NEW GOLDEN FROG SPECIES DISCOVERED IN COLOMBIA

Scientists have discovered a new species of pale-gold colored frog from the cloud forests of the high Andes in Colombia. Its name, Pristimantis dorado, commemorates both its color (dorado means 'golden' in Spanish) and El Dorado, a mythical city of gold eagerly sought for centuries by Spanish conquistadores in South America.

The extraordinarily diverse group to which the new species belongs to, Pristimantis, includes 465 recognized species, 205 of them from Colombia. The mountainous terrain of the Andes probably led to the evolution of so many different ground-dwelling frogs, in which the eggs develop directly into tiny baby frogs without going through a tadpole phase. At seven-tenths of an inch long, the species is among the smaller in the group.

The largest species grow to be two inches in length.

Males of many frog species advertise for females with distinctive calls produced by vocal sacs or vocal slits. Oddly, although the new species lacks these structures, males are still able to produce calls consisting of an irregularly pulsed series of clicks.

The new species was found calling from bushes along a roadside at about 8,700 feet elevation near Chingaza National Park, roughly 10 miles east of Bogotá, Colombia's capital and largest city. Its discovery so close to a metropolitan area of nearly 10 million inhabitants illustrates how much of the planet's biodiversity remains to be discovered.

Thanks to: sciencedaily.com