Mountain creature — with ‘massive’ head and blue eyes — discovered as new species
High up on a remote mountain in South America lived some bumpy creatures with “massive” heads. As millennia after millennia ticked forward, these animals were seemingly left behind.
When scientists finally encountered these “relicts in the mist,” they discovered a new species.
Reaching the summit of the Neblina massif is not easy. The mountain is a “highly eroded sandstone plateau” that spans the Venezuela-Brazil border, according to a study published in the February volume of the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.
A team of researchers visited the remote peak for several days in 2017 to survey its wildlife, the study said. Researchers suspected there were “unique” — and possibly very old — animals living there.
And they were right.
Researchers captured 22 frogs that didn’t match any known records and quickly realized they’d discovered a “new, and yet seemingly ancient,” species: Caligophryne doylei, or Doyle’s mist frog.
Doyle’s mist frogs are considered “medium-sized,” reaching up to about 1.3 inches in length, the study said. They have “massive” heads with blue eyes and “slightly protruding” nostrils. Their “robust” bodies are covered in bumpy warts.
Photos show the color variation of Doyle’s mist frogs. One frog is a dull dirt brown with some lighter white patches near its mouth. Another is reddish brown with some black blotches.
Doyle’s mist frogs were found “in open grassy habitats” near the researchers’ campsite and between elevations of approximately 6,500 and 8,500 feet, the study said. One frog was seen “sitting next to, and seemingly guarding, a clutch of at least 11 round whitish eggs.”
So far, the new species has only been found on the Neblina massif, a tabletop mountain that spans the Venezuela-Brazil border.
Researchers said they named the new species after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because of his “influential novel ‘The Lost World’, in which he depicted ancient creatures surviving until the present era on the isolated summit of a remote table-top mountain, like (this) frog.”
The new species was identified by its skeleton, coloring, habitat, body shape and DNA, the study said. The new species had such “ancient” features that researchers classified it with a new family, Caligophrynidae, and new genus, Caligophryne.
The research team included Antoine Fouquet, Philippe Kok, Renato Sousa Recoder, Ivan Prates, Agustin Camacho, Sergio Marques-Souza, José Mario Ghellere, Roy McDiarmid and Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues.
The team also discovered another new species of frog, Neblinaphryne mayeri, on Neblina massif.
This story was originally published February 15, 2024 at 8:26 AM with the headline "Mountain creature — with ‘massive’ head and blue eyes — discovered as new species."
