Iguana 12.4 b&w text


268 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2005 COCHRAN

its status can be made. Crocodylus acutus is found in Cuba,
Hispaniola, Jamaica, Florida, and Central America.

SPECIES ERRONEOUSLY RECORDED 
FROM HISPANIOLA

The type of Spelerpes infuscatus Peters, now in the Berlin Museum
(No. 6556), supposedly from “Hayti,” has been positively iden-
tified by Dr. E. R. Dunn as Oedipus lineolus Cope and hence
must have come from Mexico (Dunn, 1926). The intensive col-
lecting done during the past few years leaves little expectation of
finding any endemic tailed amphibians in the West Indies.

Hispaniolan records of Eleutherodactylus auriculatus Cope
are undoubtedly based on misidentifications of the several small
frogs that bear quite a close resemblance to the rather variable
true auriculatus of Cuba.

Boulenger’s record of a Dendrobates trivittatus (1882, 
p. 145) from “S. Domingo” is probably based on an incorrect
locality record, as no true Dendrobates is to be expected so far
out of its range.

Doris Mable Cochran was a specialist in Neotropical
herpetology and was for many years the custodian of

the American national collection at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C. Her interest in natural
history began as a child growing up in a small town near
the shores of Lake Erie and, while still an undergraduate
at George Washington University (A.B. 1920, M.S. 1921),
she became Aide in the Division of Herpetology at the
United States National Museum. Although formally under
the curatorship of Leonhard Stejneger, Cochran was
responsible for the day-to-day administration of the her-
petological collections. In 1927, she became Assistant
Curator and, in 1942, Associate Curator, before formally
taking charge of the collections after Stejneger’s death in
1943. In the interim, she earned a Ph.D. at the University
of Maryland (1933) with a thesis on crab myology.
Eventually promoted to Curator in 1956, she retired in
1968, and died less than a month later.

Cochran’s research emphasized the herpetofaunas of
southeastern Asia, the West Indies, and South America,
particularly those of Brazil and Colombia. She published
nearly 90 titles from 1922–1970, most of them short tax-
onomic papers describing new genera (8) and species and
subspecies (125). Her interest in the West Indies spanned
a 20-year period and culminated in The Herpetology of
Hispaniola (1941). Subsequently, she focused most of her
attention on South American frogs, about which she pub-
lished many papers and two books, Frogs of Southeastern
Brazil (1954) and Frogs of Colombia (1970), the latter pub-
lished posthumously with her longtime collaborator,
Coleman J. Goin. She also wrote numerous semi-popuu-
lar articles and some wartime booklets for use by the mil-
itary. Her most widely known book was the profusely illus-
trated Living Amphibians of the World (1961), which was

translated into at least ten languages. The New Field Book
of Reptiles and Amphibians (1970), coauthored with Goin,
was not successful and never competed seriously with
existing North American field guides by Roger Conant
and Robert C. Stebbins.

B I O G R A P H I C A L  S K E T C H

Doris M. Cochran (1898–1968)1

Doris M. Cochran (photograph courtesy of Kraig Adler).

1 Source: Adler, K. 1989. Herpetologists of the past, pp. 5–141.
In K. Adler (ed.), Contributions to the History of Herpetology.
Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles,
Contributions to Herpetology, vol. 5. Ithaca, New York.

Cyclura cornuta (USNM No. 82107, from Petite Gonave Island,
Haiti). See also article on p. 222.