New species

This month, no less than five new species of frog have been described by scientists from the Queensland and South Australian Museums and Griffith University, who published their results in Zootaxa.

Among the new species is one with a bird-poo-like appearance (above) when young that changes as it matures, and another named for its blood-red belly.

The study's lead author Steven Richards, an honorary researcher with the South Australian Museum, spent the last 30 years collecting the new specimens from Gulf Province and the New Guinea Highlands.

Key points:

The fossil of the amphibious Phiomicetus anubis was originally discovered in Egypt's Western Desert.

Its skull resembles that of Anubis, the ancient Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead after which it was named.

The ancestors of modern whales developed from deer-like mammals that lived on land over the course of 10 million years.

It lives in deep water near the US island of Guam in the western Pacific.

National Geographic Magazine says it's not seen very often and is a milky-yellow colour because it's so dark where it lives.

Professor Severus Snape is part of the name because he kept "one of the most important secrets in the story, just like the present new species which has eluded discovery until now, nearly 20 years after it was first collected".