What Australian frog species that incubated tadpoles in its stomach went extinct in the 1980s?

The Gastric-brooding Frog was the Australian frog famous for incubating its young inside the mother’s stomach before disappearing in the 1980s. The name commonly refers to the extinct genus Rheobatrachus, which contained two closely related Queensland species.

After external fertilization, the female swallowed the eggs or embryos. Her stomach temporarily stopped producing digestive acid and became a nursery, allowing developing froglets to grow inside her. She eventually expelled fully formed young through her mouth. This extraordinary reproductive strategy made the frog one of the best-known examples of unusual amphibian parental care.

The southern gastric-brooding frog was last recorded in the wild around 1981, while the northern species was last seen in 1987. Both disappeared from small rainforest and stream habitats in Queensland. Habitat degradation, pollution, invasive species, and chytrid disease have all been proposed as causes, but no single explanation is certain. A technical distinction is that “Gastric-brooding Frog” covers two species, yet it is the standard and fair trivia answer to this clue.