10,406 species on file, and books written with keepers who have spent their working lives at it. They do not all do it the same way, so you get the reasoning behind each approach and decide for your own animal. The database is free to search. The books run $4.99 to $19.99.
We all started the same way.
how should I set this one up?
Every one of them delivered with total confidence.
None of them were lying. They had each kept animals a different way and watched it work.
So we stopped trying to crown a winner and started building the pathway instead.
And it was never only about keeping.
It starts with the animal. It always did.
People who have spent their lives getting it right.
Written down, sourced, and open to anyone.
Culebra Codex puts those approaches side by side, with the reasoning under each and a name on every page. There are 12,568 known reptile species and nowhere that holds what we actually know about them, so we are building it. Every record is one more animal somebody can understand, and understanding is where conservation starts. This is for keepers, for students, for the field, and for the kid who just turned over a rock and wants to know what he is looking at. When we do not know something, the page says so.
There are 12,568 known reptile species and a hobby that keeps a few hundred of them well. For the rest, what you can find is scattered across threads, out-of-print books and whatever the last person told you. Meanwhile the animal in front of you needs an answer tonight, not eventually.
The Codex has 10,406 of those species on file so far, each one stamped with where the record came from. The gap is the work.
10,406 species, each one stamped with where the record came from and when it was last checked. Taxonomy, range, conservation status. Where there is no record, the page says unverified rather than inventing a paragraph.
Two ways to read the same title: scroll it as a film, or turn it page by page. Whichever you pick, it keeps your place, works on a plane, and installs on a phone like an app.
Warm-side surface temperature?
Tap to turn88–92°F, and a cool side in the high 70s
Build cards off any chapter and drill them. Antivenom protocol. Basking temps. Incubation windows. The things you have to know cold stick by repetition, not by reading the chapter a fourth time.
Filmed lessons with questions layered into the video, slide lessons, whole books as lessons, and a final that actually gates. Pass it, or sit it again.
Notes, highlights, what you have read, what you have passed. It follows you across every book and every device, and you can export the whole thing whenever you want.
Citadel Culebra
Certificate of Completion
Venomous & Toxicology
Serial CC‑BW‑2026‑014
Verify at culebracodex.com
Serial-numbered certificates, each on its own public page. Send the link to a shop, a vet or a state inspector and they can verify it without taking your word for it.
The database and the readers are open right now, at the links further down this page. The rest is written and running behind a door that has not opened. Leave an email below and you are in on day one.
Not a mockup and not a roadmap. These are screens of the running product, taken the day this page was built. Follow either link and you land on exactly what you are looking at.
Query by name, then narrow by class and by conservation status, with the record count updating as you go. Every card carries a serial, a family, a venomous flag where it applies, and a dossier behind it.
Scroll it as cinema or turn it page by page, whichever suits the moment. It holds your place, installs to a home screen, and keeps working with no signal at all.
An animal cannot tell you
what you got wrong.
It just gets quieter, stops eating, and holds on until somebody notices. Every page in this library exists so that somebody notices sooner.
Two of the open ones cost nothing. Start with either, and if the writing is any good you will know inside ten minutes.
Three regional editions
Crocodilians on three continents, and how people actually get hurt by them. The Americas edition is free to read. Buying either of the other two opens both.
Open the readerCare Library, Volume Two
Fifteen chapters, filmed in the New England Reptile rooms, with Kevin's own notes on metabolic bone disease dropped in where they belong. Free while the launch window is open.
Read it freeCitadel Culebra faculty, including Kevin McCurley
Thirty chapters on the most kept snake on earth, from a school whose Chief Academic Officer opened his first ball python room in 1991. Read a tenth of it before you decide anything.
Read it freeA filmed masterclass, hosted by Braxton Warren
Tom and Stacey Crutchfield, George Van Horn, Ty Park and Steve Angeli, filmed answering the questions one at a time instead of talking over each other. The book and the course are the same material from two angles.
See the masterclassAn introduction, with Steve Angeli
Beaded lizards and Gila monsters, from a private breeder who has worked them for decades and bred them down the generations. Steve opens the room and brings the animals out one at a time.
Not open yetWith George Van Horn, Tom Crutchfield, Steve Angeli and Kevin McCurley
Four keepers who have spent their working lives on the hot side of the glass, on one book. Hooks and tubes, cage design, lock discipline, the protocol you write before you need it, and what happens on the worst day.
Not open yetAn introduction, with Kevin McCurley
The part of keeping nobody writes down. What a reptile is actually telling you before it strikes, why an animal settles for one person and not another, and how thirty-five years of hands on ball pythons taught Kevin to read a room he cannot ask a question of.
Not open yetBy Braxton Warren
Half the people in this industry are here because of one man in khaki shorts. Brax writes about what he actually taught, the parts that were never about the crocodile, and the things he wishes people knew about him.
Not open yetWith Uncle Mike Stefani · Book One of The Keeper & the Kept
Sixty years of monitor lizards, told by the man who did it. A hundred and fifty-three pages, thirty-nine lessons pulled out in gold. Uncle Mike is reading the proof right now.
Not open yetFounding tuition is $79.99 a month, locked at that number for as long as you stay enrolled. It goes to $99.99 for everyone who comes after.
Not compiled from the internet. Every title here is built with a keeper who has the animals, the years and the scars, and their name goes on it. Four are open now. The rest are on the press.
Citadel Culebra faculty, including Kevin McCurley
Thirty chapters on the most kept snake on earth, from a school whose Chief Academic Officer opened his first ball python room in 1991. Read a tenth of it before you decide anything.
Read it freeThree regional editions
Crocodilians on three continents, and how people actually get hurt by them. The Americas edition is free to read. Buying either of the other two opens both.
Open the readerCare Library, Volume Two
Fifteen chapters, filmed in the New England Reptile rooms, with Kevin's own notes on metabolic bone disease dropped in where they belong. Free while the launch window is open.
Read it freeA filmed masterclass, hosted by Braxton Warren
Tom and Stacey Crutchfield, George Van Horn, Ty Park and Steve Angeli, filmed answering the questions one at a time instead of talking over each other. The book and the course are the same material from two angles.
See the masterclassAn introduction, with Steve Angeli
Beaded lizards and Gila monsters, from a private breeder who has worked them for decades and bred them down the generations. Steve opens the room and brings the animals out one at a time.
With George Van Horn, Tom Crutchfield, Steve Angeli and Kevin McCurley
Four keepers who have spent their working lives on the hot side of the glass, on one book. Hooks and tubes, cage design, lock discipline, the protocol you write before you need it, and what happens on the worst day.
An introduction, with Kevin McCurley
The part of keeping nobody writes down. What a reptile is actually telling you before it strikes, why an animal settles for one person and not another, and how thirty-five years of hands on ball pythons taught Kevin to read a room he cannot ask a question of.
By Braxton Warren
Half the people in this industry are here because of one man in khaki shorts. Brax writes about what he actually taught, the parts that were never about the crocodile, and the things he wishes people knew about him.
With Uncle Mike Stefani · Book One of The Keeper & the Kept
Sixty years of monitor lizards, told by the man who did it. A hundred and fifty-three pages, thirty-nine lessons pulled out in gold. Uncle Mike is reading the proof right now.
These are the people the books are made with. Every panel is our own footage, shot where they work, on the day we were there.
Chief Academic Officer
New England Reptile
Opened his first ball python room in 1991 and proved the Super Pastel in 1999. Most of what the hobby takes for granted about pythons started in his building.
Pythons · genetics · imports
Principal Advisor
Crutchfield Reptiles
Fifty years in the trade, most of it at the front of it. Sat down and asked the questions properly, on camera, for the first time.
Large boids · iguanas · the trade
Principal Advisor
Reptile World Serpentarium
Six decades of milking venomous snakes in front of the public, at a serpentarium he has run since 1972.
Venomous · venom extraction
Principal Advisor
Iguanaland
Built the largest lizard collection open to the public anywhere, then opened the gates in Punta Gorda so people could walk through it.
Iguanas · monitors · collection scale
Senior Advisor
Horridum Angeli
A private breeder who has worked beaded lizards and Gila monsters for decades and bred them down the generations.
Heloderma · venomous husbandry
Senior Advisor
Crutchfield Reptiles
Works a yard of rhino iguanas one animal at a time, which is the part of this job nobody films and everybody needs to see.
Cyclura · daily husbandry
Founder · Host
Citadel Culebra
Asks the questions, carries the camera, and writes the books nobody else was going to write.
The interviews · the Codex
Every page in this library files under one of them. Basic care at one end, mastery at the other, and a credential at each rung that says which one you actually reached.
Enclosure design, gradients, humidity, light, substrate, ventilation, hydration, cycling and daily observation.
What reptiles eat, how they digest it, and how diet shapes growth, reproduction, immunity and longevity.
Reading an animal accurately: body language, defense, stress, feeding response. Then handling it safely.
The long relationship between keeper and animal: trust, consistency, desensitization, routine.
Pairing strategy through neonatal care: conditioning, cycling, courtship, incubation.
Heredity, morphs, selective breeding, lineage, mutation expression and the ethics of the decisions.
How reptiles are built and how the systems work: skeleton, muscle, digestion, respiration.
Health monitoring, prevention, treatment awareness, and working properly with a reptile vet.
Venom biology, bite prevention, protocol, and the responsible care of hot animals.
Running collections, facilities and education centers: design, SOPs, biosecurity, staff.
Connecting captive knowledge to wild protection: habitat loss, field research, monitoring.
How this knowledge gets taught, filmed and presented: speaking, courses, demos, documentary.
How reptile law gets made, how it gets broken, and how keepers push back.
Where these animals come from, and how people have kept, feared, revered and studied them.
One discipline, taken properly
The core sequence
Depth in a chosen field
High-risk and venomous work
Tuition carries every discipline. The credentials above can also be taken on their own.
We film in the room,
with the animal out.
No studio, no stock, no borrowed footage, and nothing generated. If you see a room on this page, we stood in it.
The Codex is one system with a lot of doors. The same account, the same notes and the same shelf, whichever one you walk through.
The first class meets on a call. No campus, no travel, no dress code. If you are enrolled by then you get the link, and if you are still deciding you can sit at the back and listen.
The calendar for the full academic year is published the last week of August.
Citadel Culebra is the school the Codex was built for. Tuition carries the whole library, every course, the technology and the people. The founding rate is locked for as long as you stay.
There is no agency that certifies reptile knowledge.
So the school holds a harder standard, and says so plainly on its own front page: our accreditation is the faculty. One expert can be wrong. When McCurley, Crutchfield, Park and Van Horn all tell you the same thing, that is as certified as this field gets.
Billed $79.99/month. Your membership renews automatically each month until you cancel. Cancel anytime — no future charges.
Manage or cancel anytime in your account.
Founding tuition is $79.99 a month, locked at that number for as long as you stay enrolled. It goes to $99.99 for everyone who comes after.
Cancel in one click any month and you are not charged again. Before you spend anything, the database is free and a tenth of the ball python book is free.
Read the curriculum firstLeave an email and the database opens, along with the books that are free today. You will hear from us when a title comes off the press, and you can leave at the bottom of any email.
Reading the database and the free books costs nothing and always will. Individual books run $4.99 to $19.99. School tuition at $79.99 a month carries all of it plus the courses.
Working keepers and breeders, with their names on the page. Kevin McCurley opened New England Reptile in 1991. Tom Crutchfield and George Van Horn have been at it since before most of the industry existed. Steve Angeli breeds beaded lizards. Ty Park runs Iguanaland. We do not publish anonymous care sheets.
The Ball Python Codex, Croc & Gator Wise in the Americas edition, The Bearded Dragon, and The Art of Keeping Reptiles. Every one of them opens from this page.
They are built and running, and the sign-in door is the last piece we are finishing. We would rather say that than put a Live badge on something you cannot open yet. Leave an email and you go in with the first group.
Everyone gets on a call. Brax walks the academic calendar for the year, the faculty come on and say what they are teaching, and then it is an open floor. It is free, it is online, and you do not have to be enrolled to sit in.
No. Most of the library is ball pythons, dragons, geckos, tortoises and monitors. The venomous work exists because our faculty do it, and because the people who do it deserve a real book instead of a forum thread.
Start with the database. It is open, it is free, and it is the part we will never charge for.
