Richard Walter Wells

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. Coauthored by himself and high school teacher C. Ross Wellington, the papers (which had not undergone academic peer review) significantly reorganized the taxonomy and nomenclature, proposing over 700 nomenclatural changes between them. The issues of the Australian Journal of Herpetology in which Wells had published these three papers also indicated that the copyright holder was no longer the AHL but Australian Biological Services, an entity which shared Wells' address for payment and contact.

The controversy became known as the Wells and Wellington affair. Wells ceased publishing academic herpetology for several years after the affair. In 1993, he was involved in the founding of the Hawkesbury Herpetological Society, a primarily electronic herpetology club.

In the 2000s, Wells self-published several papers in the Australian Biodiversity Record describing 36 novel taxa; these drew protests in the Herpetological Review from scientists who indicated they would not use any of the names Wells had proposed after 1999. The objection to Wells' names was linked to similar concerns with the taxonomy proposed by fellow Australian Raymond Hoser, who had self-published numerous nomenclature changes in his own periodical. , the status of the names Wells had proposed in the Australian Biodiversity Record remained unclear, because no formal complaint to suppress or preserve the names had been submitted to or voted on by the ICZN.