geekosystem

Today in News You Probably Would Have Been Happier Not Knowing, the tiny, unassuming Amazonian frog Rhinella proboscidea doesn't seem like the most awful creature ever to walk the Earth, but it probably is. That's because Rhinella proboscidea, as a species, are a bunch of necrophiliacs. If they can't find a living lady during mating season, the small brown frogs quickly get, like, way less picky, plucking egg cells from the corpses of females killed during the often violent rounds of 'explosive breeding' and then fertilizing them.

Yesterday, researchers announced the discovery of Microhyla nepenthicola, a frog which in its adulthood is between 10.6 and 12.8 millimeters long (0.42 to 0.50 inches) -- smaller than a pea. Found on a mountain path in Borneo's Kubah National Park, the frog is the smallest known frog in the Old World.

Curiously enough, Microhyla nepenthicola had been found and preserved by scientists in the past, but they didn't think that it was its own species; rather, they thought they were "juveniles of other species," according to Dr. Indraneil Das, one of the frog's discoverers.