The frog visibly changes its skin in a matter of seconds, completely changing texture from spiny to smooth in a few minutes. This change is so rapid that when the first researcher captured the frog to photograph it she thought she had mistakenly taken the wrong frog specimen – the spines had disappeared. The researchers put moss in the container with the frog until they could return it to the wild, but when they checked on it later it had changed its skin texture to spiny again.

The team also identified a second frog species, the Sobetes robber frog, capable of the same shape- shifting behaviour. This indicates that this phenomenon could be present in many species of amphibian and is possibly just unrecorded as it happens so quickly.

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