Bizarre Frog Has No Lungs

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)

Thought this was pretty cool

The article further states that the internal organs seemed to have shifted to the area where the lungs used to be and that they "also discovered some abnormal cartilage around the area where the lungs should have been that we are still investigating."

I know that the differences between mammals and amphibians are vast, but it makes me wonder if any of our current internal organs will one day evolve or become obsolete.

Don't know what else to say, but I thought this article was kind of cool....wait, I already said that...

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

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.

This really is not as surprisiing as it at first would seem considering that they breath through their skin and lungs.

Presumably if it's energy demands are low or the efficiency of the skin breathing is high than why evolve lungs, or conversly devolve them if that particular species is in an environment better suited to skin breathing.

The physiology of frogs is generally like that of other amphibians (and differs from other terrestrial vertebrates) because oxygen can pass through their highly permeable skin. This unique feature allows frogs to "breathe" largely through their skin. Because the oxygen is dissolved in an aqueous film on the skin and passes from there to the blood, the skin must remain moist at all times; this makes frogs susceptible to many toxins in the environment, some of which can similarly dissolve in the layer of water and be passed into their bloodstream. This may be cause of the decline in frog populations.

en.wikipedia.org...

Cool find. Makes one wonder how many other organs will become vestigial as time goes on.