By: Lian Zhu

Some kind of frogs just can’t stick their landing. Pumpkin toadlets just won’t land peacefully.

They just flip through the air like getting flicked of the ground. They roll, cartwheel, and backflip in mid-air. After that, they plummet down and crash to the ground. Often these poorly jumping toadlets will end up landing on their bellies or uncontrollably land on their backs and bang their heads on the ground.

“I’ve looked at a lot of frogs and these are the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” Richard Essner Jr. said in a statement. Essner is a zoologist who studies vertebrates (animals with backbones) at a lab in Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Even when Essner saw these pumpkin toadlets do this odd behavior he was shocked. In fact, he was so shocked he travelled to Brazil to study them. Scientists do have to look closely. These tiny toadlets are not much bigger than your thumbnail. Since these toadlets are so small, they are hard to see. In this case, scientists have probably only two ways to find these frogs.

1. They have to hear for a high- pitched humming voices which only these frogs make.

2. While around the area, they scoop up the leaves cleaning around the lab, and hope to snatch a few of these frogs in the progress.

While the toadlets land harshly, the boney back-plates do provide some protection when landing. It is true that frogs can jump, but some just can’t land peacefully.