BASIC FACTS -
Some basic facts for the Pig-Nosed Frog more commenly known as the Purple Frog is that the Purple Frog is 8cm long and 142g. This species of frog was
thought to have gone extinct a long time ago they were just found in a field close to Kerala Forest Research Institute at Peechi near Thrissur town in Kerala.
The purple frog was originally thought to belong to a unique family called Nasikabatrachidae, but was incorporated as a subfamily into the larger
Sooglossidae family in 2006. Its closest relatives are the Seychelles frogs, the ancestors of which were present on the Indo-Madagascan land mass with
the purple frog’s predecessors when it broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana 120 million years ago. Formally discovered in 2003, the purple
frog spends most of the year underground, surfacing only to breed during the monsoon. This species is threatened by ongoing forest loss for coffee,
cardamom and ginger plantations.
The purple frog used to be considered the only surviving member of an ancient amphibian family called the Nasikabatrachidae, but in 2006 this family wasincorporated into the Sooglossidae. Up until around 120 million years ago in the early Cretaceous period, India was joined to the eastern part of the ancient
southern supercontinent Gondwana, which subsequently split apart into Australia, Antarctica, India, Madagascar and the Seychelles over millenia of
movement of the earth’s plates. The closest relatives of the purple frog are four tiny frog species found in the Seychelles in the Sooglossidae family. In their
phylogenetic study of the purple frog in 2003, S. D. Biju and Franky Bossuyt (respectively of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute, Kerala and
the Free University of Brussels) reported that the origin of the Sooglossidae/Nasikabatrachidae lineage occurred around 182 million years ago. It is thought
that these two amphibian lineages diverged an estimated 134 million years ago form a common ancestor that inhabited Gondwana prior to the break up of
this land mass. These frogs were therefore sharing the earth with the dinosaurs for 70 million years and started to evolve independently before the
common ancestor of the elephant and the human.
The ancestors of the Seychelles frogs and the purple frog were present on the Indo-Madagascan land mass as it broke away from Gondwana and drifted
through the movement of the earth’s plates for over 50 million years. Around 65 million years ago the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, the Seychelles split
away from India and the ensuring plate movements separated the purple frogs from their closest relatives by around 2,500 km of Indian Ocean. The purple
frog is therefore the only representative of a lineage that has been evolving independently for over 130 million years, has survived the break up of a
continent and the extinction of the dinosaurs.
