Amphibian Species of the World 5.1, an Online Reference

Versions and accessing old versions

Version. 1.0: June, 1985. Printed version.

Version 2.0: 22 July, 1999. First electronic version. Many corrections and additions. Reformatting of records and addition of synonymies as well as literature source of those synonymies. Reformulation of abstracts of relevant literature in comments. Unavailable for access.

Version 2.1: 15 November 1999. Many, many corrections made and querying speed much improved. Addition of taxonomic browsing. No longer available online. If you need access contact Mark Breedlove (markb AT amnh.org).

Version 2.20: 1 September 2000. Many corrections and additions to text made. Geographic querying improved. The distributions for many species, particularly in tropical Asia and Africa, are poorly known and their descriptions highly provisional. I have also made a large number of educated guesses as to the countries within which taxa might occur. Users are therefore cautioned to use the results of the geographic querying tool as a finding aid and not as an authoritative summary of taxa documented for any particular political unit. (This will have to wait until large numbers of research collections have placed their voucher data on the web and the quality of identifications in collections is drastically improved.) Because ‘common names’ (i.e., English coined names) are frequently requested/required for regulatory paperwork in the United States, English names that have previously been published or commonly used by CITES or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are included and searchable. (Many of these names are clumsy and wildly inappropriate but are included because of perceived need within the anglophone North American regulatory community.) First version to be linked to GenBank (http://www.marine.csiro.au/datacentre/taxonomy/tax_details.htm). No longer available online. If you need access contact Mark Breedlove (markb AT amnh.org).

Version 2.21: 15 July 2002. Many corrections and additions to text and improvements in geographic searching ability. Improved database software. Changes in subfamily organization of the Leptodactylidae and Hylidae. No longer available online. If you need access contact Mark Breedlove (markb AT amnh.org).

Version 3.0: 22 August 2004. New web interface and new database structure, as well as many corrections and additions. Improved geographic searching ability with the addition of Boolean searches.

Version 4.0: 17 August 2006. Counts of species for supraspecific taxa provided as well as many updates and additions.

Version 5.0: 1 February 2007. Many corrections and updates. Updated records. Improved searching of Google by using not only the preferred taxon name, but also common synonyms. (In effect, ASW now employs the power of the web and the database to circumvent the problems associated with using taxonomic names as indices to literature and images.)

Version 5.1: 10 October 2007. Many corrections and updates.