Date: January 3, 2019
Source: Pensoft Publishers
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 rivers had
blackwater and the frogs were sitting along them, on branches of brown shrubs
similar in color to the frogs' own. The frogs were difficult to find, because
they blended with their background," Alex Achig, one of the field
biologists who discovered the new species comments on the hardships of the
expedition.
Curiously, the frog has an
extraordinary, enlarged claw-like structure located at the base of the thumb.
Its function is unknown, but it could be that it is used either as a defence
against predators or as a weapon in fights between competing males.
Having conducted analyses of
genetic and morphologic data, scientists Santiago R. Ron, Marcel Caminer, Andrea
Varela, and Diego Almeida from the Catholic University of Ecuador concluded
that the frog represented a previously unknown species. It was recently
described in the open-access journal ZooKeys.
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