[.ca] Amphibians and Reptiles of the West Indies: ... (ISBN 0813010497)

An essential opus for nesoherpetophiles:
This book will be extremely useful for those with a serious interest in the West Indian amphibian and reptile fauna -- i. e., beyond nice pictures and easy identification, two things it does NOT have. It gives details of distribution for each of the nearly 600 species known to 1991 (a number of species have been described since), including maps with locality dots. For each species there is a also a technical description (size, scale counts, etc.), a list of subspecies, if any, published references where illustrations can be found, and notes on the natural history. The distributional information and the notes on natural history are probably the most useful aspects of this book. It would have been much more useful to have a means of identifying the species. The technical descriptions will help some, but there is no way to know, if you have a specimen in the hand and read a description that seems to fit, whether there might not be a description that is a closer fit a few pages away; and often, with similar species the descriptions will not discriminate them, anyway. Based on distributions, you may be able to eliminate some species, and arrive at a tentative identification. You will also have to have a good background knowledge of what the genera are like. So, this book is not a field guide for the novice but an excellent reference for those with deeper interests.