Interesting Facts

The British ate frogs' legs 8,000 years before the French. (Archaeologists at Stonehenge have found the remains of the cooked front leg of a toad, which has been dated to between 7000 and 8000 BC (or BCE for those who have been attending my sessions. I'm not sure if this isn't something we should simply leave for the French to claim.)

Scientists have implanted the cells of an extinct amphibian (a frog) into the eggs of a living relative (The gastric-brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus, which swallowed its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth actually died out in 1983. The researchers, from the aptly named  Lazarus Project, took fresh eggs from the distantly related Great Barred Frog, deactivated their nuclei and successfully replaced them with genes from the extinct frog. To date,  Similar techniques could be used to bring back the dodo, the woolly mammoth, or maybe T-Rex (the dinosaur, not the band). Maybe we need a new word - exextinct, unextinct, or deextinct.) Source: The Wright Stuff

A rare species of frog has been named after Prince Charles in honour of his conservation work. (The Ecuadorian frog, from the stream frog species, has been named Hyloscirtus princecharlesi. The blotchy brown frog was discovered by Ecuadorian scientist Dr Luis A Coloma four years ago among preserved museum specimens, he later found live species in the wild. I wonder what happens if you kiss it?)

According to a study published in the journal Conservation Biology, up to one billion frogs are taken from the wild for human consumption each year. (France and the US are the two biggest importers, and Indonesia the largest exporter of frogs.)

The world’s largest frog is nearly as big as a house-cat. (It's called the Goliath frog. Does that mean there's a David frog too?)

Japan is the largest exporter of frog's legs. (Now I was very surprised to read this. What I want to know is where do they export them to?)