Blotchy Swell Shark - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

American ichthyologists David Starr Jordan and Henry Weed Fowler described the blotchy swell shark in a 1903 volume of Proceedings of the United States National Museum, based on a 98 cm (39 in) long stuffed dry skin originally obtained from Nagasaki, Japan. They gave it the specific epithet umbratile (from the Latin umbratilis, meaning "shaded") and assigned it to the genus Cephaloscyllium.

The taxonomy of the blotchy swell shark has a history of confusion. The holotype dried skin could not be located when shark expert Stewart Springer perpared his 1979 review of the catsharks, and in its absence he synonymized C. umbratile with C. isabellum on the basis of "inconclusive morphometric differences". Some authors followed Springer's judgment while others, particularly in Japan, preferred to keep referring to C. umbratile. The taxonomy of this species was further muddled by the application of the name C. umbratile to a similar but smaller species sharing part of its range. This second species, once referred to as "pseudo-umbratile" by Leonard Compagno, has since been identified as C. sarawakensis. Recently, the holotype was found again, and in 2008 Cephaloscyllium umbratile was re-described as distinct from C. isabellum by Jayna Schaaf-Da Silva and David Ebert.