A Frog So Small, It Could Not Frog

The leap of a frog is a quintessential evolutionary feat. The critter’s girthy gams thrust from behind to springboard the body up and out; a pair of acrobatic arms stretch forward to seamlessly break the fall. The landing is “very precise, very controlled,” says Richard Essner, a biologist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. One might expect that any frog worth its salt should be able to stick it. “And most frogs,” says Marcio Pie, a biologist at Edge Hill University, in the United Kingdom, “do.”

Then there is the poor pumpkin toadlet. Spanning roughly a centimeter from snout to bum—about the width of a Skittle—and outfitted with scrawny, toothpick limbs that just barely hold its bulbous body aloft, it is the dachshund of the amphibian world,the frogs.)