• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Lungless Frog Is Lungless No More As Scientists Find Tiny Respiratory Organs

May 21, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The only lungless frog in the world has been exposed as a fraud, in fact being the secret owner of a tiny pair of lungs and glottis – respiratory organs that had previously been declared as absent in the rare Bornean flat-headed frog. New research looked at museum specimens using a high-resolution micro-CT scanner and discovered that the previous conclusion that they were lungless frogs was, in fact, incorrect.

Advertisement

Lungless tetrapods – that is, animals on four legs like amphibians, reptiles, and mammals – are relatively rare, but include one caecilian and numerous salamanders. Instead of breathing with lungs they breathe through nonpulmonary tissues, like the skin and mucus membranes in their mouths and throats.

Advertisement

The Bornean flat-headed frog, Barbourula kalimantanensis, was believed to be a part of the lungless crew. Living in cold, oxygen-rich waters, scientists figured that it must be getting its full oxygen quota through its skin.

That was until a team of scientists embarked on a large-scale project to use micro CT scanning to look at the internal anatomy of various vertebrates. Using two specimens that had been pivotal in the initial “discovery” that Bornean flat-headed frogs were lungless, they realized that there was in fact a tiny set of lungs tucked inside their bodies.

“As in other frogs, the pulmonary apparatus of B. kalimantanensis contains a glottis that is located posterior to the tongue on the floor of the buccal cavity and just dorsal to the hyoid plate,” write the study authors. “The glottis is also visible in preserved specimens, and may have been overlooked because of the folds of the buccal floor. The presence of the laryngeal dilator muscles, which open the glottis during breathing in other frogs, suggests a typical functional respiratory system in B. kalimantanensis.”

That the lungs are so minute suggests that Bornean flat-headed frogs probably do also rely on skin breathing, but evidently, planet Earth is no longer a place that can claim to be home to a lungless frog. Having such small lungs may benefit these animals in making them less buoyant, as getting swept away in currents is a considerable threat in fast flowing waters. It may also influence how their vocalizations transmit in the water, as has been seen among other aquatic frogs.

Advertisement

The authors sign off their study expressing that we have the sharing of biological specimens from natural history collections to thank for the discovery, as without these, they’d never have been able to dive into the anatomy of the “world’s only lungless frog”. Now, who fancies a trip to the museum?

The study is published in Current Biology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Lithuania to fence first 110 km of Belarus border by April
  2. China’s ICBC to restrict some forex and commodities trading
  3. Potential New Treatment For Alcohol Use Disorder Identified By Scientists
  4. Why Is Earth’s Inner Core Solid When It’s Hotter Than The Sun’s Surface?

Source Link: Lungless Frog Is Lungless No More As Scientists Find Tiny Respiratory Organs

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • RFK Jr’s New Vaccine Advisors Just Recommended Fall Flu Vaccines – But There’s A Catch
  • Controversial World-First Project To Create Human DNA From Scratch Takes First Steps
  • Humans Weren’t The First Species To Travel Around The Moon. They Lost This Race To An Unexpected Animal
  • When You Hack A Shark, You’re Exploiting A Glitch Billions Of Years In The Making
  • Wellness Whales, A New Blood Type, And A DJ Set From Space
  • Hate Flying Ants? We Used To Have Ones The Size Of Hummingbirds
  • ‘Tis The Season To See Titan Cast A Shadow On Saturn – Especially If You Are In America
  • World’s Bravest Vets Put Full Metal Dental Crown On A Bear For The First Time
  • “Spider Rain”: The Bizarre Phenomenon That’ll Send Arachnophobes Into A Spin
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version