Pygmy Rain Frog

About the Pygmy Rain Frog

Pristimantis ridens, also known as the pygmy rain frog and the Rio San Juan robber frog, is a species of frog in the family Strabomantidae. It is found in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and western Colombia. The first description of the species was published in 1866 by Edward Drinker Cope, who placed it in the genus Phyllobates. The holotype was collected by Robert Kennicott, with the type locality being the San Juan River of Nicaragua. The holotype was deposited into the collection of the United States National Museum, but has since been lost. In 1885, Cope erected the genus Hypodictyon and moved ridens to it.

In 1888, George Albert Boulenger moved the species to Syrrhophus; a genus erected by Cope in 1878 that was later deemed to be synonymous with Eleutherodactylus by George S. Myers in 1962, which was ignored by other writers until 1989, when Stephen Blair Hedges published a paper coming to the same conclusion and treating Syrrhophus as a subgenus of Eleutherodactylus.

By the time that synonymy was established, Edward Harrison Taylor had already moved the species to Eleutherodactylus, doing so in 1952; however, due to a different synonymy, the first placement of the... Wikipedia →