New Species of Purple Frog Found
A new species of frog has been discovered in India. The amphibian is plump, purple, and its ancestors probably lived among dinosaurs 175 million years ago, according to DNA analyses.
Two scientists, S.D. Biju of India, and Franky Bossuyt of Belgium, found the frog in the Western Ghats Mountains of Southern India. The new species, named Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, belongs to an entirely new family of frogs.
The frog’s closest relatives live 1,800 miles away on the islands of Seychelles, near Madagascar. So how did the species travel from Africa to India?
Not by hopping, say the researchers, but by continental drift. They speculate that when India broke apart from Africa and crashed into Asia millions of years ago, the frog rode India like a ferry.
The researchers found genetic markers in the new species suggesting a link between frogs in India and Seychelles.
“It’s amazing that this frog has turned up now,†says S. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who wrote an accompanying commentary to the study published in Nature.
Source: Genome News Network.
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