"I was doing research
with two friends on a hilltop in the reserve and I stumbled into this unusual
frog with only three fingers," he told a small group of reporters this
week on a tour of Salto Morato, a nature preserve owned by Brazil's leading cosmetic
firm Boticario.
"It happened on February
14, 2007: My birthday. What a treat!" he said.
But it was not until June this
year that the discovery of this new species – Brachycephalus tridactylus – was
officially established. A report on his finding was published in Herpetologica,
a quarterly international journal focusing on study and conservation of
amphibians and reptiles.
"At the time I was doing
some other work related to ecology and I figured I could wait as no one else
doing frog research would have access to the area," Garey said.
"It took me 18 months
from early 2011 to collect seven of the new frogs, go to museums to compare
them with other species, realise that they were new, write my paper and have it
published in the journal."
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