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Ammon News - The cordyceps fungus of "The Last of Us" may not pose a real risk of zombie-fying humankind, but can the same be said of our amphibian friends?

Indian scientists on a nature walk through the foothills of the Western Ghats came across an unexpected discovery: a living frog that seemed to have a mushroom sprouting from its back.

The group of five explorers had been on the lookout for reptiles and amphibians while hiking along the bottom of the mountain range in June. But when they came across a small roadside pond packed with about 40 tiny frogs, they noticed something odd about one of them.

Perched on a twig, the frog had a bizarre growth on its left flank that, upon closer examination, was clearly a small gray mushroom. Even more strange, unlike the creatures of "The Last of Us," the critter seemed unbothered by its fungal partner.

Hobbyist naturalist Chinmay Maliye and Lohit Y.T., a river and wetlands specialist at World Wildlife Fund-India, were quick to photograph the discovery before the group continued onward.

“To the best of our knowledge, never has a mushroom sprouting from the flank of a live frog been documented,” the team wrote in a report in January documenting the finding in the journal Reptiles and Amphibians.

USA today