Catalogue of herpetological specimens from peninsular India at the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology & Natural History (SACON), India

We list the herpetological voucher specimens in the holdings of the Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology & Natural History (SACON), a wildlife research institute in India. Most of the collections are the fruition of fieldwork by SACON’s herpetologist and a coauthor of this work—late Dr. Subramanian Bhupathy (1963–2014). Taxonomically, the collection represents 125 species, comprising 29 amphibian species belonging to eight families and 96 reptilian species belonging to 17 families. Geographically, the material in this collection originates from the Western Ghats, the Eastern Ghats, the Deccan Plateau, and the Coromandel Coast, comprehensively covering all ecoregions of peninsular India. A total of 15 taxa (three amphibians, 12 reptiles) remain to be fully identified and are provisionally referred to mostresembling taxa, with cf. prefix. All the specimens in this collection are non-types as on date.

Natural history collections are professional holdings of scientifically named and classified voucher specimens of organisms or their biological samples thereof, for research and public education purposes (Melber & Abraham 2002). Of late, their value as an enormous source of data on the diversity and distribution of plants and animals have been increasingly realized and acknowledged (Winker 2004). So much so that even species extirpation patterns and population declines can be traced and deduced from such collections (Shaffer et al. 1998;Lister 2011). Faunal catalogues from underresearched tropical countries have served as immense source of information on regional biodiversity (e.g., Mahony et al. 2009 for Bangladesh's herpetofauna).
In Indian herpetology, most of the historical information on species were based on specimens lodged in the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum London, UK) that were worked out by Boulenger (1882, 1885a,b, 1887, 1889, 1893, 1894, 1896) in a series of technical monographs. Two other important regional museums were the Indian Museum Calcutta (now Zoological Survey of India, ZSI, Kolkata) and the Bombay Natural History Society Museum (BNHS), Mumbai. The herpetological holdings of ZSI were worked out by Theobald (1876) and Sclater (1891Sclater ( , 1892, while that of the snakes of BNHS were enumerated by Phipson (1888).
Later, post-Independence, Satyamurti (1967) enlisted the amphibians of the Madras Government Museum, another old regional museum at Chennai, India (also see J TT Thurston 1888). Bauer (1998) published a catalogue of important South Asian herpetological specimens in the Zoological Museum Berlin, Germany. With regards to the type specimens, Das & Chaturvedi (1998) prepared the herpetological type catalogue for the BNHS museum.  published the reptilian type catalogue of the Zoological Survey of India (also see Das & Gayen 2004). Chanda et al. (2000) provided the type catalogue of amphibians in the same institution. Lastly, on general holdings, Ganesh & Asokan (2010) published the catalogue of Indian herpetofauna in the Madras Government Museum.
The Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology & Natural History (SACON), is one of the India's leading institutes dedicated for wildlife research. The institute was inspired by and named in honour of Sálim Ali , the leading pioneer of ornithology in India. Located in the outskirts of Coimbatore City (Tamil Nadu, India), abutting the Western Ghats, this institute has been functioning since 1990. Being a Centre of Excellence, under the auspices of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India (MoEFCC, GoI), SACON has teams of wildlife biologists and experts conducting research and teaching.
One such scientist of SACON, Dr. Subramanian Bhupathy (1963 headed the Conservation Ecology Division at this institute and with the help of his numerous students, amassed a good collection of amphibian and reptilian specimens as a part of their research work. His publications on herpetology date back to 1986 and he has been conducting field surveys and research throughout the country, on herpetofauna, among other animal taxa. The material enumerated below is from three decades of his fieldwork across Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, and Odisha states of India. Though old, the material still continues to bear immense academic value. We have already initiated taxonomic studies on several species complexes based on this collection. This holding is now in an initial research collection phase and will subsequently be made available later on for external researchers.

Materials and Methods
In the catalogue below, we list entire, formalinpreserved, and identifiable specimens of amphibians and reptiles. As far as possible, all legible hand-written information from the specimen jar labels have been furnished below to maximize the biological importance of specimens mentioned. This includes the scientific name of varying taxonomic resolutions, specimen collection locality and the number of examples in most cases. Date or year of collections was not to be found in most if not all jars and hence stands unknown. But judging by his track records, it is deduced to be between 1986 and 2014, spanning three decades. We have maintained the Institution acronym SACON for denoting this museum abbreviation as well, accompanied by other suffixes V-for vertebrates, A-for amphibians, Rfor Reptiles. This is followed by the museum registration number that continues sequentially, species after species. Where more than a single specimen is in the same jar, alphabets are added onto their registration numbers to differentiate them. Where appropriate, we also furnish comments on taxonomy, nomenclature, and distribution of the species dealt with. Scientific names and taxonomic classifications were updated after recent systematic revisions for species whose labels furnished obsolete names originally. Throughout the catalogue below, we only use the currently-valid scientific names and concepts of taxa (after Frost 2020 for amphibians; Pyron et al. 2016, Uetz et al. 2020 for reptiles).  (Ganesh et al. 2020b).