PROC. BIOL. SOC. WASH. 102(3), 1989, pp. 559-567 A NEW LIZARD OF THE GENUS LEPIDODACTYLUS (REPTILIA: GEKKONIDAE) FROM BATAN ISLAND, PHILIPPINES Hidetoshi Ota and Ronald I. Crombie Abstract. —A new species of Lepidodactylus, L. balioburius, is described from Batan Island in the northernmost archipelago of the Philippines. It is most closely related to the recently described L. yami from Lanyu Island, Taiwan. Morphological variation in both species is analyzed. The herpetofauna of mountainous north-ern Luzon and the island groups stretching north toward Taiwan remains poorly known, despite intensive field work in other parts of the Philippines during the past 20-30 years. The Batan Island group, the north-ernmost archipelago in the Philippines, is of considerable zoogeographic interest since it is located almost midway between the Philippines and Taiwan (220 km north of Luzon and 200 km south of Lanyu Island, see Fig. 1). A few specimens from Batan reported in the literature perished when the Bureau of Science collection in Manila was destroyed during World War II. During May and June 1985, a multidisciplinary team of biologists, coordinated by Angel C. Alcala (Silliman University) and Charles A. Ross (Smithsonian Institution), collected on sev-eral islands in the Batan Group. Their col-lections contained a small series of a dis-tinctive new species of Lepidodactylus, a genus unreported from the extreme north-ern Philippines. The new species is super-ficially similar to the recently described L. yami from Lanyu Island, Taiwan (Ota 1987). Materials and Methods Data were taken from the series of Lep-idodactylus from Batan Island (n = 14) and all other Philippine/Taiwanese species of the genus (see Specimens Examined). Addition-al information was taken from Brown & Alcala (1978). Nine meristic and 21 mor-phometric characters were used for com-parisons. The meristic characters are the number of: upper labials (UL), lower labials (LL), internasal scales (INS), interorbital scales (IOS), midbody scale rows (MSR), enlarged preanal and femoral scales (PFS), preanal and femoral pores in males (PFP), toe I scansors (TIS), toe IV scansors (TIVS). The mensural characters are: snout to vent length (SVL), head length (HL), head width (HW), head depth (HD), snout to eye length (SEL), eye diameter (ED), eye to ear length (EEL), internasal distance (IND), interor-bital distance (IOD), snout to arm length (SAL), axilla to groin length (AGL), body width (BW), body depth (BD), thigh length (THL), tibia length (TBL), toe I length (TIL), toe IV length (TIVL), toe IV width (TIVW), the length of scansor series beneath toe IV (SL), tail width (TW), and tail depth (TD). All morphometric characters were mea-sured to the nearest 0. 1 mm with dial cal-ipers. Meristics were compared using Wil-coxon's 2-sample test and morphometric characters were examined by principal com-ponent analysis, using the PRICOMP pro-cedure of SAS (1985) with correlation ma-
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