'¥.6675 Vol. 73, pp. 67-82 10 August I960 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON VARIATION IN THE CUBAN LIZARD LEIOCEPHALUS RAVICEPS COPE By Albert Schwartz Department of Biology, Albright College, Reading, Pa. Of the five species of the genus Leioeephalus inhabiting Cuba, the least known is Leioeephalus ravieeps Cope. De-scribed by Cope in 1862 on the basis of specimens collected by the botanist Charles Wright in "eastern Cuba," L. ravieeps was unknown to Gundlach except from the original description (Gundlach, 1875:354; 1880:34). Barbour (1914:301) followed Boulenger in regarding L. ravieeps as a synonym of L. vittatus (= L. cuhensis), but later he and Ramsden (1919:173) fol-lowed Stejneger (1917:53) in affirming the distinctness of the species, although they were not certain that it was Cuban. These two authors assumed that Wright's types came most probably from the Sierra de Yateras ( probably owing to Gund-lach's (1880) comment), but Ramsden was unable to find the lizard in that immediate area. This is not surprising, when it is known that L. ravieeps is an inhabitant of the most xeric areas in Cuba, and is not known to occur in mesic areas or forest. Cochran (1934:39) apparently was the first to report L. ravieeps from a definite locality in Cuba; she cited specimens from four localities in the vicinity of Guantanamo Bay in Ori-ente, and erroneously (see Schwartz, 1959:110-11) from the Doce Leguas keys off Camaguey Province. Alayo (1951:109; L955:16) reported the species from La Socapa, on the* west side of the Bahia de Santiago, and from Laguna de Baconao on the coast road between Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo. Thus, /.. ravieeps is now known from the region of the Bahia de Santiago east to the Bahia de Guantanamo; the onl) record of the species to the west of the Bahia de Santiago is Alayo's specimen From La Socapa, whereas the only record From east 12 — Prcx . Biol. So< . w ish.. Vol. 73. I960 I 87 I ^H*^ ^ 9 ■NSTmmoN AUG lo i960 i ■
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