RAINING SPECIMENS: Wallace painted this watercolor of Rhacophorus nigropalmatus in 1855. A newly discovered species, the frog was found in a part of Borneo’s rainforest that echoed with the sounds of workers felling trees and transporting coal. The disturbance brought a diverse range of creatures out of hiding and, in the case of the frog, into the scientific record books. As Wallace wrote on the back of the watercolor, the frog “descended from a high tree as if flying.”© ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE MEMORIAL FUNDOne day in 1855, in the teeming rainforests of Borneo, a bizarre-looking frog glided down from the canopy, its webbed feet spread, and landed in the scientific literature. For when a Chinese laborer working in the area caught the green-and-yellow creature, he took it to the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was collecting specimens nearby.
Fascinated by his amphibious gift, Wallace painted a watercolor of the flying frog, then an unknown species. He later discussed the species, named Rhacophorus nigropalmatus or “Wallace’s frog,” as an example of evolution’s stepwise process in his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, in which he included a woodcut based on his original frog painting: “[I]t is very interesting to Darwinians as showing that the variability of the toes which have been already modified for purposes of swimming and adhesive climbing, have been taken advantage of to enable an allied species to pass through the air like the flying lizard.”
But at the time he first laid eyes on the frog, Wallace would not have called himself a “Darwinian,” though the two had met and corresponded. ...
