Pedigree Terms and Lineage Documentation

Scope and authority

This Standard establishes the vocabulary by which The Reptile Club records and reports lineage. Its definitions govern the language printed on the Certificate of Pedigree, the data the Registry holds for each registered animal, and the meaning of every term used in subsequent Standards.

The authority for these definitions rests with The Reptile Club, as the publishing body of the Registry. The Standard does not regulate husbandry, breeding ethics, or commercial practice. It governs only the words by which lineage is recorded.

Where a term defined here conflicts with informal usage in the wider hobby, the definition given in this Standard is the one that applies to all Registry records and to all documents issued under the Reptile Club seal.

Definitions

The following terms have the meanings given below for all purposes of the Registry.

Registered animal

An individual reptile whose Certificate of Pedigree has been issued by the Registry and to which a Reptile Club registration code has been assigned. The Registry does not record information about animals that have not been registered, except as those animals appear by name on a registered animal's certificate.

Registration code

The unique identifier carried by every registered animal, taking the form RC followed by a hyphen and eight characters. Letters and digits that read alike in print are excluded, so a code can be copied off a certificate without ambiguity. The registration code is the public handle by which a registered animal is referenced anywhere on the Registry, on its certificate, and in the lineage records of its descendants.

Certificate of Pedigree

The document issued by the Registry on registration of an animal, available in printed form and at the registered animal's permanent page on reptileclub.com. The certificate states the registered animal's identity, the producer under whom it was registered, the parents on file, and the date of issue.

Producer

The breeder identity under which a registered animal is recorded, printed on the certificate under the heading Produced by. Once attached to a registration, the producer cannot be reassigned to a different identity, though a registration issued without a producer may later have one attached through the procedure described below.

Breeder name

The public name a breeder registers under. Each is unique, and must be approved before any animal is registered under it. Every animal so registered carries the name as it stood on the day of issue. One breeder may hold a name alone, or partners may share one across a single program.

Attribution request

The request by which an owner asks a producer to confirm that they produced a registered animal. In answering it the producer accepts or declines the attribution, records the animal's sire and dam, and may confirm or correct its hatch date. It is the only route by which a registration reaches the attributed state.

Current owner

The party in whose care the registered animal is presently held, as reflected in the Registry. The current owner changes through the transfer procedure, without alteration of the producer or the lineage on file.

Sire and Dam

The male and female parents, respectively, of a registered animal. On the certificate, each parent slot points to a registered animal by registration code or remains empty.

Lineage

The connected record of descent that links a registered animal to its registered ancestors through chains of parent references. Lineage on the Registry is held as a graph rather than as a fixed-depth list: each registered animal carries pointers to its parents, and ancestry is read by following those pointers from generation to generation.

Unregistered parent slot

A sire or dam slot on a certificate that does not point to a registered animal. Such a slot may be empty, or it may carry a name entered for an unregistered parent. The Registry records that name as entered and shows it on the certificate marked as unregistered. Because no registration stands behind the name, the Registry does not treat it as a registered ancestor, and the pedigree cannot be traced any further back through it.

The Certificate of Pedigree

A Certificate of Pedigree is the Registry's published record of a single registered animal, identified by its registration code. The certificate makes the following assertions, and only the following assertions.

It asserts that an animal of the species and sex stated was registered with the Reptile Club on the date stated, under the producer named on the certificate, and that the registration code printed on the document is the unique identifier the Registry has assigned to that animal. It asserts that the parents shown are the parents on file with the Registry at the time the certificate is consulted. It asserts that the certificate page displayed at reptileclub.com under the printed code is the current authoritative version of the record.

The certificate does not assert anything about the animal's morph beyond what the producer recorded at registration, nor anything about the animal's health, value, or fitness for any particular purpose. It does not assert that the animal currently lives, nor that any party named on it remains the current owner. These matters lie outside the recording function of the Registry.

Nor does the certificate assert that a recorded parent is the animal's biological parent. The Registry records the lineage its producers supply. It does not conduct parentage testing and does not independently establish descent. What the Registry publishes is the state of the record and the basis on which each part of it was entered, which is why the record history distinguishes a parent that was confirmed from one that was recorded.

The certificate displays the current state of every field the Registry records for the animal. Where a field has been amended, the record history carries the prior value and the date the amendment was made, so that the present record and its history are both visible.

Lineage as a graph

Each Certificate of Pedigree carries two parent slots, the sire and the dam. A slot either points to another registered animal by its registration code, carries a name entered for an unregistered parent, or is empty. A name entered for an unregistered parent appears on the certificate, but because no registration stands behind it, the pedigree cannot be traced any further back through it.

The pedigree of any registered animal is read by following the parent references from the focal animal outward. Each registered ancestor encountered along the way carries its own parent references, and the chain continues until a slot is empty or until every line has terminated in an unregistered slot. The Registry imposes no fixed depth on this traversal. An animal whose ancestors are all registered carries lineage as deep as the Registry's records of those ancestors permit.

Because lineage is held as connected references rather than as a frozen list, the depth of any pedigree may grow over time. When a previously unregistered parent becomes registered, the producer of a descendant may fill that descendant's parent slot with the new registration code, whether the slot stood empty or carried only a name entered for an unregistered parent. Subsequent reads of the descendant's certificate will display the newly available ancestry. No reissue of the descendant's certificate is required.

Where a parent slot carries neither a registered reference nor an entered name, the certificate displays it as empty. An empty slot is not a defect in the pedigree but the present limit of the Registry's record.

The name of a registered ancestor is not frozen into its descendants' certificates. Each is shown by the name presently on its own record, so an animal registered without a name, or renamed afterward, appears under its current name on every certificate that references it. Only the name of an unregistered parent is held as text, because nothing stands behind it to be read.

Producer attribution

Every registration is recorded under one of three attribution states.

Self-issued

The party who issued the registration is the producer. The producer's breeder name is printed on the certificate. This is the attribution state of registrations issued by the producer themselves through the HatchLog app.

Attributed

The registration was issued by the animal's owner, and the producer subsequently confirmed the attribution through the Registry's attribution-request procedure. The producer's breeder name is printed on the certificate. The attributed state is reached only by the producer's own approval.

Unattributed

No producer has confirmed the registration. The certificate is issued without a producer name, and the Produced by field is rendered as a dash rather than left blank. The certificate is otherwise complete. An unattributed registration may be upgraded to attributed at a later date when the producer joins the Registry and approves the attribution.

The transition from unattributed to attributed is the only change of attribution state that the Registry permits, and it requires the producer's own approval. The transition from self-issued or attributed to any other state is not permitted. A registration once attributed to a producer remains so on the Registry's permanent record.

The Registry does not record claims of producer attribution made by parties other than the producer. The free-text Produced by note that an owner may attach to a private record in the HatchLog app is a private breeder note and is not printed on the certificate.

Claiming a breeder name

The Registry does not reserve proposed breeder names. A breeder name may be approved only when the requester can show established public use of it for reptile breeding. The request is made when the breeder joins the Registry or with the first registration submitted under the name, and is confirmed through the public social account on which the name is used. Once approved, the same breeder name cannot be registered to another breeder.

Similarity alone does not prevent approval when each breeder can show established public use of their name.

The Registry may decline a name when it is confusingly similar to a registered breeder name or a registered breeder’s confirmed handle and could cause buyers to mistake one breeder’s animals for another’s. This review happens when the name is first submitted, before any animal is registered under it.

What a name may contain is governed by Registered Names, which applies to every name the Registry prints.

Permanence of the breeder name

A breeder name must be approved before any animal is registered under it. Once offspring have been registered under it, the name is locked to their record. The Registry does not reissue it to another breeder, and it stays on those certificates for the operating life of the Registry, subject to applicable law.

Each certificate carries the name as it stood on the day it was issued, so a later change of name does not rewrite what came before. A breeder who takes a new name, or who leaves a shared one, carries only later work to it. The certificates already issued keep the name they were issued under, and that name continues to answer for them.

A name that has never carried an animal is treated differently, because no record depends on it. It is held for ninety days after it is given up, and then returns to the pool of names available to be claimed.

The Registry may retire a breeder name obtained by impersonation or misrepresentation. A retired name takes no new animals, and the Registry does not reissue it, save where a claim of right in the name, such as a trademark, satisfies the Registry that it should pass to its rightful holder. What was issued under it stays on the record, since a finding against a breeder does not undo the fact of an animal's production.

What changes after issue

The Registry records changes to a registered animal's record by category. Some fields are locked at the moment of issue. Some may be filled once and thereafter hold. Others stay amendable, by the current owner or by the recorded producer, depending on which of them the field belongs to. Errors of fact in locked fields are addressed by editorial correction.

Locked at issue. The species, the producer, and the registration code define the registration. They are locked at the moment of issue and cannot be amended afterwards.

Hatch date. The hatch date follows a fill-once rule. A registration issued without a hatch date may have one added at any time, and once a date is recorded the owner cannot change it. The producer may confirm or correct the hatch date when answering an attribution request, in the same action by which they confirm production, since the producer was present at the hatch.

Lineage. Only the animal's producer may name a registered animal as its sire or dam. An owner may enter a parent's name as free text whether or not a producer is on file, and it appears on the certificate marked as unregistered.

A registered parent is recorded in one of two ways. The producer records it directly, or records it in answering an attribution request from the current owner. The determination belongs to the producer in both. The Registry does not ask the current owner of the sire or dam, since a producer who has sold an animal still knows what it produced.

A slot that already holds a parent is locked. The one exception is the producer answering an attribution request, who may correct or remove a parent recorded earlier. Every such change is written to the record history with the value it replaced. Empty slots remain fillable indefinitely.

A parent may be any registered animal the producer bred from, whether or not they still keep it. An owner may correct a name they entered themselves while no producer is on file. Once a producer is attributed, that name holds as what the owner claimed, and the producer takes the lineage from there.

The record history says whether a parent was confirmed or recorded. A parent the producer supplies in answering an attribution request is published as confirmed. A parent the producer enters directly is published as recorded. Both are the producer's determination. What separates them is whether a second person asked for it, and the Registry does not publish one as the other.

Name. The current owner may rename the animal freely until it is recorded as a sire or dam on a registered animal. From that moment the name is fixed. A registered ancestor is shown on its descendants' certificates by the name presently on its own record, so a rename after that point would rewrite pedigrees the owner does not hold. An error in a fixed name is addressed by editorial correction.

Amendable after registration. The current owner may amend the animal's sex and photo. The recorded producer may amend the morph designation, including refining heterozygous designations as offspring confirm or disprove them. Sex carries no lock. An animal sold too young to sex is sexed later, and a sex recorded wrongly disproves itself.

Amendment does not erase what was registered. The Registry retains the photo and the morph designation the certificate was issued with, and on transfer it pins the photos taken under the producer, so that a later owner cannot substitute a different animal behind a registration code.

Editorial correction. Genuine errors of fact in a registration, including in fields locked at issue, may be raised with the Registry by writing to registry@reptileclub.com. Such requests are reviewed individually by The Reptile Club's editorial process. Where a correction is warranted, the original value is preserved in a permanent entry for the change, and the corrected value is recorded with the date it was made.

The record history. The Registry retains an entry for every amendment to a registration, by producer or owner. No amendment is made without one, and no entry is removed or rewritten once written. Entries are kept for the operating life of the Registry. Where the law requires particular material to be removed, the terms are those set out at reptileclub.com/permanence.

The record history published on the registered animal's page carries the changes that bear on what the animal is: its morph, its sex, its hatch date, and its lineage. Each entry gives the date and the value recorded, and a lineage entry also gives the value it replaced. Changes to how the record is presented, meaning the animal's name and its photos, are retained but not published there, since they say nothing about identity or descent.

Transfers

A transfer is a change of owner. The producer, the lineage on file, and the registration code are unaffected by transfer. Only the current owner changes.

The Registry holds the chain of transfers as a sequence of dated events on the registered animal's record. The chain is part of the animal's permanent history.

Revisions

This Standard is maintained as a living document. The Reptile Club may issue a new version when the language of the Registry requires clarification, when new terms enter that vocabulary, or when an ambiguity in a prior issue is identified.

August 2026. Wording only: "photograph" became "photo" throughout, matching the vocabulary adopted with the Registration Photos Standard. No meaning changed.

August 2026. Added the section Claiming a breeder name, requiring established public use, social confirmation of each claim, uniqueness, and review for confusing similarity against registered names and confirmed handles.

Each new issue is identified by its adoption date and supersedes the prior issue for all registrations made after that date. Registrations made under a prior issue retain their original meaning. The Registry interprets older records by the issue in force at the time of their registration.

Editorial enquiries and proposed corrections may be addressed to registry@reptileclub.com.