As slick as a frog might seem, spikes and lumps erupt from their skulls in places we can’t always see. “A few of them, if you could poke them on the head, you could feel it,” says David Blackburn, a herpetologist with the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. Most of the features are a surprise, visible only when peering beyond the skin and soft tissue.
So that’s what Blackburn and his student, Daniel Paluh, did. The team compiled digital 3D images of the skulls of 158 frog species to visualize all their lumps, bumps and enormous jaws. It turns out that frogs probably developed their strange head gear to help them hunt, protect their homes or even deliver poison, the team concluded in their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
