Talk:Forest cobra/Archive 1

GA potential
There is a wealth of information out there on this species. It won't be long before this is a good article. --DendroNaja (talk) 17:38, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Oldest snake
A male specimen, held at the Melbourne Zoo in Australia, recently turned 35 years old, surpassing the 28 year-old one in the article by 7 years:

http://www.zoo.org.au/news/rare-reptile-raches-milestone

Born in New York's Bronx Zoo in 1979, this snake has lived its entire life in captivity. Flanker235 (talk) 06:58, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Some awkward structure in the Scalation section
I find the details on colouration in the Scalation section to be awkwardly phrased:

"The colour of this species is variable, with three main colour morphs. Those from the forest or forest fringe, from Sierra Leone east to western Kenya and south to Angola are glossy black, the chin, throat and anterior region of the belly are cream or white, with broad black cross-bars and blotches. The sides of the head are strikingly marked with black and white, giving the impression of vertical black and white bars on the lips. The second colour morph, from the west African savanna, is banded black and yellow, with a black tail, the head is brownish-yellow on top, the lips, chin and throat are yellow. The third colour morph, from the coastal plain of east Africa, south to KwaZulu-Natal, inland to Zambia and southern Democratic Republic of Congo, is brownish or blackish-brown above, paler below, the belly is yellow or cream, heavily speckled with brown or black, and specimens from the southern part of its range have black tails."

There are two main problems:
 * 1) The sentences are awkwardly long and hard to parse. It seems like it would be preferable to separate the locations of each colour morph from their descriptions if possible. It feels like what we really have is tabular data: a set of three main colour morphs for which we have two facts to list each: location and colouration details. Particularly if we happen to have, or get, decent images for each colour morph, converting some of this information into a table might be a good idea.
 * 2) The sentence structures of the colour morph descriptions are poor-quality. For example: "The second colour morph, from the west African savanna, is banded black and yellow, with a black tail, the head is brownish-yellow on top, the lips, chin and throat are yellow." The first, unemphasized part of the sentence creates an expectation of a list, and the second, emphasized part of the sentence consists of two phrases that could be valid sentences on their own. This makes for poor readability; I don't feel like I can correct each of the colour morph description sentences because of the ambiguity produced by the inconsistent structure. In "[…] the belly is yellow or cream, heavily speckled with brown or black, […]", for example, which part(s) of the snake are speckled? Is the whole snake speckled, or just its belly? I'd prefer that these sentences be rephrased for clarity, but at minimum some of the commas ought to be replaced with semicolons to distinguish the other commas as internal punctuation of list items. I'd do it myself, but since I'm not familiar with each colouration, I'd rather avoid the potential to introduce an error through aggressive copyediting.

Cheers, {&#123; Nihiltres &#124;talk&#124;edits}&#125; 19:04, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

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