This Toad Is So Tiny That They Call It a Flea
The New York Times
A “toadlet” in Brazil is the second-smallest vertebrate known to exist on the planet.
At 6.95 tiny millimeters in length, this creature could fit on your fingertip. It is smaller than several ant species. While it sounds like a cricket, it’s not an insect: It’s an extremely small frog.
The recently discovered animal is one of the smallest known vertebrates on Earth.
“We are talking about the limits of life size on Earth,” said Luís Felipe Toledo, a herpetologist at the University of Campinas in Brazil.
He and colleagues described the frog in a study published last week in the journal PeerJ, naming it Brachycephalus dacnis after the Dacnis conservation project through which it was spotted.
Dr. Toledo got his first hint about the very tiny frog when a colleague shared several audio recordings of miniature frog species he was collecting in the Atlantic forest of Brazil. As soon as he listened, he knew he was hearing something novel.
“Oh, that’s actually two species that you have in your hands,” Dr. Toledo recalls saying.
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