The Book of Frogs

An up-to-date, beautifully illustrated, and beloved guide to six hundred of the world’s most fascinating frogs.

With almost nine thousand known species, frogs display a stunning array of forms and behaviors. A single gram of the toxin produced by the skin of the Golden Poison Frog can kill one hundred thousand people. Male Darwin’s Frogs carry their tadpoles in their vocal sacs for sixty days before coughing them out into the world. And the Wood Frogs of North America freeze every winter, reanimating in the spring.

The Book of Frogs documents the diversity and magnificence of all these anurans and many more. Readers meet six hundred of nature’s most fascinating frogs, with each entry including a distribution map, illustrations, species identification, natural history, and conservation status. Color photos show the frogs at their actual size—from Papua New Guinea’s diminutive Paedophryne amauensis, smaller than a coin, to Cameroon’s colossal Goliath Frog, heavier than some dogs. Written by experts Mark O’Shea and Tim Halliday and containing updated information on one hundred species and nearly twenty new entries, this revised edition will enthrall both veteran researchers and amateur herpetologists.

As frogs increasingly make headlines for their troubling worldwide decline, The Book of Frogs brings readers face to face with six hundred astonishingly unique and irreplaceable species that display a diverse array of adaptations to habitats that are ever changing.

Author Biography

Mark O’Shea MBE is professor of herpetology at the University of Wolverhampton. O’Shea hosted four seasons of O’Shea’s Big Adventure for Animal Planet/Discovery Channel and the UK’s Channel 4. He has conducted fieldwork on numerous tropical expeditions since 1983 and is a fellow of the Explorers’ Club of New York, the Royal Geographical Society, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Society of Biology. O’Shea has authored ten books, including The Book of Snakes, also published by the University of Chicago Press. In 2020 he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours “for services to higher education, zoology, reptile conservation and snakebite research.” He lives in Shropshire, England, twenty miles from the birthplace of Charles Darwin. Tim Halliday (1945–2019) was one of the world’s foremost authorities on amphibians. He was formerly professor of biology at the Open University and was International Director of the IUCN Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force for thirteen years.