Back from the Dead

Few creatures have ever existed that can match the sheer weirdness of Australia’s gastric brooding frog. As the name suggests, the amphibian had the strange ability to reproduce offspring in its stomach. The female would release a cloud of eggs, the male would fertilize them, and then the female swallowed the eggs whole. At that point, the female ceased making digestive acids and her stomach became, essentially, a womb. A few weeks would pass, and then the female would open her mouth and a batch of babies would issue forth. Think of it as the swampland version of Zeus birthing Athena out of his forehead: a beast that pukes its young into the world.

This wonderful oddity no longer exists. Biologists didn’t identify the frog until relatively recently – and then it almost immediately disappeared. The southern gastric brooding frog was described in 1973, discovered in a narrow range of streams on Australia’s east coast; the last sighting occurred in 1979. Its cousin, the northern gastric brooding frog, wasn’t discovered until 1984; the last one was seen just a year...