 A Purple Relic
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Oct. 16, 2003 — Biologists said they have uncovered a new species of frog — a purple, snub-nosed, hamburger-shaped critter from India with an extraordinary genetic past.
The chubby, seven-centimeter (three-inch) beast has been dubbed Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, from the Sanskrit word for nose (nasika); batrachus, meaning frog; and Sahyadri, the name for the hills along the western Indian coast.
According to its discoverers, N. sahyadrensis is no ordinary frog.
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Indeed, in evolutionary terms, it is of royal lineage, being the very last representative of the kinds of frogs that hopped around the feet of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period more than 65 million years ago.
Its finders, S.D. Biju of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in Kerala and Franky Bossuyt, said N. sahyandrensis shares a genetic link with sooglossid frogs.
These frogs belong to a small, clannish family that lives in the Seychelles across the Indian Ocean.
The genetic resemblance supports the theory that, millions of years of ago, the common ancestor of both frogs lived on Gondwana, a "super-continent" in which the Earth's continents were glommed together, said the scientists.
Eventually, Gondwana split up into two landmasses, one comprising Africa and South America, the other comprising Australia, Antarctica and Indo-Madagascar.
The ancestors of the Nasikabatrachidae and Sooglossidae were on the Indo-Madagascan fragment.
This, in turn, broke up and drifted apart to form the Indian subcontinent and islands in the Indian Ocean, and the frogs evolved separately according to their habitat, the pair wrote in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly.
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