At the museum

Supplementary material



Darwin's frogs have a way of caring for their brood that might seem quite odd when witnessed for the first time: the male stands guard over the roughly 40 eggs that were laid by the female, and as soon as the embryos start moving he ingests them. Don't worry, though: he's actually keeping the kids in his vocal sac.

There the embryos hatch into tadpoles and they'll remain in their dad's vocal apparatus until metamorphosis, at which point they hop out of his mouth to start their frog life.

"Where do babies come from?" is a question much easier to answer when you're a Darwin's frog: "from daddy's mouth, dearie".