This Amazing Baby is Born Through His Mother’s Mouth + photo

Saed News — Society Section: Different animals have various methods of reproduction. For example, a type of frog keeps its eggs inside its stomach and then releases the newly born froglets through its mouth.

This frog is called the gastric-brooding frog (Rheobatrachus silus) because it gives birth through its stomach.

The gastric-brooding frogs went extinct in 1983 (1362 in the Iranian calendar), about 30 years ago, due to habitat loss. However, scientists have now created an early-stage frog using frozen embryos, aiming to reintroduce gastric-brooding frogs back into nature.

The gastric-brooding frog is actually the only known animal species that gave birth through its mouth. After laying eggs, it swallowed them and kept them in its stomach until about six weeks later when the froglets were born and expelled.

Michael Archer and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, extracted nuclei from the cells of frogs that had been frozen for about 40 years. They then inserted these nuclei into eggs of a different frog species called Mixophyes fasciolatus.

This caused the cells to multiply and divide several times—just like the process of embryo formation. The results of this study were presented for the first time at the TED conference in Washington under the title “De-extinction.”

But among all extinct animals, why do scientists want to bring this frog back to life? There are several reasons: First, among ongoing de-extinction projects, the gastric-brooding frog has simpler DNA. Also, frozen cell samples exist. Additionally, close relatives of this frog still live on Earth and can provide eggs for the project.

In contrast, other extinct species like the Tasmanian tiger, which Archer also hopes to bring back, are much harder because they have no living relatives. Moreover, frog embryos inside eggs don’t face the hormones and immune system of a host mother as mammals do, which affect embryo development.

Archer hopes to raise the revived frogs in a large aquarium, but they might need to reconstruct the body of a mother frog to carry the embryos inside the eggs for proper growth.