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#120 Mark's Bush Frog

Critically Endangered

This is another life-sized painting. It seems that all the sites I looked at quoted Wikipedia's description. They are a good bit smaller than the last two I have done, from about 21-30mm. I did this one at around 29mm, so it is a female. They are described as being dark grey with a "dark brownish concave stripe running from behind the eyes". They don't say where the stripe runs to, or how big it is, and not a single picture I saw had that. The picture that is the closest to the grey with brown stripe was an almost black with very dark brown sides, but no stripe that I could see. The other pictures were very different from that photo, and not a one really looked like each other. So, I tried to combine all the pictures I saw. Also, there was no picture that showed the inside of the legs or the frog's underside, so I am just making assumptions based on lots of other frogs I have seen.

After doing the painting, and being disappointed with the lack of information available to share about the frog I did some more looking around and I found a website for Mark Wilkinson from Natural History Museum of London. He is the Mark the frogs are named after. I'm going to contact him and am hoping that he can possibly get more information about their looks to me or he can confirm what I've done even. So, the group photo version of this one may look similar or a good bit different. If I hear from him before I paint the Mark's bush frog portion of the painting I will feel much more confident about how it looks. I am really loving the chance to reach out to researchers and biologists. After giving up on being a wildlife photographer as a kid, and realizing that having a horse was probably a huge part of the job description of "trick rider", I wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. I remember having a science kit with a frog you were supposed to dissect. I felt sorry for the frog and never dissected it. I also laughed though, because it had "harmful if swallowed" on the jar, and I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to swallow the frog or the formaldehyde it was swimming in. I've dissect 2 cadavers, a couple frogs, a shark, a cat, and a fetal pig. AP biology doesn't really care if you feel bad for the animals.


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