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.
Brazil's Atlantic forest has many frogs of the Brachycephalus genus, which are known also as saddleback toads. Their penchant for springing around and leaping distances about 30 times their body length has led to the nickname “flea toadlets.”