The World’s Smallest Vertebrate Is a Tiny Brazilian Frog, Study Finds
Adult male Brazilian flea toads are just over 7 millimeters long on average, and females measure about 8.15 millimeters
A tiny frog endemic to the state of Bahia on Brazil’s Atlantic coast may have just earned the title of the smallest vertebrate in the world.
The Brazilian flea toad, or Brachycephalus pulex, was first discovered in 2011—and despite its name, it is technically a frog, not a toad. Researchers immediately suspected the creature could break the record for the tiniest frog—and vertebrate—on Earth, but it wasn’t until a new study that scientists systematically measured the lengths of the species’ males and females.
The male frogs, which are smaller, measured 7.10 millimeters long on average, the team reported this month in the journal Zoologica Scripta. An earlier study of the frog Paedophryne amauensis, the previous record holder, found that its males averaged 7.70 millimeters in length.
“It’s absolutely clear,” Mark Scherz, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark who did not contribute to the findings, tells New Scientist’s Jake Buehler. “These really are potentially the smallest extant frogs in the world, which is astonishing.”
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