After Jean-Louis Berlandier came William Hemsley Emory, another surveyor of Texas. Emory served on a Texas maping expedition. He wrote a report that included animals and plants of the Southwest. The Great Plains Rat Snake (Pantherophis e. emoryi) was named in his honor by Charles Frédéric Girard and Spencer Fullerton Baird in 1853.

In 1848, congress commissioned the US and Mexican Boundary Survey, William Hemsely Emory, Jean-Louis Berlandier, William Hemsley Emory, John Russell Bartlett, James D. Graham (Graham's Crayfish Snake was named in his honor), Darius Nash Couch (Couch's Kingbird and Couch's Spadefoot Toad was named in his honor) and Ferdinand Lindheimer (Texas Rat Snake was named in his honor, also known as Father of Texas Botany) all helped to collect specimens. The collections were later used by famous US herpetologists such as Edward Drinker Cope, Spencer Fullerton Baird and Charles Frédéric Girard to examine the diversity of US wildlife.

The title of "Father of Texas Herpetology" belongs to John Kern Strecker of Baylor University. Strecker was your stereotypical "nature kid" and soon became an authority of Texas natural history. He was appointed curator of the Museum of Baylor University at age 28 in 1903 and soon traveled all over Texas in search of vertebrates. Over his lifetime, he wrote over 100 publications, 60 of them were about reptiles. The Western Pigmy Rattlesnake(Sistrurus miliarius streckeri),Strecker's Chorus Frog (Pseudarcis s. streckeri) and Mexican Hooknose Snake (Ficimia streckeri) were named in his honor.

Also around 1890's, Clinton Hart Merriam commissioned Vernon Bailey and his associates to do a biological survey of Texas. This survey took a span of 16 years to complete. During this time, the group collected over five thousand specimens. Most of them were mammals and birds but reptiles, amphibians and plants were also surveyed. Detailed accounts of each species and type of habitat were noted. Other noted naturalists such as Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Albert Kenrick Fisher, Ned Hollister and Henry Philemon Attwater (Attwater's Prairie Chicken was named in honor of him). Mammalogist David J. Schmidly gives a good account of Merriam & Bailey's Texas survey in his book, Texas Natural History: A Century of Change. The Western Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus collaris baileyi) and a mountain peak at Big Bend National Park were named in honor of Vernon Bailey. Merriam's Canyon Lizard (Sceloporus m. merriami) was named in honor of Clinton H. Merriam.

In 1948, Dr. William Frank Blair arrived at the University of Texas and started a vertebrate collection that is one of the finest in the state. He took his students on several 4 to 6 week long collecting trips in West Texas from 1945 to 1965. On one particular trip in 1948, Dr. Blair and his students spent 37 days at C.E. Miller Ranch in Presidio County and collected 51 species.

More to come....