Microhylinae Günther 1858

The frog subfamily Microhylinae (sensu Frost 2010) includes about 70 species in nine genera found across Eastern, Southeastern and Southern Asia from India west to the Greater Sunda Islands. This subfamily encompasses a large amount of morphological diversity. Some have free-swimming and free-eating larvae, others free-swimming larvae that survive on energy stored in the yolk until full grown (endotrophic larvae).Most species are terrestrial, stout frogs that feed on ants and termites, some live underground (fossorial), and some live in trees. An unusually high morphological diversity in this subfamily (and the family Microhylidae) has made the evolutionary history of this group difficult to reconstruct, and it has become more apparent that many features have evolved more than once in different parts of the group (van der Meijden et al. 2007).

Microhyline frogs were originally considered to occur in the new world and the old world, but phylogenetic analyses have found that the members from these two distant parts of the world are quite distinct (van der Meijden et al. 2007).Molecular analyses redefined Microhylinae as distributed widely in the Oriental region, from India and Korea to the Greater Sunda Islands.As the group has gained more attention from phylogenetic re-analysis, it has become apparent that it is complex taxonomically and is possibly not a true (monophyletic) lineage.For example, Matsui et al. (2011) proposed on the basis of molecular sequence data from the gene COI that the Microhylinae should include just three genera: the speciose genus Microhyla, genus Calluella, and genus Glyphoglossus. Other analyses, have recovered a monophyletic arrangement the subfamily (Pyron and Wiens 2011) and more analysis and data is required to resolve this.

The Microhylinae are a subfamily of microhylid frogs. It contains 9 genera. Phylogenetic studies have estimated the family Microhylidae to be about 52 million years old.