Ramit Singal was on a field survey for his citizen science initiative to protect the rocky laterite lands near the coastal town of Manipal in Karnataka when he spotted a thumbnail-sized frog with a call that sounded like a cricket's. Singal hadn’t seen a frog like it before and when he consulted other researchers, it turned out that they hadn't either. After studying the frog's genetics, body structure, colouration and vocalisation, Singal and his collaborators concluded that they had discovered a new frog species in the Western Ghats.
The frog, named Microhyla laterite after its habitat and described in a paper published in PLOS ONE on March 9, is just 1.6-cm long, pale brown with black markings, and is the latest in a long line of amphibian discoveries in India. A week earlier, another team of researchers discovered a species of bush frog in the Biligiri Rangaswamy mountain range, the southeastern offshoot of the Western ghats. In January, a team of biologists led by India’s most famous frog expert, Sathyabhama Das Biju, described a species of tree frog in Arunachal Pradesh that was =read more=http://scroll.in/article/805151/why-are-new-species-of-frog-being-discovered-so-often-because-there-are-so-many-of-them
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