Next time we hear a frog croak, let’s say thank you!

Not many of us would count frogs among the animals we love. Frogs do not figure anywhere near the top of the list even among animal lovers and conservation biologists. The phrase one often hears among conservationists is ‘charismatic mega-fauna’, and they tell us that these are easy to sell in conservation public relations. It is true that you cannot really hug and cuddle a frog and yet a frog has just put India prominently on the world map. The discovery of a unique frog being variously dubbed as the Jurassic frog, pig-nosed frog and the coelocanth of frogs, from the Western Ghats is justifiably causing ripples across the disciplines of biodiversity, vertebrate phylogeny and biogeography. Writing in a recent issue of Nature1, S. D. Biju of the Tropical Botanical Garden and Research Institute, Thiruvananthapuram and Franky Bossuyt of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, describe their discovery and point out why they have not only had to assign this frog to a new species but to a new genus and a new family as well. In a parallel study published in this issue of Current Science, Sushil K. Dutta of Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar, along with colleagues from the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun; Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore has described the same frog using similar morphometric and molecular techniques and arrived at pretty much the same conclusions.