A Survey of the Frogs of Honduras

Abstract

The amphibian faunae of most of the Middle Americas are well known through the works of Smith and Taylor (1948Mexico), Stuart (1963Guatemala), Schmidt (1941British Honduras), Mertens (1952El Salvador), Taylor (1952, 1954, 1955, and 1958Costa Rica) and a series of small papers by Dunn between the years 1931 and 1937 which treated certain aspects of the fauna of Panama. The amphibian faunae of Honduras and Nicaragua are, in comparison, very poorly known. That these countries lack extensive and well differentiated mountainous areas further reduces the possibility of large numbers of endemic species, as is the case in Costa Rica and Mexico. Noble (1918) and Gaige, Hartweg and Stuart (1937) have provided brief reports on the fauna of Nicaragua and Dunn and Emlen (1932) and Schmidt (1933, 1936, and 1939) have paid some attention to the fauna of Honduras. This report is concerned with the anurans of Honduras, based largely upon the Archie Carr collection in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as well as lesser collections in the Chicago Natural History Museum (CNHM), Brigham Young University collections (BYU) and the Michigan State University museum collections (MSU). We are grateful to Drs. Richard G. Zweifel, Robert F. Inger, Wilmer W. Tanner and Roland Baker for the loan of material as well as Dr. Doris M. Cochran, United States National Museum (USNM), Dr. Charles F. Walker, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) and Dr. Ernest E. Williams, Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) for information on certain specimens.