An international team made up of scientists from Brazil, Australia, the U.S., Ecuador, Germany and Sweden has published the results of an extensive database of snakes of the American tropics. This database is made up of museum collections from the past 150 years and demonstrates that some Neotropical regions, such as the Cerrado in the central Brazil, contain a disproportionately high diversity. Furthermore, some other diverse regions are disproportionately under-sampled, such as the Amazon. For the first time, distribution patterns, collection records and frequency of occurrence are recorded from a total of 147,515 contributions to 886 snake species. Thus, the database covers 74 percent of all snake species from 27 countries. The database will serve as a solid basis for conservation concepts, and biodiversity and evolution models in the future. The study was recently published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.