hello, froggy

It may not look much like Kermit, being bloated and bright purple with a long, pointy nose, but a frog recently discovered in the mountains of southern India may well become the next big amphibian celebrity. Described by Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and S.D. Biju of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in India in the Oct. 16 Nature, the frog not only is a new species, but, according to the researchers, warrants the establishment of a whole new frog family of which it is the only member. Named Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis (Nasikabatrachus is a combination of Sanskrit and Latin meaning “frog with nose”), this “living fossil” diverged from its froggy ancestors during the time of the dinosaurs. In an accompanying commentary, S. Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University describes the frog as “a once-in-a-century find.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 10/21/2003.