Newly discovered mini frogs are so very very tiny

CC BY 4.0 Mini mum on a thumb. (Photo: Andolalao Rakotoarison)

The teeny amphibian inhabitants of Madagascar could fit four on a thumbnail.

What do the words minimum, miniature, and miniscule have in common? Well of course they all share the word-forming element, "mini," suggesting something supremely teeny – but now the three share something else as well. They serve as official science names for three tiny frog species newly discovered in Madagascar.

Meet Mini mum, Mini ature, and Mini scule, who “are astronomically small,” says Mark Scherz, an evolutionary biologist at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany. Scherz described these and two other tiny new frog species in a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.

You could sit the brain on the top of a pin. It’s amazing that they have all the same organs you or I have in our bodies, but in a package that can fit four times on your own thumbnail,” he told National Geographic.

As part of his PhD, Scherz has been studying frogs and reptiles on Madagascar, a tiny paradise with more than 350 frog species. In an essay published in The Conservation, Scherz notes that the island possibly has the highest frog diversity per square kilometer of any country in the world. "And many of these frogs are very small," he writes.

Just how small are they? Well the newly discovered ones – who in fact have given birth to a new genus – range in size from 8 mm (one-third of an inch) to 15 mm (just over half an inch). The smallest of the three is just a tad bit longer than a gran of rice. Scherz explains:

"We’ve dubbed three of the new species as “Mini” – a group that is wholly new to science. When a whole group or “genus” like this is new to science, it needs a name, so that information about it can be accumulated with a fixed anchor. We also wanted to have a bit of fun. And so, we named the species Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature. Adults of the two smallest species – Mini mum and Mini scule – are 8–11 mm, and even the largest member of the genus, Mini ature, at 15 mm, could sit on your thumbnail with room to spare.