Friends pull over to listen to frog calls and discover grumpy-looking new species
As an electrical storm hit a small town in eastern South Africa, wildlife expert Nick Evans drove past a field in KwaZulu-Natal Province. He said he and two friends pulled over after hearing the calls of rain frogs driven from their burrows by the storm’s heavy rain, according to a May 21 Facebook post.
Believing they heard the calls of the elusive Braviceps bagginsi, or Bilbo’s rain frog, they scoured the field for the hard-to-find amphibians.
Despite having a nearly identical call to the species they were searching for, the frogs didn’t look like Braviceps bagginsi.
The group recorded the frog’s calls that day in September 2018 to share with experts including Louis de Preez and Les Minter, but the audio quality was too poor to analyze, according to a May 19 study published in the African Journal of Herpetology.
In 2023, researcher Louis du Preez returned to the field in Boston and collected specimens to determine if they were Bilbo’s rain frogs, according to the study.
Analysis of their anatomy and vocalization patterns revealed that the frogs Evans and his friends heard nearly seven years before belonged to a new species called Breviceps batrachophiliorum, according to the study.
Breviceps batrachophiliorum, or the Boston rain frog, is characterized by an “extremely abbreviated” snout, a narrow down-turned mouth that gives the species a distinct frowning expression, and short limbs that don’t extend beyond the outline of its rounded body, according to the study.
Breviceps batrachophiliorum means “frog-loving-people,” according to the study. The name was given as an homage to Evans and his friends who helped identify the new species, the study said, as well as for “the many herpetologists and other nature-lovers who submitted data to the Southern African Frog Atlas Project.”
Researchers said the discovery casts doubt on whether Bilbo’s rain frog ever existed in the region.
“This finding means that the Bilbo’s Rain Frog’s conservation status jumps from being listed as vulnerable, to critically endangered, as we now know their range does not extend from where they do occur, Babanango, to the Midlands,” Evans said in a Facebook post. “A big range reduction.”
The research team included Louis du Preez, Edward Netherlands and Les Minter.
Boston, South Africa, is about a 320-mile drive southeast from Johannesburg.
This story was originally published May 27, 2025 at 7:51 AM with the headline "Friends pull over to listen to frog calls and discover grumpy-looking new species."
