Pseudis

***Pseudis*** or the **swimming frogs** are a genus of frogs that live in South America. They are in the family Hylidae.

## Distribution
*Pseudis* frogs live in tropical and subtropical South America.  Almost all of them live east of the Andes, on the Atlantic side of South America. *P. paradoxa* is the only species in *Pseudis* that has any frogs living west of the Andes. These frogs live from Trinidad to northern Argentina but not in Ecuador or Chile. They live in hills and other highland regions, and they live in the southernmost part of South America. All species in this genus are found in Brazil.

## Description
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These frogs have several body parts that help them live in the water.  They have eyes that stick up and out, strong hind legs, and fully webbed feet. They are the longest tadpoles in the world.  They are also very large compared to the adult frogs, which are  from nose to rear end. Their adult frogs are also somewhat smaller with nose-to-rear-end lengths of . However, *P. cardosoi* and *P. minuta* (which could be in the proposed genus *Podonectes*, see *Phylogenetic relationships*) have more normal tadpoles that probably do not grow longer than  . This is still large compared to the adults of these two species.  This means that the animal is the largest it will ever be in its life when it is an older tadpole.  It is smaller when it becomes a frog.

*Pseudis* is closely related to the genus, *Lysapsus*.  The frogs in *Lysapsus* do not have giant tadpoles. In *Lysapsus*, adults frogs grow to . The adult frogs eat land-based insects and spiders, but they also eat other animals without bones and smaller frog.  Some frogs in *Pseudis* can eat plants.

## Species
*, one of several species formerly included in *P. paradoxa*]]

There are seven species in this genus if we think of *Lysapsus* as a different genus. Until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most scientists said only *P. minuta* and *P. paradoxa* counted as frogs in *Pseudis*.  Scientists wrote the first paper about *P. cardosoi*. Before that, scientists thought *P. cardosoi* was the same frog as *P. minuta*. All the other species remaining were thought to be subspecies, synonyms or populations of *P. paradoxa*. Hylidae, and in their own family, Pseudidae, by themselves. It has been difficult for scientists to say where these frogs belong in taxonomy because their bodies are very different from those of other hylid frogs. The bodies of *Pseudis* frogs are different from other tree frogs' bodies because *Pseudis* frogs spend much more time living in water than most tree frogs do.

However, in the early 20th century, scientists did more studies.  Both body-shape-based and molecular (DNA) scientific experiments showed that these frogs are more closely related to tree frogs than to other frogs.  So scientists put them in the subfamily Hylinae with *Scarthyla* as a sister group.

Since then, two teams of scientists used molecular genetics (DNA) to find how this frog is related to other frogs. Both teams found the same thing, but they had different ideas about how the frogs should be put into groups: One team said scientists should start using the genus *Podonectes* again and the other team said they should use *Lysapsus* as a junior synonym of *Pseudis*. Later, more teams of scientists said *Pseudis* was not paraphyletic to *Lysapsus*, so making Lysapsus a junior synonym would not be good.

## References
## Other websites
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