James Arthur Peters (July 13, 1922 – December 18, 1972) was an American herpetologist and zoogeographer. He was born in Durant, Iowa, and raised in Greenup, Illinois. He studied at the University of Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biology in 1952. He studied with the herpetologist Norman Edouard Hartweg. His main subject of research was herpetology and zoogeography of Latin America, especially Ecuador. During his thirty years of research in herpetology he described 17 new species or subspecies, most of them amphibians, such as several neotropical toads of the genus Atelopus. Peters died of liver cancer in 1972 (Irish & Zug, 1982). Source: Wikipedia (en)