Conventions

A specimen was weighed or measured. Somebody put an animal on a scale or against a rule and wrote the number down.

Worked out from another figure on the same entry, and the entry says which one. A mass computed from a length is not a mass anybody weighed.

Taken as published by a named scientific dataset. The dataset is credited on the entry, and every source is listed at how this is made.

A dash is not an omission. It means the field was looked for and no dataset carries a value. The field keeps its place on every entry, so two animals can be compared line by line.

Two or more independent datasets carry this figure and they concur. 71,164 facts here are held by more than one source.

The datasets disagree. Both are named and the difference is stated rather than resolved into a single confident number, because collapsing them is what made existing care sheets contradict each other.

Genus and species are set in italic, the genus capitalised and the species always lowercase, even when it comes from a person’s name. Ranks above genus (Agamidae, Squamata) are roman.

The person who first described the species, and the year, set in roman rather than italic. The brackets carry meaning: they say the species has since been moved out of the genus it was originally described in.

A name science has moved on from. It still leads to the animal: roughly a third of squamates carry a synonym keepers use daily, and 4,488 of them are filed in the index in their own alphabetical place.

Where an animal sits among every animal in its family that anyone has measured. A family is the grouping one step above the genus: a bearded dragon’s family, Agamidae, holds 616 species. Ranking is only shown where at least 20 species have been measured, because a percentage taken over four animals reads as a finding and is noise.

Every species in a family on one sheet, photographed where a picture exists. Species without one keep their cell, so the gap is visible. See the plates.

Enclosure figures are the floor a published welfare standard sets, not advice about what is best, and the entry names the standard and the measurement it was worked out from. Where an animal is recorded as living both on the ground and in vegetation, the figure is the larger of the two rules in every dimension.

The American figure leads because it is the one a keeper builds to. The metric figure follows in brackets because it is the one the standard and the datasets actually recorded.

Four boxes, each an equally likely way two gametes can meet. Shown only for the inheritance modes that can honestly be worked out this way.

176 of the 344 morphs here — a majority — cannot have offspring odds: polygenic, sex-linked, not heritable, clonal, or with no inheritance recorded. The entry says which, and gives no percentage. A polygenic trait handed a ratio is advice that cannot work.