Six years ago, ecologists identified a frog that might be a new species. It was living on Staten Island, a borough of New York City. Since then, scientists have discovered even more of these amphibians leapin’ across many sites along the eastern seaboard. The animal doesn’t look much different from the southern leopard frog. Only its croak gave it away.
“The discovery was unexpected,” say ecologist Jeremy Feinberg of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and his colleagues. It’s hard to imagine, they say, that people could have missed a vocal species “in one of the largest and most densely populated urban parts of the world.”