of the South American forms which now seem valid, to supplement my previous account of the North American species (Schmidt, 1928 and 1933). A number of groups of allied forms may now be discerned within the genus; but a consistent phyletic subdivision of the group as a whole is as yet impossible. A purely artificial division of the species into those with the black rings in triads and those without that arrange-ment simplifies the review; but M. dumerilii, M. circinalis, and M. ecuadorianus clearly exhibit the development of this type of pattern from the simpler alternation of red, yellow, and black, and it is quite possible that the perfected triad type of pattern may have developed more than once. In the forms without triads the presence No. 373 189
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