India’s starry dwarf frog, lone member of newly discovered ancient lineage

But the starry dwarf frog nearly got overlooked in the crush of new species that Vijayakumar and his then-doctoral supervisor Kartik Shanker were finding on a series of expeditions to the Western Ghats, a 1,000-mile-long mountain range along India’s southwestern coast. The isolated hill ranges of India’s Western Ghats act much like islands, preserving lineages of frogs that are found nowhere else, such as Astrobatrachus kurichiyana. Blackburn and Stanley could instantly compare the starry dwarf frog’s bone structure to other frog species from the Western Ghats that have been imaged as part of the openVertebrate project, known as oVert, an initiative to scan 20,000 vertebrates from museum collections.

Source: www.phys.org