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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 1: Purple Frog Found in India

A frog once thought extinct, or even nonexistent, has been discovered in the Western Ghats mountains in Kerala, India.

The frog certainly looks far fetched--it's a purple creature with a round body, tiny head and eyes and a little whitish snout, and it only grows to only a few inches long. It burrows into the ground with its arms and pointy snout, and lives underground for all but 2 weeks of the year, when it emerges to mate.

That my be why it has taken scientists so long to find out it exists. The "new" species is really quite old--scientists think it has been around for about 140 million years, and lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. It has been found to be related to another family of frogs, Sooglossidae, that currently live in the Seychelles Islands, thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean.

Because the frog's closest relative lives so far away, the new purple frog is believed to be a link that helps scientists and researchers confirm theories on the existence of the supercontinent Gondwana, and of the date it may have separated into the smaller land masses of India, Australia, South America, Africa, and Antartica, and Madagascar and the Seychelles Islands.

The scientists who discovered the frog, a Belgian named Franky Bossuyt and an Indian scientist named S.D. Biju, published a report on the frog in the journal Nature. Scientists think the discovery is especially exciting because new discoveries are very rare--the last family was discovered in 1926.

--Written by Nia Williams

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