Darrel Frost

Darrel Richmond Frost (born 1951) is an American herpetologist and systematist. He was previously head curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as president of both the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (2006).

Life Frost became interested in animals after witnessing his father kill a rattlesnake at the age of four. He earned a B.S. in biology from the University of Arizona in 1973, an M.S. in zoology from Louisiana State University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in ecology and systematics from the University of Kansas in 1988. He became an adjunct professor at Columbia University in 2000. He would later become curator-in-charge Frost later explained, "When I started in 1980 on the amphibian catalog, it had been a hundred years since this had been done. So it was an enormous amount of work to catch up because the number of amphibians had basically quadrupled." In 1985, the first edition was published in print. As of 2014, the website is visited more than a million times each year.

Frost was lead author of a 2006 study that recommended major taxonomic changes to the amphibian tree of life based on a phylogenetic analysis of 522 species, making it the largest phylogenetic analysis of a vertebrate group to date. Frost has worked in Guatemala, Ethiopia, Mexico, Peru, Namibia, South Africa and Vietnam,