Bizarre Frog Has No Lungs, page
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Topic started on 7-4-2008 @ 05:08 PM by kawz1

Bizarre Frog Has No Lungs


news.yahoo.com
The enigmatic amphibian, dubbed Barbourula kalimantanensis, apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin...

"At first I did not believe that the frogs had no lungs, but then, we just kept on seeing the evidence pile up. I was flabbergasted," Bickford said...

The loss of lungs has been known to occur two other times in all the creatures with backbones that have waddled onto land across geologic time...

(visit the link for the full news article)


reply posted on 7-4-2008 @ 05:42 PM by JBA2848
Was reading the story and these quotes stood out to me.
www.livescience.com...

Scientists first saw one of these frogs 30 years ago, but due to their rarity, just one other specimen had been collected since then and neither had been dissected.

"No one thought to open them up — there was no real reason to believe that they could be lungless," said researcher David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. "Because these specimens were so rare, they had never been dissected. If you have just one specimen in your museum, you don't want to rip it open!"





"I was just going to be happy if we simply rediscovered the frogs," Bickford said. "It had been 30 years of intermittent searching for this frog until we could put together a multinational team and get to the last remaining areas where it could realistically be found."




"Having the undeniable privilege of going out to these remote sites, seeing some of the last and greatest treasures that exist in the wild, and then getting to study them — well, every day I feel lucky."



"There are so many difficulties in field work, and yet it remains my biggest joy," Bickford added. "Having the undeniable privilege of going out to these remote sites, seeing some of the last and greatest treasures that exist in the wild, and then getting to study them — well, every day I feel lucky."

As the researchers were doing initial dissections of the frogs as they caught them in the field, they were surprised to discover these amphibians lacked lungs.

"At first I did not believe that the frogs had no lungs, but then, we just kept on seeing the evidence pile up. I was flabbergasted," Bickford said.




Good find on the story first Ive seen it. But I put these quotes up to show where I find a problem with what there doing. They just found the frog after looking for one for thirty years and decide to kill not just one but more than one to see there insides. I hope this team of people don't find to many more rare species becuase it seems there making sure they make it to extinct species list by killing them.

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