Hemidactylus greeffii Bocage, 1886

Parrinha, Diogo, Calado, Francisco M. G., Marques, Mariana P., Bauer, Aaron M. & Ceríaco, Luis M. P., 2025, Echoes of a lost museum: Revision of the herpetological collections sent by Barbosa du Bocage from the Lisbon Museum to the British Museum of Natural History, Vertebrate Zoology 75, pp. 353-404 : 353-404

Hemidactylus greeffii Bocage, 1886

Specimen.

São Tomé and Príncipe: S. Tomé Island : BMNH 1893.12.27.1 .

Comments.

Hemidactylus greeffii was first described by Bocage in a paper written in Portuguese ( Bocage 1886 a), and a duplicate description written in French appeared immediately after in the same issue of the Jornal de Sciencias Mathematicas, Physicas e Naturaes ( Bocage 1886 b). The description was based on three specimens from “ S. Tomé island ” – one collected by Richard Greeff (1828–1892) and presented to the Lisbon Museum, and two from the Museu de Coimbra collected by Francisco Newton (1864–1909) ( Bocage 1886 a, 1886 b). Although Bocage (1886 a, 1886 b) attributed the collection of the Coimbra specimens to Newton, this was most likely an error, as the now lost specimens were more likely to have been collected by Adolfo Moller (1842–1920) in 1885 ( Lopes Vieira 1886). The specimen presented to the British Museum in 1893 was cited by Boulenger (1894 a) and was likely a duplicate received at the Lisbon Museum after the original description, presumably collected by Newton, who explored the region from 1885 to 1895 ( Ceríaco et al. 2022). Miller et al. (2012) reviewed its taxonomic status and designated a neotype from the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA.