Food for thought: “Weirdly, it’s easier for us to generate beautiful images of skulls than it is to know what these frogs eat,” Blackburn said. “Natural history remains quite hard. Just because we know things exist doesn’t mean we know anything about them.”
Tag: frogs
But how do frog dads know how to look after tadpoles?
It’s not enough to say that it benefits their offspring. What is the exact mechanism by which they learned to carry out this process? In this case, the researchers are honest enough not to just start emitting Darwinblather. They admit we don’t really know.
They didn’t find the parenting switch…
They didn’t find anything like a “parenting switch” that applied across frog and mouse species, they noted. But parenting behavior, however caused, may be very much older that we used to think (the rise of amphibians about 360 million years ago?). And yet many later life forms don’t care for their offspring. The more evolution becomes a history, the more it features puzzling complexities that can’t be resolved by a fatuous appeal to an “ism”.
Researchers: Newly discovered frog separated from others by 50 million years
“It’s a perfect scenario for cooking up new species,” he said. What? Wait! This isn’t a “new species.” This is a holdover from 50 million years ago, during which it’s always been an obvious frog.