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Eyeless, lungless amphibian looks like a…
photo: Juliano Tupan (Wikimedia Commons)
I don’t mean to lower the tone of the website by posting about an animal that looks like a male generative organ, but I’m going to do just that.
This slimy beast has been making a bit of a splash on the science and environment pages of many a website of late after Brazilian biologists found six examples of the blind and lungless species of amphibian called the Atretochoana eiselti at the bottom of a drained river in the northern state of Rondonia. A ‘member’ (stop it) of the caecilian order of amphibians, which physically resemble earthworms or snakes, very little is known of the ‘floppy snake’.
From the LA Times:
The discovery was made last November, but was not announced until Wednesday, when researchers had confirmed that it is a new species. Biologist Julian Tupan told Brazil’s Estado website that, of the six collected, one died, two were kept for studies, and three were released back into the river.
Until last November the only known, confirmed examples of the Atretochoana eiselti existed in Vienna’s Natural History Museum and at the University of Brasília. The Viennese specimen originated somewhere in South America and was found some time before 1945 and the Brasília example was found in 1998.
Tags: amphibian, Atretochoana eiselti, lungless
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