organism: Scaphiopus couchii
description: Couch's spadefoot toad or Couch's spadefoot (Scaphiopus couchii) is a species of North American spadefoot toad (family Scaphiopodidae). The specific epithet couchii is in honor of American naturalist Darius Nash Couch, who collected the first specimen while on a personal expedition to northern Mexico to collect plant, mineral, and animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. Couch's spadefoot is native to the United States southwest of southeastern Colorado and central Oklahoma, northern Mexico and the Baja peninsula. They can be found throughout the Sonoran Desert, which includes parts of southern Arizona and California. This sample of a male individual from Portal, Arizona was procured by Ivan Gomez-Mestre to generate transcriptome data for the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Sequencing and genome assembly were conducted at the Vertebrate Genome Lab (VGL) at the Rockefeller University, led by Erich D. Jarvis, Giulio Formenti, and Jennifer Balacco.