Stephen Blair Hedges

Stephen Blair Hedges (known as S. Blair Hedges) is a professor of evolutionary biology and a herpetologist at the Center for Biodiversity at Temple University, where he is the director. He was at Pennsylvania State University from 1988 to 2014.

Hedges has an Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree from George Mason University (1981), and a Masters (1984) and Ph.D. in Zoology (1988) from the University of Maryland. While an undergraduate he worked at the Smithsonian Institution. He joined Penn State in 1988 and then Temple in 2014. He is also a founding member of the astrobiology group at NASA. He has published over 276 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. He was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 for "revealing connections between biological evolution and Earth history in diverse groups of organisms", and was awarded the 2011 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences.

Taxonomy

Hedges has described over 124 new species of reptiles, amphibians and butterflies. He first visited Jamaica in 1986 with a team led by Ronald Crombie, who said that "his interpretations of Jamaican species have been controversial". His colleagues Alberto Estrada and Rodolfo Ruibal noted that "During the 1990s major contributions to the Cuban herpetofauna were made by S. Blair Hedges". While conducting fieldwork in the islands of the West Indies Hedges has discovered three of the smallest species (at the time) of reptiles and amphibians, including the Barbados threadsnake, Sphaerodactylus ariasae (a gecko), and the Monte Iberia eleuth (a frog). The frog Eleutherodactylus blairhedgesi was named after him by his collaborator, Cuban zoologist Alberto R. Estrada, and another of his discoveries, Eleutherodactylus dolomedes, is known as the Hedges' Robber Frog.

Hedges' work on molecular clocks led to a re-estimation of the origin of mammalian and avian orders to 100 million years ago, and the origin of land plants to 700 million years ago. He reclassified Caribbean skink species after finding hidden diversity in museum specimens by genetic analysis, identifying 33 new species. Hedges and his team produced a spiral tree of life in 2015 to visualize the relationships over time of 50,000 species.

Conservation

He has discovered several new species of Haitian frogs, and initiated a captive breeding program to conserve endangered species at Philadelphia Zoo. His work on preserving Haitian animal and plants specimens in a cryobank at Temple University was filmed for the documentary Extinction in Progress. His scientific and conservation work has led to the establishment of three national parks in Haiti.

Hedges' Nature piece "Biogeography:The coelacanth of frogs" was selected by the journal as one of their seven best News and Views articles of 2003, saying it "Does full justice to a cracking story, which at first sight seems of specialist interest only, taking in three disparate themes."

• S. Blair Hedges, Sudhir Kumar, eds. (April 23, 2009). The Timetree of Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199535035.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)

• Lincoln, Tim (December 18, 2003). "A magnificent seven" (PDF). Nature. Archived from the original on 2003. Retrieved March 20, 2015. 
• "News and Views: A magnificent seven". Retrieved March 20, 2015. 

Hedges is interested in Renaissance art, which led him to conduct several scientific studies of early artwork, including the development of a method for dating old printsand a study on the historical biogeography of beetles based on the holes they bored in old books.