- A mutant frog with three heads and six legs was on the
run in Somerset yesterday after being photographed in the garden of a children's
nursery.
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- Wildlife experts said they were stunned by the weird
creature which was briefly captured by a group of children at the Green
Umbrella nursery in Weston-super-Mare yesterday morning.
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- Rebecca Twinn, the nursery manager, said the children
had put the frog in a bucket and brought it to show to the teachers.
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- "At first we just thought it was three few frogs
piled on top of each other but then it leapt up at us as one thing. The
skin of the three heads all seemed to be one piece of skin," Ms Twinn
said. "The children were all excited. They are all under four, so
I suppose they were too young to be scared. I suppose they thought it was
a bit of Harry Potter come to the Green Umbrella."
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- "He got away quite shortly after we captured him.
One of the children went to look at him and he jumped out. We've had Sky
News, the local television people and the children trying to find him all
afternoon. They've been looking all over the garden and in the pond but
with no success."
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- John Wilkinson, a frog ecologist at the Open University,
said it appeared, from pictures taken before the escape, to be an extremely
unusual find. "I have certainly never seen anything like it before.
It seems to be an example of Siamese birth whereby three individual animals
all have arisen from the same fertilised embryo but they haven't divided
properly. We know this can happen because it happens in other animals,"
he said. "I do retain some scepticism, however. If you look at the
pictures, the lower frog does appear to have different characteristics
to the two other frogs. It is not unusual to find more than one male frog
clinging very tightly to a female. They get very randy, as we all do, and
will not let go. We are in the breeding season."
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- Mike Dilger, a wildlife biologist, said: "As far
as I am aware it is unprecedented. Frogs have a very primitive embryology
- so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is something
different."
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- He said the reason for the three-headed frog's development
could have been damage to the embryo, a spontaneous mutation such as that
of conjoined human twins or factors in the environment, including pollution.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=498416
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