Help Identifying Tegu species

[Rex Taylor]

Hello everyone. So about 2 or 3 months ago, I bought my first Tegu. I ended up doing extensive reasearch on Black and White Tegus and saw numerous images of the young. However, when I got him, the store said he was a B/W Tegu, but he doesnt look like one at all. He has a slight yellowish color to where the white should be, lacks the greenish head (even when i first got him), and his pattern doesnt quite match up to that of B/W babies. I have two pictures with this thread. If anyone can help identify what he is that would be great.

 

[Walter1]

Hello everyone. So about 2 or 3 months ago, I bought my first Tegu. I ended up doing extensive reasearch on Black and White Tegus and saw numerous images of the young. However, when I got him, the store said he was a B/W Tegu, but he doesnt look like one at all. He has a slight yellowish color to where the white should be, lacks the greenish head (even when i first got him), and his pattern doesnt quite match up to that of B/W babies. I have two pictures with this thread. If anyone can help identify what he is that would be great.

Hi Rex- From your description and the pictures, I'm going with a Tupinambis teguixin, aka Columbian Gold Tegu or Columbian Black and White Tegu.

It is a different species than the Argentine Black and White Tegu, Tupinambis merianae.

A juvenile Columbian should go for 30-50 dollars. They are smaller in adult size than the Argentine. On average they are much more defensive than the Argentine.

 

[Roadkill]

Sorry Walter1, you're wrong on that. That's not a Colombian tegu (Tupinambis teguixin) at all. That's clearly Salvator merianae. Rex, S.merianae is highly polymorphic, meaning they don't all look alike. There is a lot of variation in them, and only the freshly hatched have the green head, and even then not all of them do. As I frequently say, people need to stop paying attention to the colours, start paying attention to the patterning.

 

[Walter1]

Sorry Walter1, you're wrong on that. That's not a Colombian tegu (Tupinambis teguixin) at all. That's clearly Salvator merianae. Rex, S.merianae is highly polymorphic, meaning they don't all look alike. There is a lot of variation in them, and only the freshly hatched have the green head, and even then not all of them do. As I frequently say, people need to stop paying attention to the colours, start paying attention to the patterning.

Hi Roadkill- I'll defer. I went with teguixin because of both the absence of a hatchling green head and a failure to see two loreals. The yellowish tinge didn't help either. Such were the bases of an incorrect ID. When I'm wrong, I change my mind!

 

[Roadkill]

Like I said, everyone jumps on the colours when they are meaningless in most cases. It's like defining what type of car a person has by it's colour. Oh, you drive a blue car? That's a Ford. I drive a grey car, so it's a Bentley. However, the patterning is more defining. Those dark longitudinal shoulder stripes? Tupinambis teguixin certainly doesn't have those. That's a Salvator trait. About the only time colour is definitive in these guys (and I'm going to likely regret saying this....) is in Salvator rufescens. Erroneously, many think they see any red that means it's S.rufescens, but this is wrong as S.merianae can have red colouring too. The red of S.rufescens is not just any red, it's a very distinctive rusty dried blood colour.

 

[Walter1]

Like I said, everyone jumps on the colours when they are meaningless in most cases. It's like defining what type of car a person has by it's colour. Oh, you drive a blue car? That's a Ford. I drive a grey car, so it's a Bentley. However, the patterning is more defining. Those dark longitudinal shoulder stripes? Tupinambis teguixin certainly doesn't have those. That's a Salvator trait. About the only time colour is definitive in these guys (and I'm going to likely regret saying this....) is in Salvator rufescens. Erroneously, many think they see any red that means it's S.rufescens, but this is wrong as S.merianae can have red colouring too. The red of S.rufescens is not just any red, it's a very distinctive rusty dried blood colour.

No, no. I am not at all equating elmer''s glue and milk because both are white. No. I went with accepted criteria. The likelihood that all teguixin would be in one merianae individual seemed too improbable to me.

 

[Roadkill]

That's just it, though, colour is NOT accepted criteria with respect to tegus, except it seems in people that don't seem to realise that Salvator merianae comes in such a diverse range of colours and patterns to those colours that just about any colour that can be ascribed to any other tegu species can be found in S. merianae.

Take for example this girl:


from the very day I took this photo and first posted it, I've been told it is certainly a mix of Tupinambis teguixin x Salvator merianae; that it has to have Blue in its lineage because of that dark nose; that it has Salvator duseni in it because of the yellow in her back; that those distinctive spots are the trait of another species......all of it nothing more than conjecture, that's 100% Salvator merianae, her parents were 100% S.merianae, and although I no longer have access to the data, at the time I could trace her lineage back probably 20 generations and can assure you no other species or distinctive morphs was ever "crossed" into her ancestry to produce these traits. I wish I had my camera and had realised how ridiculous the "colour" argument would get with respect to tegus. In the colony this one came from, we also had an all black male that to me did not match what I understand to be "melanistic", had one that I suspect was leucistic (certainly not albino) and was nearly completely white, another that had so many colours that I named it "The Rainbow Warrior" (there IS a photo of it, but that's from back in the early days of digital cameras and the colour scale was bad, does no justice of the tegu) - yet every time a hobbyist sees a slightly different colour, they still jump to a different species.

 

[Walter1]

That's just it, though, colour is NOT accepted criteria with respect to tegus, except it seems in people that don't seem to realise that Salvator merianae comes in such a diverse range of colours and patterns to those colours that just about any colour that can be ascribed to any other tegu species can be found in S. merianae.

Take for example this girl:


from the very day I took this photo and first posted it, I've been told it is certainly a mix of Tupinambis teguixin x Salvator merianae; that it has to have Blue in its lineage because of that dark nose; that it has Salvator duseni in it because of the yellow in her back; that those distinctive spots are the trait of another species......all of it nothing more than conjecture, that's 100% Salvator merianae, her parents were 100% S.merianae, and although I no longer have access to the data, at the time I could trace her lineage back probably 20 generations and can assure you no other species or distinctive morphs was ever "crossed" into her ancestry to produce these traits. I wish I had my camera and had realised how ridiculous the "colour" argument would get with respect to tegus. In the colony this one came from, we also had an all black male that to me did not match what I understand to be "melanistic", had one that I suspect was leucistic (certainly not albino) and was nearly completely white, another that had so many colours that I named it "The Rainbow Warrior" (there IS a photo of it, but that's from back in the early days of digital cameras and the colour scale was bad, does no justice of the tegu) - yet every time a hobbyist sees a slightly different colour, they still jump to a different species.

Yes, any slight difference is a money bandwagon to jump on. A quick buck. The apparant lack of two loreals, which can be variable, clinched it for me. The range of color and pattern in merianae is wide.