436 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
The Australian Limnodynastes tasmaniensis lays small eggs which 
are enclosed in a gelatinous frothy mass floating on any available 
water supply. These eggs hatch in about 48 hours and the newly 
emerged larvae make their way from the frothy mass into the water 
where they immediately attach themselves to water plants, debris, or 
other submerged objects. 
Centrolenidae——Not too much is known concerning the breeding 
habits of this distinctive little family of tree frogs. The eggs are 
deposited in disklike masses on the undersides of green leaves. These 
masses are invariably above running water, into which the tadpoles 
fall on hatching. It has been reported for Cochranella fleischmanni, 
of Barro Colorado Island, Panama Canal Zone, that the easiest way 
to locate the frogs is to search out the egg masses. At night a male 
will nearly always be in attendance. Multiple matings by a single 
male have been reported for this species. 
Bufonidae.—The true toads, like so many other anuran families, 
show a diversity of life histories. In the genus Bufo the males go 
to the ponds in spring, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, and 
give their calls. When the female approaches the male, the latter 
embraces her behind the front legs and the pair float at the surface, 
the male leaving his hind legs hanging free. As the female deposits 
the eggs, the male brings his knees to rest in her groin with heels 
almost touching. The female pushes along the bottom and deposits 
strings of small-yolked eggs, which may number in the thousands. 
They hatch in 2 to 4 days into little, short, polliwog-type tadpoles. 
These tadpoles transform into tiny toads a month or two later. 
In the African genus Vectophrynoides, which contains but three 
species, the eggs are not laid but are retained in the body of the 
female where they hatch; the young go through their larval develop- 
ment in the oviducts of the mother. The number of young is greatly 
reduced in comparison to the number produced by the toads that lay 
their eggs in water, but even so, more than 100 may be taken from 
a single female of Vectophrynoides vivipara. Despite the fact that 
these larvae remain in the oviduct rather than having a free-living 
tadpole stage, few of the important characters of tadpoles have actu- 
ally been lost. Transformation takes places within the oviduct and 
fully developed young are born. No copulatory organs have been 
described for this genus of frogs, and how the spermatazoa are 
transmitted from the male to the female is not known. 
Rhinodermatidae—The small Andean Darwin’s frog, Rhinoderma 
darwini, has one of the most unusual of all life histories known 
among the frogs. Several males will watch a clutch of 20 to 30 
eggs, deposited on land by a single female, for 10 to 20 days, until 
they are nearly ready to hatch and the embryos can be seen moving 
inside them. Over a period of several days, each male then picks up 
