A recently discovered purple frog delights scientists — not because it’s odd looking and oddly colored, but because it explains frog evolution:
Scientists have given it the name Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, from the Sanskrit word for nose (nasika); batrachus, meaning frog; and Sahyadri, the name for its mountain home.
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“It is an important discovery because it tells us something about the early evolution of advanced frogs that we would not know otherwise because there are no fossil records from this lineage,” says Franky Bossuyt, of Free University of Brussels, Belgium.Bossuyt and colleague S D Biju, of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in Kerala, say N. sahyandrensis is related to a family of frogs in the Seychelles called Sooglossidae.
DNA analysis suggests the common ancestor of the animals lived 130 million years ago, when the planet’s landmasses were joined together into a giant supercontinent called Gondwana.