The Mystery of Darwin’s Frog by Marty Crump (review)

Among the wonders collected by naturalist Charles Darwin on his famed voyage aboard the Beagle is a creature that’s kept scientists guessing since the mid-nineteenth century. It’s not just Rhinoderma darwinii’s Pinocchio-like snout, or its variety of skin colors, or its teeny inch-long size, but rather its outré breeding habits. The female frog contributes the customary clutch of eggs for fertilization, but then the male takes over by brooding the newly hatched tadpoles in his vocal sacs and “burping” them loose a couple of weeks later as fingernail-sized baby frogs. Crump, who has herself studied the frogs and written about them for the academic community, focuses not only on the oddities of the frogs, but also on early misunderstandings of their physiology (the presence of tadpoles within a frog’s body once led scientists to believe the brooders were female) and even the broader scientific shift from merely describing species to actually investigating their behavior. Illustrations here represent the best of two worlds—clear photography allows readers to examine the animals in natural settings, while scientific rendering, in this case not Audubon-style drawing but Jenkins’ detailed paper collage, provides objectified detail. The somewhat cramped typeface makes this offering appear a bit daunting, but readers who plunge right in should quickly discover that the writing is clear and the concepts accessible. End matter is substantive and thoughtfully arranged, from the additional notes on Darwin’s frogs, to the glossary, resource lists of children’s and adults materials, and index.