An international team of researchers has discovered in the Amazon a species of ‘zombie frog’ with mottled orange skin that usually lives underground and that usually comes to the surface only when it is raining. communicates the Senckenberg Natural History Collection in Dresden, Germany.
That species, which has been identified as’Synapturanus zombie sp.‘, belongs to the genus Synapturanus and was discovered in French Guiana and northern Brazil. The amphibian is about 40 millimeters long, has a pointed snout and features small orange spots on a skin of the same hue.
📢 #Research news: “Zombie frog” discovered – three new species from the narrow-mouthed frog family described 🐸👉 You can find out more about the new frog species here: https://t.co/XVA2CbtqiT#SGNScience © ️Antoine Fouquet pic.twitter.com/wPnYWAffRZ
– SENCKENBERG (@Senckenberg) June 7, 2021
“The sounds of male frogs they can only be heard after or during heavy rains, “explains German herpetologist Raffael Ernst, co-author of the study on the discovery, published in the magazine Zoologischer Anzeiger. The ‘Synapturanus zombie sp.’ is one of the three species of the genus Synapturanus discovered by Ernst and his colleagues.
“Hard-to-reach habitats”
“So far it has been provided little scientific attention to this genus “, among other things, because their” habitats are difficult to access and their distribution areas are very small “, comments the German herpetologist. Furthermore,” their sounds are quite difficult to differentiate “, since the animals they hide underground.
“We assume that there are six times as many species Synapturanus than those we have described so far. Therefore, it remains a lot of work to do, especially because we still cannot conclusively assess the risk status of the species due to the complex situation of the data, “he concluded.
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