science in 2000 and joined at the Amphibian Evolution Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and obtained his second PhD, this time in Amphibian Systematics. In less than a decade of his professional career as an amphibian systematist, Biju's efforts have already thrown up over 100 new species and formally described 96 new species, eight new genera and two new families of amphibians. Remarkable among his discoveries are the entirely new and famed purple frog family Nasikabatrachidae from the Western Ghats of India, published in the journal Nature. This discovery was heralded as a once-in-a-century find because the last time a new family of amphibians was described was almost 100 years ago. His second discovery of a new amphibian family was in 2012, the Chikilidae, popularly called tailless burrowing caecilians or chikilids, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B. This discovery was called the 'discovery of the year' and 'another giant scientific discovery'. Both these discoveries of ancient lineages (both the families about 140 million years old) shed significant light on the biogeographic history of the Earth, particularly that of the Gondwana, and in understanding the present-day continental distribution patterns of organisms–while the closest relatives of the purple frog lives 3,000 km across the Indian Ocean in the Seychelles, that of the chikilids is found 7,000 km in Africa. Notable among his new species discoveries are India's first canopy frog Raorchestes nerostgona; India's smallest tetrapod Nyctibatrachus minimus, a frog whose adults do not grow more than 10 mm; and Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, the famed purple frog. A critical aspect of Biju's work has been the combination of molecular techniques with traditional approaches bringing on par with the international practice in amphibian research. His efforts have resolved long-standing taxonomic and systematic problems and confusions in difficult amphibian groups: the bush frogs Philautus and night frogs Nyctibatrachus. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to India's modern amphibian systematics, scientists named a frog after him Polypedates bijui. Biju's tireless endeavor brought the Indian amphibians into global limelight. The world was taken by surprise to see a frog featured on the cover of a largely macro-economics and business magazine, The Economist, London. Conservation career Biju's conservation concern for the rapidly vanishing amphibians, incidentally the world's most threatened vertebrate group led to the creation of two important conservation initiatives in India. The Western Ghats Network of Protected Areas of Threatened Amphibians (WNPATA), a network