by Sico » Wed Jul 20, 2011 6:04 pm
Iggy I took a squizz through The South African Tortoise Book by Borquin and Boycott, revised edition, and they have Kinixys natalensis and Kinixys spekii as being more in your range with K. belliana belliana being more to the east, not appearing to come over the Mozambique border much at all. They don't mention K. b zombensis at all in the book. What did you use as a reference work? Good luck uploading pics, it will be very interesting to see this torty. Do you know where it was picked up?
K. natalensis seems to have a very narrow range in your neck of the woods, with a slight curve from Swaziland up through towards the middle of the KNP, while K. spekii appears to be very much more widespread, coming up from northern Natal, through Swaziland, covering most fo the KNP region (and slightly west of that) right up into most of Limpopo, part of Northwest, the bulk of Zimbabwe and up into the Caprivie strip and northern Delta region fo the Okavango.
The key in the front of the book for hinged tortoises shows that K. natalensis has a tricuspid upper beak, aqnd the plastron is in a V shape and appears bisected by a single line anteriorly to posteriorly. The other hinged tortoises have a unicuspid upper beak and rather normal plastron. Of the remainder K. lobatsiana has upturned and serated posterior marginals (although it does not appear to be found in Mpumalanga), K. spekii has a plain brown or zonary pattern (concentric circles in the plates) and the ratio of shell height to shell length is normally more than 1:23. K.belliana has a shell with radial pattern (like G. pardalis) and a ratio of shell height to shell length of normally less than 1:23. Basically K. spekii looks more like a pancake than K. belliana. Hope that helps a bit?
Mark
Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, experience usually comes from bad judgment.