The rediscovered Hula painted frog is a living fossil

Abstract

Amphibian declines are seen as an indicator of the onset of a sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Because of a combination of factors such as habitat destruction, emerging pathogens and pollutants, over 156 amphibian species have not been seen for several decades, and 34 of these were listed as extinct by 2004. Here we report the rediscovery of the Hula painted frog, the first amphibian to have been declared extinct. We provide evidence that not only has this species survived undetected in its type locality for almost 60 years but also that it is a surviving member of an otherwise extinct genus of alytid frogs, Latonia, known only as fossils from Oligocene to Pleistocene in Europe. The survival of this living fossil is a striking example of resilience to severe habitat degradation during the past century by an amphibian.

New insights on phylogeography and distribution of painted frogs (Discoglossus) in northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula

“…Yet, several sites of close syntopy exist (Lanza et al, 1984(Lanza et al, , 1986Vences, Glaw and Hirschberger, 1996) and so far, no indication of hybridization has been published. In this case, the taxa concerned are phylogenetically distant (Lanza et al, 1984(Lanza et al, , 1986Fromhage, Vences and Veith, 2004;Pabijan et al, 2012;Biton et al, 2013), and differentiated both morphologically (Lanza et al, 1984;Clarke and Lanza, 1990;Capula and Corti, 1993;Clarke, 2007) and bioacoustically (Glaw and Vences, 1991). The other two cases are the contact zones which herein are characterized geographically in some detail.…”

“…The phylogeny and phylogeography of Discoglossus has been subject of numerous studies (Lanza et al, 1984(Lanza et al, , 1986García-Paris and Jockusch, 1999;Martínez-Solano, 2004;Real et al, 2005;Zangari, Cimmaruta and Nascetti, 2006;Velo-Antón et al, 2008;Pabijan et al, 2012;Biton et al, 2013). The available evidence strongly suggests D. montalentii being the sister taxon of all other species of Discoglossus, and a sister group relationship of D. g. galganoi and D. g. jeanneae.…”

“…Concatenated and species tree analyses of multigene DNA sequence data sets have provided concordant reconstructions of the evolutionary history of this genus (Pabijan et al, 2012;Biton et al, 2013), and we therefore refrained from phylogenetic analyses of our COB and RAG1 data set and instead opted for visualizing patterns of differentiation in the form of haplotype networks.…”

“…Among extant frogs, the sister taxon of Discoglossus is Latonia nigriventer (Mendelssohn and Steinitz, 1943) from Israel (Biton et al, 2013), and the Discoglossus-Latonia clade is sister to the midwife toads, Alytes Wagler, 1830 (Roelants and Bossuyt, 2005;Roelants et al, 2007;Biton et al, 2013). Discoglossus currently contains 5-6 extant species: D. montalentii Lanza, Nascetti, Capula and Bullini, 1984 D.…”

Quantifying the living fossil concept

“…We used two approaches for estimating time. First, we sourced large-scale timecalibrated phylogenetic trees for two major vertebrate groups, mammals (Bininda-Emonds et al, 2007) and birds (Jetz et al, 2012;Birdtree, 2016). Because the source data for the bird tree is composed of two posterior distributions generated from different avian taxonomies, we selected a random set of 100 trees from the distribution based on the Hackett et al (2008) taxonomy.…”