Hyla micans Oken, 1836

Sá, De, 2010, The identity of the crackling, luminescent frog of Suriname (Rana typhonia Linnaeus, 1758) (Amphibia, Anura), Zootaxa 2671, pp. 17-30 : 25

Hyla micans Oken, 1836 .

At the end of the French translation of Boie’s (1827) paper on Rolander’s luminescent frog (“ Rana crepitans , quae Rana typhonia dicitur”), Duméril and Bibron (1841) noted that no subsequent authors (including themselves in the systematic section of the eighth volume of the Érpetologie Générale) cited the species. This statement is partially true; although never mentioned as Rana crepitans , Rolander’s species, under a different name, was occasionally cited in the literature.

In fact, in 1836 Oken translated into German Boie’s (1827) transcription of Rolander’s Diarium Surinamicum, naming the species as H[yla] micans , noting that the author considered this frog as a toad (“... Bufo typhonius , margaritifer ...”), despite all the evidence contained in the translated paper. Hyla micans was overlooked by the great majority of herpetologists and the only references we found hitherto, aside from the original, are those of Clark (1953), Hartwig (1863; 1871), Holder and Holder (1885), Kappler (1887), Korn and Smith (1959), Schoedler (1853), Schumacher (1844), and Shufeldt (1896). All these contributions contain only a couple of lines with the anecdote of the luminescence, in some cases noting (erroneously) that it was due to corporal secretions, but without any new information.