Researchers from the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Germany discovered a new species of small frogs in the Amazon, and nicknamed it the "zombie frog."
Why you ask? It's because the frogs spend most of their lives buried in the soil (like dead bodies) and their existence was only discovered when the biologists noticed their mating calls after heavy rains. "We herpetologists have had to dig the animals out of the ground with our bare hands - usually while we were completely soaked ourselves - in order to identify them," said team leader Raffael Ernst as reported in Phys.org, "This somewhat eerie and muddy scenario also inspired us to use the name Synapturanus zombie for one of the newly discovered species from the narrow-mouthed frog genus Synapturanus in the Amazon region."
Images above: Antoine Fouquet
Image: Hölting/Senckenberg