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A tiny new species of Platypelis from the Marojejy National Park in northeastern Madagascar (Amphibia: Microhylidae)

Frank GLAW, Jörn KÖHLER & Miguel VENCES

en European Journal of Taxonomy 2012 (9) - Pages 1-9 (EJT-9)

Published on 14 March 2012

We describe a tiny new frog species of the genus Platypelis (Anura: Microhylidae: Cophylinae) from Marojejy National Park, northeastern Madagascar. Platypelis ravus sp. nov. differs from all other known Platypelis and Cophyla species by its small size (17-19 mm snout-vent length) and a combination of other morphological and bioacoustic characters. The new species seems to be most closely related to P. milloti with which it shares the principal colour pattern, but exhibits a yellow rather than red posterior venter. Uncorrected pairwise sequence divergence in a 16S rRNA gene fragment to all other known species of the genus (except P. cowanii for which no genetic data is available) is greater than 6%. We suggest the inclusion of the new species in the IUCN threat category “Data Deficient”.


Keywords:

Microhylidae, Cophylinae, Platypelis ravus sp. nov., Madagascar, Marojejy National Park.

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