Fei Liang (L) and Ye Changyuan observe a frog sample at their office in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, Jan. 14, 2021. Fei Liang, 84 years old, and Ye Changyuan, 82, are both researchers at the Chengdu Institute of Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The elder couple have been doing herpetological research for 60 years. Due to the need of their work, they often had to stay in the wild for more than half a year. Among the 117,000 samples displayed inside the Herpetological Museum of the Chengdu Institute of Biology, nearly half of the samples were collected or sorted by Fei. After retirement in the 1990s, the couple continued to work, for another 20 plus years so far. In the past 60 years, they have published some 200 papers and 28 monographs, with over 15,000 illustrations. They also discovered 72 new species and established 24 new genera, 15 new tribes, 6 new subfamilies, one new family. In 2016, their English monograph "Amphibians of China" (Volume One) was officially published. They have also finished the Volume Two draft and will hand it to the publishing house in 2021. They plan to finish the Volume Three in three or four years. "We have to work against time as we want to list all the knowledge we accumulated through the whole life, in a bid to make China's herpetological research internationally compatible." (Xinhua/Liu Kun)
