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7-cm Indian purple frog leaps 100 million yrs: The Indian Express
New Delhi, Oct 17: It`s just 7 cm long. It`s purple in colour. It looks like a balloon and lives a metre below the surface. It`s a frog. Hitherto unknown, it`s our very own though it has been around for a while: 140 million years.
New Delhi, Oct 17: It’s just 7 cm long. It’s purple in colour. It looks like a balloon and lives a metre below the surface. It’s a frog. Hitherto unknown, it’s our very own though it has been around for a while: 140 million years.
This new frog species, first spotted in 1998 in the cardamom plantations of Idukki district in Kerala, was around when dinosaurs roamed the earth. This frog’s only cousins are in Seychelles, 2,500 km away.
Scientists are hailing it as one of the most exciting discoveries for evolutionary science. In a report published in the latest issue of Nature magazine, scientists describe these creatures as ‘‘living fossil.’’
S D Biju of the Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram and Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels, who discovered the frog, say the amphibian belongs to a species that dates back more than 100 million years and originated in Indo-Madagascar, a mass of land that once incorporated India, Madagascar and Seychelles.
Molecular analysis done in a Hyderabad laboratory showed that they belonged to a family of which only four species are found on two islands in Seychelles. ‘ ‘This proves an ancient biogeographical link between these two fragments of Gondwana subcontinent broken some time in the early Cretaceous,’’ says the Nature article.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Biju, pursuing a second as a Royal Society Research Fellow in London, said: ‘‘It was an accidental discovery. But this information will be vital for evolutionary science as well as those studying the landmass theory.’’
The closest relatives of the new frog make a small colony on the Seychelles which split from the common landmass 65 million years ago. It supports the theory that millions of years ago, the ancestor of both frogs lived on a supercontinent which later split into several continents. This theory of a common landmass has been the subject of a great debate. The tiny frog has a reclusive lifestyle: it spends 50 weeks underground in a burrow, emerging only at the start of the monsoon season to breed. It uses its powerful forelimbs and hard snout to burrow into the soil. Excited scientists say these ‘‘living fossils’’ give them an opportunity to study a real animal in place of partially preserved fossil remains. The Western Ghats, where the frog was found, is only one of the eight biodiversity hotspots in the world which is home to unusual species found nowhere else. Spread over six states, the Ghats are home to over 10,000 species of flora and fauna.
S D Biju of the Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram and Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels, who discovered the frog, say the amphibian belongs to a species that dates back more than 100 million years and originated in Indo-Madagascar, a mass of land that once incorporated India, Madagascar and Seychelles.
Molecular analysis done in a Hyderabad laboratory showed that they belonged to a family of which only four species are found on two islands in Seychelles. ‘ ‘This proves an ancient biogeographical link between these two fragments of Gondwana subcontinent broken some time in the early Cretaceous,’’ says the Nature article.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Biju, pursuing a second as a Royal Society Research Fellow in London, said: ‘‘It was an accidental discovery. But this information will be vital for evolutionary science as well as those studying the landmass theory.’’
The closest relatives of the new frog make a small colony on the Seychelles which split from the common landmass 65 million years ago. It supports the theory that millions of years ago, the ancestor of both frogs lived on a supercontinent which later split into several continents. This theory of a common landmass has been the subject of a great debate. The tiny frog has a reclusive lifestyle: it spends 50 weeks underground in a burrow, emerging only at the start of the monsoon season to breed. It uses its powerful forelimbs and hard snout to burrow into the soil. Excited scientists say these ‘‘living fossils’’ give them an opportunity to study a real animal in place of partially preserved fossil remains. The Western Ghats, where the frog was found, is only one of the eight biodiversity hotspots in the world which is home to unusual species found nowhere else. Spread over six states, the Ghats are home to over 10,000 species of flora and fauna.