Frogs

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:

These little amphibians — in the genus Choerophryne — would shrivel and dry up in mere minutes in the hot sun, so they are most common in the rainy, cooler mountains.

Yet many isolated peaks, especially along northern New Guinea, have their own local species of these frogs.

So how did localised and distinctive species of these tiny frogs come to be on these isolated peaks, separated from each other by hotter, drier and rather inhospitable lowlands?