A Family Older Than the Himalayas
The family Nyctibatrachidae, Kerala's night frogs, diverged from all other frog lineages somewhere between 70 and 86 million years ago, when the Indian subcontinent was still a drifting landmass moving north across the Tethys Sea. The Himalayas did not exist yet. The frogs were already here. This makes them among the most ancient frog lineages on the planet, and their closest living relatives are found not in Asia but in the Seychelles, a remnant of the same Gondwanan fragment that India broke away from. What Kerala's streams hold, then, is not just biodiversity. It is a biological record of continental drift.
