As any naturalist well knows, many species are given eponymous names. However while most will recognize the person so honored in the names of species such as Sylvilagus audubonii (the Desert, or Audubon’s, Cottontail) or Setophaga townsendi (Townsend’s Warbler), how many will understand that the name Edalorhina perezi (Pérez’s Snouted Frog) refers to the Nineteenth Century Spanish entomologist and malacologist Laureano Pérez Arcas?
Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, and Michael Grayson, FZSL certainly do, and in their most recent eponym dictionary The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians they catalog and explain the many fascinating stories behind the people, characters, and organizations whose names have been applied to the world’s amphibians.
This is the fourth eponym dictionary for which Boelens and Watkins have joined forces, and the third for which Grayson has made that duo a trio. While the previous works have been published by Yale University Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press respectively, this most recent of the team’s dictionaries is published by Pelagic Publishing.