The American Museum of Natural History's Department of Herpetology, founded in 1909 as the Department of Ichthyology and Herpetology (herpetology is the branch of zoology dealing with reptiles and amphibians; ichthyology deals with fishes), has its roots in 19th-century global expeditionary biology. Mary C. Dickerson, author of an influential introduction to the natural history of frogs (The Frog Book, 1906, Doubleday), formed the Museum's Herpetology Department as a separate entity ten years later, and it continues today as one of the world's foremost centers of research on reptiles and amphibians. The Department's curators, researchers, and students maintain active research programs in the taxonomy and evolutionary biology of worldwide reptiles and amphibians, and in the theory and practice of determining the evolutionary relationships among organisms.

The Museum's collection of amphibians and reptiles, one of the most heavily used herpetological resources in the world, ranks among the world's five largest such collections. The collection maintains more than 360,000 specimens representing more than 6,900 species (more than half the world's known species) of frogs, toads, salamanders, alligators, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, turtles, and more, from Africa, Australia, China, Madagascar, Mexico, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands, Pakistan, Panama, South America, the United States, and Vietnam. The oldest specimen in the collection is a scale from a fence lizard dating to the Pleistocene Epoch (28,000 years ago) found in a fossilized mammal nest. Some of the tiniest objects in the collection include frog and toad larvae, while the largest is an eight-foot-long Crocodylus novaeguineae from Indonesia housed in one of the collection's 126 tanks. A gecko that was wrapped in an Egyptian mummy dating to 2010 B.C. is the oldest whole reptile specimen in the collection. Other highlights include jawbones from about 300 reptile specimens and rare specimens acquired in 1870 from the estate of Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied, the great explorer of coastal Brazil and of the Missouri River.

Along with the Department's collection, the Museum's herpetologists avail themselves of the Museum's molecular laboratories, which house three DNA sequencers as well as a powerful, highly sophisticated parallel-computing facility. The facility enables Museum herpetologists to develop phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, from massive amounts of data that range from fossil traits to DNA sequences. The Museum's frozen tissue collection, with a one-million-sample capacity, also supports a broad range of research in herpetological genomics. The Department of Herpetology has recently deposited more than 10,000 tissue samples in this facility.

The recent research of the Department's curators has yielded a number of significant findings. Darrel R. Frost, Associate Dean of Science for Collections and Curator-in-Charge, studies the evolutionary origin and diversification of reptiles and amphibians. He maintains a comprehensive online catalog of the world's living amphibians, the Amphibian Species of the World database, which allows scientists from around the world to keep track of the rapid advances in knowledge of global frog diversity. Dr. Frost started to develop this project in 1980 and continually updates this online reference to make it readily useful to professional herpetologists. Some 8,000 researchers access the database monthly, and it is widely used by herpetologists in the developing world and by collections managers. In the past ten years especially, Dr. Frost has brought the online catalog to a new level of sophistication by including enormous amounts of new literature on species, identifying synonymies (all the available names for a particular species), adding the 48 percent of all amphibian species described since 1985, expanding abstracts of relevant taxonomic literature, and adding English (or common) names to the database. In 2000, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an organization that oversees an international agreement to ensure that trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival, adopted the Amphibian Species of the World online database as an official reference on amphibian taxonomy.

Dr. Frost and his colleagues recently completed the largest analysis ever of the evolutionary relationships among all living amphibians; in fact, it is the largest analysis of its kind of any group of vertebrate animals. The resulting evolutionary tree will provide biologists with a dramatically improved basis and common language for addressing questions about amphibian evolution, life histories, biodiversity, global distribution, conservation, and extinction. Dr. Frost has also published extensively on the evolutionary relationships among the entire group of New World lizards called Iguania, comprising about 1,000 species in the Americas, Madagascar, Fiji, and Tonga. He also has published research on the study of the grounds of knowledge in systematic and evolutionary biology, such as the notion of "species" used in these fields.

Christopher J. Raxworthy, Associate Dean of Science for Education and Exhibition and Associate Curator, studies the species relationships among chameleons. He also is interested in the applications of geographic information systems (GIS) for identifying the distribution of reptile species, which is useful for setting conservation priorities. Most recently, Dr. Raxworthy and his colleagues have used the Remote Sensing/GIS Laboratory overseen by the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation to develop a modeling approach that has successfully predicted the geographic distribution of 11 chameleon species in Madagascar. The models, based on satellite data and specimen locality data from museum collections, also correctly predicted the existence of previously unknown areas of chameleon distribution, which included 7 chameleon species new to science. This discovery suggests that for poorly explored regions, satellite data and data from museum collections can help identify promising places to survey for new species—an exciting development, especially beneficial to the conservation community.

The Department's impressive curatorial and scientific support staff, combined with its vast specimen collection and related research facilities, promises a future of significant and fascinating advances in the study of reptile and amphibian evolution and life histories.