Richard W. Wells
Australian herpetologist
Richard Walter Wells is an Australian herpetologist. He is known for editing the Australian Journal of Herpetology in the 1980s, in which he and C. Ross Wellington wrote and published three papers without academic peer review that proposed significant changes to the taxonomy and nomenclature of Australian reptiles and amphibians. In the 2000s, Wells self-published herpetological research in the Australian Biodiversity Record. The scientific names he proposed therein are the subject of a boycott begun in 2013 by some members of the herpetological community.
Early life
Richard Walter Wells was interested in herpetology in his early teen years when he lived in Prospect, New South Wales. In 1980, he brought several eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis) eggs to the offices of The Sydney Morning Herald, where they hatched, an occurrence which Wells stated had never before been captured on film.
Career
By 1981, after working as a zoological specimen collector with several Australian museums, Wells had enrolled at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale where he was pursuing a Bachelor of Science in biology. Wells became a member of the Australian Herpetologists' League (AHL) at UNE and during his first year at the university, became editor-in-chief of the Australian Journal of Herpetology, a new scientific journal published by the AHL. While the journal released its first two issues, Wells did not complete his first year at UNE and moved to Sydney. Nonetheless, Wells maintained a mailing address at the university and his editorship with the Australian Journal of Herpetology, although he ceased communicating with its editorial board for two years.
In a move that made him "notorious in the world of Australian herpetology", Wells unexpectedly published three papers in the Australian Journal of Herpetology in 1983 and 1985.
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