Purple frog delights scientists
It has to be one of the strangest looking frogs ever discovered.
The chubby, seven-centimetre-long, purple amphibian with a pointy snout was found hopping around in
the Western Ghats, a range of hills in western India.
Scientists have given it the name Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, from the Sanskrit word for nose
(nasika); batrachus, meaning frog; and Sahyadri, the name for its mountain home.
Its head appears too small for its body and it looks more like a squat, grumpy blob than a
living creature.
But to the scientists who describe it in the journal Nature, the frog is a beautiful find because of
what it tells them about Earth history.
"It is an important discovery because it tells us something about the early evolution of advanced
frogs that we would not know otherwise because there are no fossil records from this lineage," says
Franky Bossuyt, of Free University of Brussels, Belgium.
Read the rest at BBC news.bbc.co.uk3200214.stmOpen ↗
Includes a picture of the weird little fella
Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.