Purple Frog

• comportamientoIt spends almost its whole life underground and comes up only for a couple of weeks a year to breed during the monsoon.
• GeneralIt spends the whole year underground and comes up for just two weeks when the monsoon arrives.
• It is a living fossil: its lineage separated from that of its closest relatives, a group of frogs in the Seychelles, more than a hundred million years ago, when India and those islands were part of the same continental block. Its discovery in 2003 was likened to finding an unknown mammal the size of an elephant.
• It spends the whole year buried several metres down and emerges for only two weeks a year, during the first monsoon rains, to breed in the torrents.
• Its snout is pointed and it has a grooved tongue specialised for eating termites underground, without needing to come to the surface.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (amphibian)

Habitat and environment

Deep soil of forest and plantations in the Western Ghats, in south-western India

Sexual maturity

3 years

Gestation / incubation

Larval development in mountain torrents

Litter / clutch size

3000 eggs

Sources consulted: https://www.iucnredlist.org/ | https://animaldiversity.org/ | https://es.wikipedia.org/

The pins mark the parks where its presence is documented.