Frog find

Natural History, Feb, 2004 by Stephan Reebs

Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis is one weird-looking frog. Known from a single female collected in 2000 near a cardamom plantation in India, the species has a round body nearly three inches long, unusually short limbs, very small eyes, and a small head ending in a pointed snout. S.D. Biju of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in Trivandrum, India, and Franky Bossuyt of Vrije University in Brussels, Belgium, have examined the specimen inside and out, and analyzed its DNA to boot. Their conclusion is that the critter represents a brand-new family (not merely a new genus or species) of frog, the first such discovery since 1926.

Its closest relatives appear to be frogs from another family that occurs on just two islands of the Seychelles. Genetically, the two amphibian groups separated 130 million years ago. But physically, they parted ways 65 million years ago, when the Seychelles broke away from the Indian subcontinent as the latter (itself a fragment of the supercontinent Gondwana) migrated northward toward Asia. ("New frog family from India reveals an ancient bio-geographical link with the Seychelles," Nature 425: 711-14, October 16, 2003)