Despite the active ongoing taxonomic progress on the Madagascar frogs, the amphibian inventory of this hyper-diverse island is still very far from being complete. More new species are constantly being discovered, often within already well-studied areas. So, in one of the relatively well-studied parks in northern Madagascar, a new species of diamond frog, Rhombophryne ellae, was found in 2017. Now, the discovery is published in the open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.
aitik Patel and Dr Abhijit Das of the Wildlife Institute of India came up with one of the very first non-invasive approaches to identify individual frogs using photos from their natural habitats, which are then processed with the animal recognition software HotSpotter. Their unique method is described in the open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal Herpetozoa.
Eleven new to science species of rain frogs are described by two scientists from the Museum of Zoology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in the open-access journal ZooKeys. Discovered in the Ecuadorian Andes, the species are characterized in detail on the basis of genetic, morphological, bioacoustic, and ecological features. On the one hand, the publication is remarkable because of […]
A new species of puddle frog has just been discovered by NYU Abu Dhabi researchers at the unexplored and isolated Bibita Mountain in southwestern Ethiopia. The research team named the new species Phrynobatrachus bibita sp. nov., or Bibita Mountain dwarf puddle frog, inspired by its home. In summer 2018, NYU Abu Dhabi Postdoctoral Associates Sandra […]
A new treefrog species was discovered during a two-week expedition to a remote tabletop mountain at Cordillera del Cóndor, a largely unexplored range in the eastern Andes. “To reach the tabletop, we walked two days along a steep terrain. Then, between sweat and exhaustion, we arrived to the tabletop where we found a dwarf forest. […]
The frogs living in the rainforest of Sumatra also represent a new genus Indonesia, a megadiverse country spanning over 17,000 islands located between Australia and mainland Asia, is home to more than 16% of the world’s known amphibian and reptile species, with almost half of the amphibians found nowhere else in the world. Unsurprisingly, biodiversity […]
Two new treefrog species were discovered in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. Both had been previously misidentified as another superficially identical species. Curiously, one of them received a name translating to ‘demon’ or ‘devil’. The second one was named in honor of famous American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, because of his masterpiece A […]
In the Neotropics, there is a whole group of so-called glassfrogs that amaze with their transparent skin covering their bellies and showing their organs underneath. A recently discovered new species from Amazonian Ecuador, however, goes a step further to fully expose its heart thanks to the transparent skin stretching all over its chest as well […]
While there are already a number of species named after famous British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough, including mammals, reptiles, invertebrates and plants, both extinct and extant, not until now has the host of the BBC Natural History’s Life series been honoured with an amphibian. A new fleshbelly frog, recently discovered in the Peruvian […]
The critically endangered Nimba toad is long known for its exceptional reproductive biology. The females of this unique species give live birth to fully developed juveniles, having for nine months continuously provided nutrition to the foetuses in the womb (matrotrophy). While live birth (viviparity) among frogs and toads is rather an exception than a common […]
