The Mystery of Darwin's Frog

A frog full of tadpoles? Impossible! Here, for the first time, is the strange but true story of Darwin’s frog. After Charles Darwin discovered the frog in 1834, other researchers found that one of his specimens was packed full of tadpoles. Was the frog a cannibal, or perhaps a rare species that gave birth to live young instead of laying eggs? No. He was a male, holding the tadpoles safe in his vocal sac while they morphed into froglets. And the surprises didn’t stop there. Author and frog scientist Marty Crump mines her firsthand experiences studying Darwin’s frog to tell the fascinating story for young readers. Award-winning illustrators Steve Jenkins and Edel Rodriguez lend their art to a mix of beautiful photographs. Young readers will be enthralled by this story of real science, full of strange surprises.

A frog packed with tadpoles! How could that be? No one had ever seen this species before, and they had certainly never seen a frog full of polliwogs. This is the story of a frog that stumped scientists for decades. This fascinating tale of scientific discovery chronicles “how we know what we know” about the exotic Darwin’s frog, including the surprising discovery that the male broods the tadpoles in his vocal sac, and it details the creation of a program to protect the species from a deadly fungus.