BERTHA LUTZ was a Brazilian herpetologist, activist, politician, and diplomat who spent much of her life and career advocating for women's rights in Brazil and around the world. She was born in 1894 in São Paulo, Brazil and completed her studies in natural sciences at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. Upon completion of her degree in 1918, Bertha returned to Brazil and was hired as Secretary of the Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. She conducted extensive fieldwork in Brazil, often with her father Adolfo Lutz, who was an infectious disease epidemiologist, microbiologist, and zoologist. Her formal contributions to herpetology were not published until after she was forty and yet over the course of her career, Bertha authored over 50 publications on Brazilian herpetofauna (Schulte and Rödder, 2016). She described over 60 species of anurans (e.g., Lutz and Bokermann, 1963; Lutz, 1966) and made important contributions to our understanding of...

You do not currently have access to this content.