It does not eat bagels nor had it been seen striding into traffic on Fifth Avenue to flag down a cab, but Jeremy Feinberg knew as soon as he heard its voice: the frog was a New Yorker.
Three years later his suspicions have been confirmed: a new species, as yet unnamed, has been identified living in New York City and surrounding counties.
It was the frog mating season of 2009 and an amphibious version of Sex And The City was playing out at a pond on Staten Island when Mr Feinberg heard the distinctive croak. A doctoral student in ecology and evolution at Rutgers University, he had ventured into the city to examine what he thought were local populations of the southern leopard frog, a spotted creature found hopping around all over the south eastern states of America.
Yet instead of the repetitive chuckling he was used to hearing from males in Florida and the Carolinas, there came a single croak.
In a district otherwise known as the native habitat of mob wives, Irish-American cops and well-built men with spray tans, Mr Feinberg had discovered a new species.
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“The second I heard the call I knew right away,” he said. “It’s like if you are a detective and you discover a finger print that is not from one of the victim’s ten fingers. It was obviously something different.”
Like a detective, however, he needed to wait for the lab results formally to identify his suspect. He captured similar frogs from ponds around New York City, cutting off part of a toe – frogs can grow them back. He posted the toes to Catherine Newman, an evolutionary biologist who was then working at the University of California at Davis.
“I did a quick and dirty analysis,” she said. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ This was bizarre.”
The frogs from ponds in New York and New Jersey “were definitely different from the southern leopard frog and the northern leopard frog. They were virtually identical to each other.”
Her supervisor for the study, Professor Bradley Shaffer, who has travelled the world in pursuit of amphibians and counts the reticulated flatwoods salamander among his many discoveries, was also astonished. New species are usually found in remote jungles.
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“We had found a new species living in the largest human population centre in the US,” he said. “This was not a microbial bacteria or a tiny insect. This was a frog, it’s a serious animal.”
It had probably lived in the vicinity of Manhattan for more than a million years, though it appeared to have croaked as far afield as Connecticut. The dead centre of its range is near the Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, though it is not thought to have attended any games.
Mr Feinberg must now name this new creature. “As a New Yorker I’m excited, and I’ve had lots of suggestions,” he said. He would like to call it the New York Frog, though he fears this could provoke protests from New Jersey.
“Someone suggested that the Latin name ought to be Rana Yankeei,” he said.