The frog that has no lungs
It's rare for a terrestrial vertebrate to give up its lungs. But this fellow appears to have done just that. It's a newly-described species of frog from Indonesia. They get all their oxygen through diffusion over their skin surface, including skin flaps coming off the arms and legs. There are a few lungless species of salamanders and as well as caecilians, but this is the first frog: in dissections of eight specimens, nary a lung was found. CNN has more.Labels: amphibians, evolution
3 Comments:
The scientific community should be ashamed...
The explaination for this animal's lack of lungs is absolutly absurd...facsinating, but absurd!
To begin with, it seems that this frog's trait is evolutionary speaking, better than lungs! yet, here's what the "experts" say: "These are about the most ancient and bizarre frogs you can get on the planet". according to the very nature of evolutionary theory, this is stupid and backwards.
The most rediculous part of this is the reasoning: "It's an extreme adaptation that was probably brought about by these fast-moving streams," Bickford said, adding that it probably needed to reduce its buoyancy in order to keep from being swept down the mountainous rivers.
Well, I suppose that over the millions of years that these streams (have not only existed, but) picked up their current, this particular frog just happened develop the ability to breathe through its skin, over millions of years, at the same pace.
I suppose every new and unheard of discovery needs to be questioned and its origion theorized, but the fact that this drivel is being published and spread around in this manner is just silly (for lack of a better word that wasn't an explative).
Its a good thing that the human mind hasn't evolved enough to question this school of scientific evaluation, otherwise one might be annoyed.
The fact that these irresponsible "guesses" will likely wind up in our children's text books is what has me fuming.
Compared to this explaination, I'm more inclined to believe that God made this frog (not that that isn't necessarily a bad theory either).
Come on people...our species may not have been around as long as this frog's, but surely we can do better than this!
(by the way, I do happen to think this is a really cool discovery!)
No lungs? Then why does it have nostrils?
Anonymous #2,
The frog has nostrils because it is descended from frog ancestors who had nostrils. The nostrils in this case are a vestigial structure -- no longer used to ferry air to the lungs, but still constructed and maintained (at metabolic expense) because that's what the frog's genes tell it to do. If it were really efficiently designed, the frog wouldn't need nostrils. Such imperfections in living organisms were one of Charles Darwin's five main bodies of evidence presented in 1859 -- and in 149 years of scrutiny, no better explanation has been put forth to explain why a lungless frog would have nostrils, or why flightless beetles have wings, or why the panda has a half-assed "thumb".
Anonymous #1,
I only have one question: What?
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