. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum Zoology. vomer den tar y. Fig. 1 Diagrammatic representation of tooth patches on jaws and palate of Rita species. A. Rita sacerdotum Anderson, 184 mm, SU 39869. Scale bar = 1 mm.; B. Rita kuturnee (Sykes), 97 mm, SU 34868. peninsular India are substantially smaller (36 to 103 mm) than any of the specimens listed from Myanmar (184 to 318 mm). In the Ayeyarwaddy specimens that I examined (22 to 285 mm), the eye length is always 8 to 10 times in the head length. Curiously, despite the observation that the Ayeyarwaddy specimens has small eyes, Jayaram used
. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum Zoology. vomer den tar y. Fig. 1 Diagrammatic representation of tooth patches on jaws and palate of Rita species. A. Rita sacerdotum Anderson, 184 mm, SU 39869. Scale bar = 1 mm.; B. Rita kuturnee (Sykes), 97 mm, SU 34868. peninsular India are substantially smaller (36 to 103 mm) than any of the specimens listed from Myanmar (184 to 318 mm). In the Ayeyarwaddy specimens that I examined (22 to 285 mm), the eye length is always 8 to 10 times in the head length. Curiously, despite the observation that the Ayeyarwaddy specimens has small eyes, Jayaram used the eye size of/?, kuturnee to help distinguish it from R. chrysea, a species for which he lists the eye diameter as ' ( to )' in head length. Clearly he did not take into account the Ayeyarwaddy specimens in this diagnosis of R, kuturnee. The shape of the palatal tooth patches, a characteristic on which Jayaram placed heavy emphasis, also differs between Rita kuturnee and the Ayeyarwaddy form. The 'pear-shaped' tooth patches that Jayaram (1966, Figure lb) described and illustrated as characteristic of R. kuturnee appear, in fact, to be those of the Ayeyarwaddy river species, and not R. kuturnee. In all of the specimens of R. kuturnee that I examined, the palatal tooth patches are slender, crescent- shaped arches that are either separated at the midline (Figure lb), or meet only for the width of a single row of teeth. The palatal tooth- patches in Rita kuturnee have stout conical teeth, larger in size than those of the premaxilla, rather than the broadly rounded, or molari- form ones that predominate in the palate of the Ayeyarwaddy species (Figure la). As with the size of the eye, it is possible that Jayaram assumed that his specimens of R. kuturnee from peninsular India were juveniles, with incompletely developed palatal tooth patches, and that the adult condition in the peninsular population is like that in the Ayeyarwaddy specimens. Even in the smallest examined
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