Frog Without Lungs Discovered in Indonesia
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
BANGKOK, Thailand — A frog has been found in a remote part of Indonesia that has no lungs and breathes through its skin, a discovery that researchers said yesterday could provide insight into what drives evolution in certain species.
The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis was found in a remote part of Indonesia’s Kalimantan province on Borneo island during an expedition in August 2007, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore, David Bickford, said. Mr. Bickford was part of the trip and co-authored a paper on the find that appeared in this week’s edition of the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology.
Mr. Bickford says the species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a worm-like creature known as a caecilian.
