Threes Company: discovery of a third syntype of Stegonotus lividus, a species of colubrid snake from Pulau Semau, Lesser Sunda Islands, Indonesia, with comments on an unpublished 19th Century manuscript by the naturalist Salomon Mller.

We report on the discovery of a third, male specimen of Stegonotus lividus in the collection of the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle in Paris, France, and demonstrate that it is not only a member of the original type series but the only one of the three syntypes, whose morphology was detailed in the original description. We herein identify it as a paralectotype. In their description of S. lividus, Dumril et al. (1854) attributed authorship of the name to the German zoologist Salomon Mller, whose work was never published. By the rules of zoological nomenclature, author attribution solely via an unpublished manuscript is inadmissible, and the species is therefore properly listed as Stegonotus lividus (Dumril et al., 1854). The recent discovery of Mllers handwritten manuscript, along with an unpublished drawing of one of these snakes by the Dutch artist Pieter van Oort, allows a better assessment of color and pattern for a species that remains known from only three preserved vouchers, as well as improved differentiation from other taxa occurring in the Lesser Sundas and Moluccas.

A new species of Stegonotus (Serpentes: Colubridae) from the remnant coastal forests of southern Timor-Leste.

During the first amphibian and reptile survey of Timor-Leste, we discovered a population of groundsnakes, genus Stegonotus, in the last remnant of lowland coastal forest along the countrys southern coast, which represents a new species. This sexually dimorphic species can be differentiated from all other Wallacean Stegonotus by a combination of 17-17-15 dorsals, ventrals (female 206; males 197207), paired subcaudals (female 61; males 7175), the gull wing + condition of the rostral, large squared prefrontals that each are 2.5 times the area of the internasals and two-thirds the size of the frontal, a snout-scale ratio of near 0.4 and a frontal-parietal suture ratio of ≤ 1.0, a labial scale formula of 73+4 | 94, five gulars separating the posterior genial and the anteriormost ventral, and an overall brown body coloration that lightens progressively from the vertebral scale row in a dorsallateral direction and features color gradients of dark brown posterior edges to lighter brown anterior edges on individual scales. The species is most similar in overall morphology to S. modestus from the central Moluccas and to S. lividus, a species known only from tiny Semau Island that lies off the western end of Timor Island, in close proximity to Kupang, the capital of the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara.