Deep in the jungles of Ecuador lives a creature with pale, pink eyes, long, sticky webbed fingers, greenish-gray skin and a black and yellow speckled belly. At first glance, it seems like a creature one would find in a fantasy world. And that's precisely the reason researchers decided to name the newly-discovered stream frog after the Father of Modern Fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien.
"In a stream in the forest, there lived a Hyloscirtus. Not a nasty, dirty stream, with spoor of contamination and a muddy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy stream with nothing in it to perch on or to eat: it was a Hyloscirtus-stream, and that means environmental quality," say the study authors in the recent study, published in the journal ZooKeys (adapted from the opening of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien).
The frog, Hyloscirtus tolkieni (or, the Río Negro Stream Frog), lives in the pristine ...
