(Image: Mike Tyler/ANT Photo Library/Science Source)
Researchers are working to bring a frog that gives birth through its mouth back from extinction. The New Scientist reports:
Habitat destruction drove the gastric-brooding frog (Rheobatrachus silus) to extinction in 1983, but researchers have now created an early frog embryo from frozen specimens with the goal of bringing it back to life.
The gastric brooding frog was the only animal known to give birth through its mouth. It swallows its eggs after laying them, lets them grow for about six weeks, and then dribbles out tadpoles.
To clone the frog, Michael Archer and colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, isolated the nuclei from the cells of frogs that had been frozen for 40 years. They transferred them into the eggs of a modern frog, Mixophyes fasciolatus, which then divided several times as if to form an early embryo. The research, which has not yet been published, was presented at a TEDx conference on “de-extinction” in Washington DC last week.