Dear all, at age 50 with a science background and over 40 years verifiable expertise with snakes, I have some qualifications to publish on snakes.
As for claims I named too many species, well I have done a few dozen, versus for example 900 odd by the late Mr Cope, or over 500 by Mr Boulenger and similar numbers to these by the likes of Wells, Gray, Fitzinger and Gunther.
And for what it's worth, besides those genera inspected in the latest issues of AJH Issues 13 and 14, I can say there are at least 30 more I have not dissected which are clearly paraphyletic and will be broken up by someone else in the not too distant future based on already existing molecular and morphological data.
Anyway, one of the previous posters here wrote:
"Hoser has that that justifies a different interpretation of Pyron et al. If the authors weren't comfortable dividing Thamnophis based on the results of their research, Hoser needs to be more specific about why he can justify a different interpretation of the research"
is in error.
Pyron et. al. stated point blank that Thamnophis, Crotalus and other genera were paraphyletic, in those exact words.
They were not looking at busting up genera or what pre-existing names were available for such (if any), which is a different and time consuming exercise as compared to what they were doing.
That's what I did!
Instead they (Pyron and co) were more concerned with higher family level taxonomy.
Anyway I've uploaded a recent phylogeny in relation to another new genus, Rentonus, due to the fact that they are commonly sold as Garter snakes.
All the best
Rentonus-Guo-Cut.jpg