Steve Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Pacific in Stockton,
California and a Research Associate in the Department of Herpetology Herpetology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco,
California. Retired from teaching, he continues his research on the fauna and biogeography of Southwest Asia. He has published
many papers on the amphibians and reptiles of that area and is the author or coauthor of three books. He is Consulting Editor
for Fauna for Encyclopaedia Iranica. He has done field work in Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, as well
as in the deserts of North America.
I was born in Grand Canyon National Park in 1936. I spent most of my childhood in Rosemead California and attended the public
schools. Subsequently, I attended Riverside Community College, University of California at Riverside, University of California
los Angeles, San Francisco State College, and Stanford University.I became interested in the fauna of Southwest Asia when
I spent nine months in Iran in 1958 doing herpetological research that became the subject of my masters and doctoral degrees.
Most of my research has concentrated on the herpetology of Iran, and in 1975 I was envited to be a visiting scientist by the
Iran Department of Environment, helping to build the herpetology collection of the natural history museum in Tehran. (See
my resumé page for further deatails and a bibliography of my published papers.)
In recent years I have been in contact with many researchers and students in Iran and elsewhere in Southwest Asia.
I began to see that it would be helpful to post a website that would begin to organize some of the new research on the
fauna and to introduce young and older researchers to one another to foster collaboration and exchange of ideas and information.
This site is now under construction and I encourage researchers and other interested people to bring publications, photos,
websites, and especially, links to pdf files to my attention. The initial emphasis will be on herpetology, especially
of Iran, but I will also post information on the vertebrate fauna of other countries as time and effort allow.
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