Welcome back to Project Frog! A surprising amount has happened since the close of fieldwork in Cameroon in August 2006. In the fall of 2006, Dave returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin work on the specimens collected during the 2006 fieldwork and to enter the final stretch of his Ph.D. research.

2008 was a busy year: Dave defended his Ph.D. in February (on Leap Day no less—certainly not just a funny frog coincidence); designed and taught the laboratory section for Harvard’s first herpetology course; along with his wife (and 2006 team member) Katie, he welcomed a new member of the family with the birth of their son (Mo Blackburn); and then relocated to Lawrence, Kansas. Dr. Dave Blackburn is now a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, where he continues to work on the evolutionary history of African amphibians.

The work done by the field team in 2006 has resulted in many new discoveries. This includes finding new populations of threatened amphibian species, identifying the tadpole stage of many threatened frog species, figuring out that juveniles and adults of the tiny tree toad Nectophryne batesii look very different, and discovering a number of frog species that are completely new to science. In fact, the research on this material is still far from finished! For example, there are still quite a few new species waiting to be described; at least a few of these will be discovered by Dave’s colleague Breda Zimkus, who is nearly done with her Ph.D. at Harvard (and also works on African frogs). All of the work by Dave’s team and other collaborating researchers will have important consequences for conserving African amphibians and for developing a better understanding of their history.

One important part of “doing science” is communicating your discoveries. The main way that this is done is through publishing scientific papers in journals. These journals are then read by researchers around the world. But this process of writing scientific papers is not always a simple one! It takes a lot of hard work to make sure that the science is explained and communicated in the best possible way. Over the past two years, Dave and his colleagues have published a number of papers based on the Project Frog work done in Cameroon in 2006. These include descriptions of new species that are found only on Mt. Manengouba (see updates from July 16, 2006 and July 23, 2006), a study of the evolutionary

The hills of the inside of the Mount Manengouba Crater, about 5550 feet above sea level, Southwest Province, Cameroon. Mt. Manengouba is home to several frog species that are found there and many others that are found only in Cameroon.

Dave has also been spending time working on frogs from other places in Africa (such as the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania), finding new places to conduct field research, and developing new research projects. To continue the work that he has started Cameroon in 2004 and 2006, Dave is traveling to Nigeria in April 2009 to make a first study of the frogs found in the far-east of the Nigeria.

Stay tuned for more on this soon!