Customer Reviews

Field Guide to the Reptiles of South-East Asia

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When Das showed the advanced copy at a herpetological meeting this summer, everyone's eyes lit up. This is a much needed book for the region and a reference I use quite frequently.

This book gives basic information about the species in Southeast Asia, and does a great job of providing the information needed for basic identification. Species lengths are included in the descriptions. Unfortunately there are no range maps - a bummer.

Novices using this book should also be aware that the large python plate numbers are labeled incorrectly. Hopefully this will be fixed.

I hope to see more from Dr. Das in the future. This is a great book, don't hesitate to buy it if you're at all interested in the region.

This book is indeed a much needed and very welcome first one to cover all known species of reptiles from mainland SE Asia and the Greater Sundas.

All species are shown on color plates, with more detailed descriptions of their appearance, habitat, behavior and conservation status, distribution (without maps) to be found separately at the back of the book.

So far so good!

Unfortunately, while all this makes for a very interesting overview of the region's herpetofauna, the book's usefulness as an actual field guide is undermined by the fact that the illustrations are often too few, poor or inaccurate to let you identify even some very common species, and worse still, there are no keys provided to aid identification either.

For the Sunda subregion (Malay peninsula and the Greater Sundas), the more professionally compiled German language guide Amphibien und Reptilien Südostasiens. can be much more useful, with keys and distribution maps, and quality photos of most species.