My research focusses on how past climatic and tectonic changes have shaped the evolutionary histories of vertebrates occurring in some of the main aquatic and terrestrial habitats of sub-Sahara Africa. The used detailed phylogeographical approach contributes to the unraveling of the evolutionary histories of these faunas, facilitates the biodiversity inventory of these often poorly documented vertebrate faunas, and allows us to study the speciation mechanisms that generated fascinating species assemblages and to investigate their role in the distribution of zoonotic diseases.