Late Wisconsinan Appalachian herpetofaunas: relative stability in the midst of change

Abstract

Fossil herptiles from eastern North America exhibit less dramatic Wisconsinan-Holocene range adjustments than many contemporaneous mammals, birds, and plants. Mammal and bird faunal lists consist of current residents of the fossil locality plus a sizeable component of taxa that ranges to the north or west, Herptile lists include area residents with a few forms now removed to the south. Factors responsible for the varying responses to climatic change between and within vertebrate classes have not yet been adequately addressed. Most Late Wisconsinan Appalachian herpetofaunas neither support nor contradict the climatic equibility hypothesis, because herptiles are either insensitive to climatic and biotic change or an appropriate transfer function has not been formulated to provide a partial climatic analog. Although range limits of many plants and animals changed by hundreds of kilometers in response to the late glacial-interglacial climatic shift, herptiles in eastern North America seem to have been less strongly affected by these events. Previously reported extralimital records of Masticophis flagellum, Crotalus adamanteus (Natural Chimneys, Virginia), and Bufo americanus copei (New Paris No. 4, Pennsylvania) are rejected.