Miniaturized frogs form a fascinating but poorly understood group of amphibians. They have been exceptionally prone to taxonomic underestimation because when frogs evolve small body size they start to look remarkably similar – so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are.
New staple-size frog is one of the tiniest ever discovered
How many ways can you say “tiny?” Miniature, miniscule, and minimum? These adjectives not only describe three new species of frog from Madagascar, but also serve as their official scientific names. Mini mum, Mini ature, and Mini scule “are astronomically small,” says Mark Scherz, an evolutionary biologist at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany, who described these and two other new tiny frog species in a new study published recently in the journal PLoS ONE. Mini is an all-new genus of frog.
“You could sit the brain on....
