FIELDIANA ZOOLOGY Published by CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM Volume 31 FEBRUARY 20, 1947 No. 9 NOTES ON AMPHIBIANS AND REPTILES OF MICHOACAN, MEXICO KARL P. SCHMIDT CHIEF CURATOR, DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY AND FREDERICK A. SHANNON UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS During the summers of 1938 to 1941, inclusive, Mr. Harry Hoogstraal, while a graduate student at the University of Illinois, led successive biological expeditions into Mexico, with the object of making general collections of plants and animals for study, and with the special purpose of studying the distribution of animal life in the different biotic provinces of Mexico. Through the kind assistance of Professor B. V. Hall, of the University of Illinois, Department of Zoology, the junior author was included as herpe-tologist in the expeditions of 1940 and 1941. In these years the considerable field party made its base at Tancitaro, a village on the north side of the Cerro de Tancitaro in Michoacan. This mountain is a somewhat isolated but massive outlier of the Mexican plateau, connected with it by ridges descend-ing to an altitude of about five thousand feet. On the south, Mount Tancitaro slopes directly to the hot and arid valley of the Rio Tepalcatepec, an affluent of the Rio Balsas. Mr. Hoogstraal's choice of this area for study had the obvious merit of making possible a description of the altitudinal zones ranging from the valley floor at 1,000 feet to the peak of Mount Tancitaro at nearly 12,000 feet. Such zonal studies of plant and animal life have been elaborately developed in the western United States, especially by Joseph Grinnell and his students, and for certain groups and limited regions in the American tropics by Frank M. Chapman and others. The radical differences discernible between the "life zones" of the tropical Andes and those of the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada of California suggest that important results may be obtained from ecological stud-ies in Mexico and Central America. Such studies, in mountain regions, No. 589 63 THE LIBRARY OF THE MAR 2 4 1947 Natuf ,, H , stery surrey ,,,,rnCITV f\f tlllNOIS
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