The first amphibian to officially be declared extinct has been rediscovered in Israel.
Israeli park ranger Yoram Malka caught only a fleeting glimpse of the frog as it leapt across the road, but he knew it was something special.
When he first saw the frog in northern Israel’s Hula Valley, Malka jerked his utility vehicle to a stop, bounded out of his seat, and jumped atop it, catching the creature in his hands.
The animal had a mottled backside and a black belly with white dots. It belonged to a species that most scientists thought had disappeared from the Earth more than half a century ago.
In fact, the Hula painted frog was the first amphibian to officially be declared extinct, in 1996. Prior to Malka’s 2011 encounter, the animal had not been spotted alive in nearly 60 years.
When Sarig Gafny, a river ecologist at Israel’s Ruppin Academic Center, received Malka’s cell phone picture of the frog, he recalled that “everything fell out of my hands.”
“I forgot about my fever, jumped into my car, and drove two hours north to see it,” said Gafny, the coauthor of a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications detailing the frog’s rediscovery.
Former Glory
The last confirmed sighting of the frog was in 1955, after the draining of the Hula Valley wetlands, only about a decade after the amphibian had been discovered. Survey trips dedicated to searching for the frog were launched as recently as 2004, but to no avail.
Since 2011, however, Gafny and his team have discovered several more specimens, bringing the tally of known Hula painted frogs up to 14.
Gafny says that there may be between 100 to 200 Hula painted frogs living in the Hula Valley. While not bad for a species once thought extinct, scientists think the frog’s range and population levels are greatly reduced from what they once were.
Based on detailed studies of DNA and skeletal morphology from recent specimens of the Hula painted frog, study author and Hebrew University of Jerusalem paleontologist Rebecca Biton has concluded that the species is the last living member of Latonia, a genus of frogs once found across Europe, as far west as Spain.
It had initially been catalogued within another frog genus, Discoglossus, when it was first discovered in the 1940s.
Fossils of Latonia frogs as old as two million years have also been found in Israel, but the group was thought to have died out more than 10,000 years ago.
Read the whole thing.
No doubt the palestinians will claim despite Israel’s genocidal attempts, their beloved Hula painted frog survives!
