There were only ever two known species of frogs to give birth in this way: the southern (Rheobatrachus silus) and northern (R. vitellinus) gastric-brooding frogs, both native to Queensland, Australia.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gastric-brooding frogs like this southern gastric breeding frog only very recently went extinct. Could we bring them back?<\/p>\n
What happened to the gastric brooding frogs?<\/p>\n
Scientists at the University of Newcastle were very interested in these curious amphibians. The southern species was only described in 1973<\/a>, but it was extinct by the 1980s. The second, northern, species was discovered in 1984<\/a>, but by 1986<\/a>, they too had disappeared from the wild.<\/p>\n Both species had fallen victim to chytrid fungus, which has caused many new-to-science species discovered in Australia to go extinct within a few years of having first been discovered. For this reason, scientists started thinking long and hard about ways to bring them back. Aka, de-extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n “If it is clear that we have exterminated a species, we arguably have an obligation to bring it back,” said Mahony.<\/p>\n And so Project Lazarus was born \u2013 an ambitious initiative that hoped to use a frozen gastric brood carcass to resurrect the species. It required intact DNA to be transferred into a surrogate egg. Initial attempts appeared promising as cells began dividing, but before they were fully cooked, the embryos started dying. This continued until 2013, when Project Lazarus paused its de-extinction efforts.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Can we bring back the gastric brooding frogs?<\/p>\n So, is that the end for the gastric-brooding frog? Not necessarily. Resurrecting lost species is an emerging area of science, as some companies seek to craft a \u201cde-extinction toolkit<\/a>\u201d that could help us restore species that are driven to extinction as a result of human activity.<\/p>\n Stories about the mammoth<\/a> and dire wolf<\/a> may be the ones you see in the media, but there are numerous approaches that hope the technologies innovated could prevent future extinctions and keep more species off the de-extinction candidate list.\u00a0<\/p>\n Is it really possible? Well, as luck would have it, we\u2019ve an entire podcast episode on the topic that you can find here<\/a>, featuring interviews with Colossal Bioscience\u2019s Ben Lamb, Beth Shapiro, and Matt James, as well as author and historian Sadiah Qureshi, who wrote Vanished: An Unnatural History Of Extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are many questions that need answering to better understand the emerging technologies’ potential, but there is one question we can answer very easily: Would I like to see a living frog that can vomit up its babies? Yes, yes I would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s fair to say that growing new life is rarely easy. For humans, it involves a lengthy stay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-226548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}