Microhylids and Other Frogs (Patreon)

I've been thinking about frogs a lot lately: my plans are to publish something new at TetZoo (hopefully within the next week or so) AND to both (1) draw new frogs and (2) update and redraw many frogs for The Big Book (I did a great many frog drawings for The Big Book back in c 2015, but did them with pencil outlines, then drew over the outlines with finepoint marker; because the results are unsatisfactory relative to other illustrations planned for the book, the only way to salvage them is to redo them from scratch). I started with members of the vast froggy group Microhylidae. There are several 'subfamilies' in this group but - as usual with amphibian (and non-bird reptile) 'families' - these are substantially distinct, so much so that they warrant separate consideration and discussion, and are easily 'as distinct' as are 'families' in mammal and bird classification. 

In the new montage here I show (left to right) members of the microhylid subfamilies Otophryninae, Gastrophryninae, Scaphiophryninae and Cophyline. All of these animals (specifically, Scaphiophryne brevis, Gastrophryne, Otophryne steyermarki and Cophyla) were redrawn from photos. I next need to arrange these animals - with other members of the larger clade that includes Microhylidae (it's called Allodapanura) - in a cladogram. In fact, I'll likely be drawing several cladograms showing these frogs, since there are competing views on their phylogenetic relationships. Microhylidae in the traditional sense is likely monophyletic, but my take is that it should be upped in rank (to Microhyloides or something), and its 'subfamilies' should then become 'families'. I'll discuss all this in the relevant TetZoo article.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how these microhylids look when included with the other frogs that I've finished revising. And here's the result. This is very provisional -- there are LOTS more frogs yet to add. I don't have time to add labels but let me know if you're curious about any one of them in particular. The big boy at the back is my reconstruction of Beelzebufo, the building of which I discuss in one of my older posts here. As usual with these montages, I think it looks pretty good and hope you do too.

There is still so much to do on this book, but I have to remain optimistic that I'll get it done. I'm really hoping to get it finished in 2021. Thanks as always for your help, it makes such a different to what I do.