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The Australian water dragon, Physignathus lesueur (Gray 1831), is a large acrodontan lizard which occurs in eastern Australia and has been reported from western New Guinea (Fig. 1). The species appears to be absent from eastern New Guinea (Allison 1982). This unusual disjunct distribution has been widely accepted (e.g., Allison 1982, 1996; Cogger, 1995; Harrison 1928; Moody 1980; Welch et al. 1990; Whitaker et al. 1982), and has long been the subject of comment (Covacevich et al. 1990; Harrison 1928).
The existence of P lesueur in western New Guinea was first reported by de Rooij (1915) and was based on a single specimen in the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden in the Netherlands (RMNH 5462). The data associated with this specimen show that it was collected from the Arfak Mountains in what is now the Indonesian state of Irian Jaya. However, there have been no further specimens of P lesueur from New Guinea reported in the literature. All published reports of P lesueur in New Guinea appear to be based on De Rooij's (1915) account of this single specimen.
We have searched for additional specimens of Physignathus lesueur from New Guinea in the following institutions: Australian Museum (AM); South Australian Museum (SAM); Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences (NTM); Bernice P. Bishop Museum (BPBM); National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea (PNGM); University of Papua and New Guinea (UPNG); University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ); Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH); Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM); California Academy of Sciences (CAS-SU and CAS); American Museum of Natural History (AMNH); Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (USNM); University of Illinois Museum of Natural History (UIMNH); Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ); Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (RMNH). Although these collections contain over 300 additional specimens of the P. lesueur, none was from New Guinea.
The Leiden specimen (RMNH...