7xm This Toad Is So Tiny That They Call It a Flea
At 6.95 tiny millimeters in length7xm, this creature could fit on your fingertip. It is smaller than several ant species. While it sounds like a cricket, it’s not an insect: It’s an extremely small frog.
The recently discovered animal is one of the smallest known vertebrates on Earth.
“We are talking about the limits of life size on Earth,” said Luís Felipe Toledo, a herpetologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil.
He and colleagues described the frog in a study published last week in the journal PeerJ, naming it Brachycephalus dacnis after the Dacnis conservation project through which it was spotted.
Dr. Toledo got his first hint about the very tiny frog when a colleague shared several audio recordings of miniature frog species he was collecting in the Atlantic forest of Brazil. As soon as he listened, he knew he was hearing something novel.
“Oh, that’s actually two species that you have in your hands,” Dr. Toledo recalls saying.
ImageBrachycephalus dacnis sings like a cricket and does not have tadpoles.Credit...Lucas BotelhoBrazil’s Atlantic forest has many frogs of the Brachycephalus genus, which are known also as saddleback toads. Their penchant for springing around and leaping distances about 30 times their body length has led to the nickname “flea toadlets.”
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