Torrentophryne aspinia is a new kind of toads discovered in China recently, it lives in the forest floor in West Yunnan, the most important things for this kind of species is that they have a kind of torrent-adapted tadpoles which have abdominal suckers and can adhere to the surfaces of rocks in moving waters. In this article, we described the forming procedures of abdominal sucker and some breeding behaviors, habitats and habits. After comparing with those of other toads, it is confirmed that Torrentophryne should be a new valid genus, it is derived from ancestor toads because of adaptation to the torrent habitats, by the forming of torrent -adapted organ-abdominal sucker in the early development.
Mitochondrial gene fragments of 16S rRNA gene of four species （Rhacophorus rhodopus, R. reinwardtii, Philautus albopunctatus and P. rhododiscus ） from 11 populations were sequenced in this study. Homologous sequences of R. bipunctatus, Theloderma asperum, T. corticale and Buergeria japonica were obtained by screening the GenBank database. After excluding all gaps and ambiguous positions, aligned sequences were 500 bp in length with 115 variable sites and 92 parsimony-informative sites. Using B .japonica as an outgroup, phylogenetic relationships were analyzed using Bayesian inference, maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood methods. Our results indicated that neither of R. rhodopus and P. albopunctatus were monophyletic at the species level. The population of R. rhodopus from Hainan Island was more close to R. bipunctatus than to populations of R. rhodopus from Yunnan Province. Furthermore, the populations of R. rhodopus from Yunnan Province can be divided into two main lineages. Theloderma corticale and P.rhododiscus were clustered together and T. asperum was nested in P.albopunctatus. We considered that P. albopunctatus Liu and Hu, 1962, was the synonymy of T. asperum Boulenger, 1886, and suggested removing P. rhododiscus from Philautus into the genus Theloderma.
