Human civilization may be a grand 6,000 years old, but lot of things on our lovely little blue marble remain undiscovered. Case-in-point: the Bhupathy Purple Frog. While belonging to the frog family, this newly discovered species of frog looks remotely like the amphibian family it belongs to. Scientists have discovered the frog dwelling in the Western Ghats mountain range in southwestern India, but instead of naming it based on the region the creature was found, it was named after the late herpetologist Dr. Subramaniam Bhupathy who perished at Ghats in 2014.
Anywho, according to a report, this species of frog never see the day of the light, spending its life exclusively underground and feeding on insects in the ground using its flute-like tongue that sucks like a vacuum. Having not exposed to the natural environment above ground, it is not surprising that the frog kind of hideous, or it is hideous by frog standards. I don’t know what to make of it when I first saw the images. Is it a fur-less guinea pig, or is it really a frog because it absolutely look nothing like it. And oh, it has a four-pulse call as oppose three made by ‘regular’ purple frogs.
Now, here’s an intriguing thing about this discovery: Indian purple frogs are known species, specially in the Ghats mountains range, but this rather grotesque amphibian his not. Though it is called purple frog, it is anything but purple, which you may have already noticed. More importantly, its existence reaffirms the theory of continental drift that scientists have been debating for decades. Basically, researchers concluded that little guinea pig frog is a probable evidence that India may once part of ancient land mass called Gondwana (and vice versa) that included modern day Seychelles because Bhupathy Purple Frog’s closest relatives happens are found on Seychelles.
Yes. It seems that the two continents have drifted that far. Hard to imagine, right? What’s more, the newly discovered creature has an entirely different DNA and genetic to the purple frog in southwestern India which means, Bhupathy Purple Frog could not have been the relative of the purple frogs found in India and therefore they must have migrated somehow, and hence the theory of a continental drift being the only way that could have separated the related species.
Sounds like sound theory to me, unless there are undiscovered ‘talents’ that we didn’t know about tiny piggy here. Who knows, perhaps they could teleport? Or perhaps, some ancient Homo sapiens brought it with them as they trekked from Gondwana to India? From what I see, much more ties need to be established to confirm this (the continental drift). But what do I know, right? I am just a person sitting behind a computer, furiously tapping on a keyboard.
Images and source: All That Is Interesting.
