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The Guardian reported that 92-year-old Colette Ferry, a resident of the tiny French village Frontenex, received a visit from local law enforcement after they received complaints from neighbors about noisy frogs in her yard. “A man came here and was really yelling at me, saying he could not sleep and he had to work … but I did not expect the [police]. Especially not for frogs! But there’s always someone ready to complain about someone else,” Ferry said. Ferry is excited to see what happens next, as the French police assured her that someone will return to apprehend the frogs...

Archaeologists working near the site of an iron age home near Cambridge were perplexed when they uncovered a vast trove of frog skeletons. Quite why more than 8,000 bones had been piled up and preserved is a prehistoric mystery.They were all recovered from a single 14-metre-long ditch, right next to the site of an iron age roundhouse at Bar Hill, where there was a settlement during the middle and late iron age (400BC-AD43)...It is unlikely that these amphibians had been eaten by the people living at the settlement. The archaeologists say that, while there is evidence of amphibian consumption in...

The leap of a frog is a quintessential evolutionary feat. The critter’s girthy gams thrust from behind to springboard the body up and out; a pair of acrobatic arms stretch forward to seamlessly break the fall. The landing is “very precise, very controlled,” says Richard Essner, a biologist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. One might expect that any frog worth its salt should be able to stick it. “And most frogs,” says Marcio Pie, a biologist at Edge Hill University, in the United Kingdom, “do.” Then there is the poor pumpkin toadlet. Spanning roughly a centimeter from snout to bum—about...

Black smoke has been seen billowing from China’s first assault carrier in Shanghai. The new Type-075 carrier, which is similar to the U.S. Navy’s America Class assault carriers, is designed to carry helicopters and hovercraft to support amphibious landings. The smoke was reported on Chinese social media platforms earlier today. Images suggest that the fire took hold within the hull of the ship, possibly in the expansive aircraft hanger. Smoke came out of the open aircraft lift near the front of the island superstructure. Smoke also came out of the rear hangar opening. For a time a massive cloud of...

AUSTIN, Texas— The Center for Biological Diversity and Save Our Springs Alliance today filed a notice of intent to sue the Texas Department of Transportation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over an Austin highway construction project’s threats to the federally endangered Austin blind and Barton Springs salamanders. The conservation groups recently learned that the MoPac Intersections Project has exposed at least 21 underground caves, sink holes and other karst features that provide habitat for the endangered salamanders. There is a high risk that construction will pollute the two species’ habitat by introducing silt and pollutants to the subsurface. The...

The rock carvings -- known as petroglyphs -- have been discovered in their thousands atop hillocks in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra. Mostly discovered in the Ratnagiri and Rajapur areas, a majority of the images etched on the rocky, flat hilltops remained unnoticed for thousands of years... animals, birds, human figures and geometrical designs are all depicted. The way the petroglyphs have been drawn, and their similarity to those found in other parts of the world, have led experts to believe that they were created in prehistoric times and are possibly among the oldest ever discovered. "Our first deduction...

Wildlife officials in Peru are investigating the mass death of thousands of rare frogs near the Bolivian border. Locals estimate that the bodies of some 10,000 Titicaca water frogs have been found in Lake Titicaca and its adjoining rivers. The critically endangered amphibian, known as the ‘scrotum frog’ due to its unfortunate appearance, is believed to have been killed by polluted waters. Thousands of the large, wrinkly green frogs have been found floating on the surface of the Coata river in southern Peru in recent days, prompting the National Forestry and Wildlife Service (Serfor) to launch an investigation.

Two hundred and seventy-eight million years ago, the world was a different place. Not only were the landmasses merged into the supercontinent of Pangaea, but the land was home to ancient animals unlike anything alive today. But until now, very little information was available about what animals were present in the southern tropics. In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists from The Field Museum and colleagues from around the world describe several new amphibian species and a reptile from northeastern Brazil that help fill this key geographic gap and reveal how animals moved among regions in the supercontinent. "Almost...

All of the found and re-discovered species belong to the Night frog group, genus Nyctibatrachus. Thanks go to S.D. Biju, an amphibian biologist at the University of Delhi, and his team for tirelessly scouring the wildlife rich Western Ghats region, and performing DNA testing of the frogs. Biju and his colleagues over the years have discovered an astounding number of new frog species, 45. That number is likely to increase. Animal discoveries, however, often come with serious concern, since many of these species are few and far between and are desperately needing conservation help. At present, 32 percent of the...

Kerry M. Kriger wants to make Santa Cruz County the most frog-friendly county on the planet. The county is home to three endangered amphibians, including the California red-legged frog. "I definitely want our community to understand the importance of amphibians," he said. "We have some important Santa Cruz-based projects that we're working on, and we'll need a lot of community participation." Kriger - founder and executive director of Save the Frogs, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting amphibian populations and "promoting a society that respects and appreciates nature and wildlife" - will speak at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum today, as...

It may be a shot in the dark, but freezing sperm is one of the last chances to save the hellbender, North America's biggest salamander, conservationists say. Hellbenders—also known as snot otters and devil dogs—have dwindled throughout their range, which once encompassed streams from northeastern Arkansas to New York. The 2.5-foot-long (0.7-meter-long) amphibians have declined by 80 to 90 percent in most of their traditional watersheds in recent decades, and healthy populations now haunt only isolated pockets of southern Appalachia (see map) and Pennsylvania, said Dale McGinnity, curator of reptiles at Nashville Zoo. All of the states in the hellbender's...

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - Greek officials say a horde of frogs has forced the closure of a key northern highway for two hours. Thessaloniki traffic police chief Giorgos Thanoglou says "millions" of the amphibians covered the tarmac Wednesday near the town of Langadas, some 12 miles east of Thessaloniki. "There was a carpet of frogs," he said. Authorities closed the highway after three car drivers skidded off the road trying to dodge the frogs. No human injuries were reported. Thanoglou said the amphibians probably left a nearby lake to look for food.

Long-standing 'canary in the coal mine' role questioned.Frogs aren't always the first to suffer from pollution.Digital Vision The health of amphibians is commonly used to give a rough assessment of pollution levels in an area, but an analysis of more than 20,000 toxicity studies now suggests that these creatures are relatively resilient and not well suited to the task.The finding could have a significant effect on the way that the environment is assessed. Conventional wisdom suggests that if an amphibian population is thriving, the area is probably clear of pollutants. But the survey shows that other species, such as shelled...

Frogs are suffering from a fatal fungal infection.Vance T. Vredenburg/SFSU A fungal infection that is killing amphibians around the world acts by disrupting the flow of electrolytes across their skin, ultimately causing heart failure. The discovery is helping to raise hopes that a treatment for the infection could one day be given to amphibians in the wild.Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a kind of chytrid fungus that causes the skin disease chytridiomycosis in amphibians, was likely spread around the world by the South African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) in the 1930s and 1940s, when the frog was widely used as a pregnancy test....

Amphibians around the world synchronise their mating activity by the full Moon, researchers have discovered. This global phenomenon has never been noticed before, but frogs, toads and newts all like to mate by moonlight. The animals use the lunar cycle to co-ordinate their gatherings, ensuring that enough males and females come together at the same time. In doing so the creatures maximise their spawning success and reduce their odds of being eaten.

EDGE Amphibians: World's Weirdest Creatures Just Got WeirderThe Chinese giant salamander can grow up to 1.8m in length and evolved independently from all other amphibians over one hundred million years before Tyrannosaurus rex. (Credit: Image courtesy of Zoological Society of London) ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2008) — A gigantic, ancient relative of the newt, a drawing-pin sized frog, a limbless, tentacled amphibian and a blind see-through salamander have all made it onto a list of the world’s weirdest and most endangered creatures. ZSL EDGE programme is highlighting some of the world’s most extraordinary creatures currently threatened with extinction. This year ZSL...

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For the first time, scientists have documented a link between global warming — perhaps better described as human-induced climate disruption — and the significant loss of amphibian biodiversity. Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the Tropical Science Center’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, led a team of 14 scientists that investigated the disappearance of more than 70 species of harlequin (Atelopus sp.) frogs in Central and South America. More than half of these frog species have gone extinct. Researchers had identified the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis as the villain wiping out harlequin frogs, but until this study, published in...

Rising temperatures are responsible for pushing dozens of frog species over the brink of extinction in the past three decades, according to findings being reported today by a team of Latin American and U.S. scientists. The study, published in the journal Nature, provides compelling evidence that climate change has already helped wipe out a slew of species and could spur more extinctions and the spread of diseases worldwide. It also helps solve the international mystery of why amphibians around the globe have been vanishing from their usual habitats over the past quarter-century -- as many as 112 species have disappeared...

An outbreak of waterborne fungal disease in western Panama has eliminated eight families of Panamanian amphibians and is spreading, scientists report in this week's issue of the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS). An outbreak of the infectious disease chytridiomycosis, caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, is spreading into the El Cope region, researchers have found. The disease is moving from northwest to southeast from Costa Rica toward Colombia, leaving entire species of dead frogs and salamanders behind. The rockhopper frog, for example, which lived along El Cope riverbanks, disappeared completely within one month. Central American frog Eleutherodactylus...