Oldest rainforest frogs found, according to BBC news, National Geographic News, and ScienceDaily, 14 June 2018 and Scientific Reports Scientific Reports, 14 June 2018, doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-26848-w. Scientists from University of Florida and China University of Geosciences in Beijing have found the remains of four tiny frogs embedded in specimens of amber originally collected in Burma. […]
Petrified salamander found, as reported in ScienceDaily 3 October 2017, and PeerJ, 2017; 5: e3861 doi: 10.7717/peerj.3861, 3 October 2017. Scientists from Switzerland and France have studied an “exceptionally preserved” fossil of a salamander named Phosphotriton sigei. The fossil is dated as 35-40 million years old and belongs to the same family as living ‘fire […]
Sticking a frog foot on it, described in ABC News in Science, 12 October 2007. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur have developed a reusable adhesive tape inspired by frog feet. Conventional sticky tapes are not reusable because they crack when removed from one surface, and they collect dust and other particles and […]
Indian frog is a living fossil, as reported in Nature vol. 425, p711, 16 October 2003. Scientists have analysed the DNA of a strange purple burrowing frog recently discovered in India and found it is similar to some frogs that are only found in the Seychelles Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The […]
Hybrids cause conservation conundrum, according to a report in ScienceNOW, 17 September 2007 and ScienceDaily 2 Oct 2007. The California tiger salamander is a “threatened species that lives in the Salinas Valley in California. For the last 50 years it has been breeding with banded salamanders introduced from Texas. Biologists have studied the native and […]
Frog kneecap surprise reported in New Scientist 7 July 2017 and The Anatomical Record doi: 10.1002/ar.23629 published online 1 July 2017. Scientists in Argentina have studied skeletons of 20 frog species and have discovered, much to scientists’ surprise, that some frogs have kneecaps. The kneecaps are made of fibrocartilage rather than bone, but as John […]
How toads conquered the world, according to articles in Science vol 327, p633 & 679, 5 Feb 2009. Toads are believed to have evolved in South America but are now found all over the world. An article entitled “Evolution: ‘Toadness’ a Key Feature for Global Spread of These Amphibians” describes how an international group of […]
How poison frogs get their poison reported in ScienceNOW and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 August 2005, and the New York Times, 9 August 2005. Poisonous frogs contain toxic chemicals called alkaloids in their skin, but most do not actually manufacture the chemicals themselves. Recently scientists found that poisonous frogs in Panama […]
Frog tongue physics described in reports in Science (AAAS) News 31 January, ScienceDaily 1 February 2017, and Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 20160764 doi: 10.1098/rsif.2016.0764, 1 February 2017. Engineers and biologists at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, have studied how frogs’ tongues function. It is not just enough for the tongue to […]
New age Aussie fossil in the British Natural History museum. When John Mackay first photographed the fossil Paracyclotosauraus davidi (a large Salamander-like labryinthodont) in 1987, it was labelled 200 million years old. When John photographed the same fossil in 1999, it was labelled 235 million years old. My how time flies! According to The Natural […]