| Title | Meet India's Starry Dwarf Frog - a Species With no Close Relatives | |
| Date | Friday March 22 2019, @09:43AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the it's-not-easy-being...-brown? dept. | ||
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/india-starry-dwarf-frog-species-no-close-relatives
A tiny new frog species discovered in tropical forests of southwest India has been one of a kind for millions of years.
Palaniswamy Vijayakumar and his colleagues first spotted the new species one night in 2010 while surveying frogs and reptiles roughly 1,300 meters up in India’s Western Ghats mountain range. The frog hardly stood out — its brown back, orange belly and starlike spots acted as camouflage against the dark hues and water droplets on the forest floor. And at only 2 to 2.9 centimeters long, “it can sit on your thumb,” says Vijayakumar, a biogeographer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Dubbed the starry dwarf frog by the team, the frog didn’t seem special among the dozens of other possibly new species discovered on the trip. But analysis of its DNA, anatomy and geographic distribution told a different story. The frog represents the sole known species of a lineage dating back 57 million to 76 million years ago, the researchers report March 12 in PeerJ. That’s around when the Indian subcontinent was merging with Asia after breaking away from Madagascar.
S. P. Vijayakumar et al. A new ancient lineage of frog (Anura: Nyctibatrachidae: Astrobatrachinae subfam. nov.) endemic to the Western Ghats of peninsular India. PeerJ. Published online March 12, 2019. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6457.
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printed from SoylentNews, Meet India's Starry Dwarf Frog - a Species With no Close Relatives on 2024-04-25 12:06:35