Alfred Russel Wallace, the brilliant Victorian British naturalist and co-developer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, might have been the first European to see any of the “flying frogs” of South-east Asia. In his magnum opus The Malay Archipelago he wrote:

“One of the most curious and interesting reptiles which I met with in Borneo was a large tree-frog, which was brought me by one of the Chinese workmen. He assured me that he had seen it come down, in a slanting direction, from a high tree, as if it flew. On examining it, I found the toes very long and fully webbed to their very extremity, so that when expanded they offered a surface much larger than the body. The fore legs were also bordered by a membrane, and the body was capable of considerable inflation.”

Since Wallace’s time, a number of other species of flying frogs have been discovered. But since this one was the first to be described scientifically, it has a special place in the hearts of frog-lovers everywhere. (Never mind the fact that in the mid-1860's amphibians were not distinguished from reptiles.)

Of all the frogs, lizards, snakes, and caecilians in Malaysia, this was the species I most wanted to see. So naturally my guide Kurt "Orion" G found two of them for me on my first night in the country. Go Kurt!

My Travelogues and Trip Lists page includes a complete list of the herps I saw in the wild on this trip to Malaysia, as well as a travelogue of the trip.

Pity the poor File-eared Treefrog. As a large, distinctive, and weird-looking frog, it would normally garner all the attention from onlookers, bystanders, and photographers. But this one was foolish enough to share a perch with everyone's favorite Malaysian frog, and nobody cared about it.