Last Confirmed Sighting: Conondale Range, Queensland, Australia, 1981
Status: Declared Extinct, 2002
There was a quiet alchemy in the mountain streams of Queensland. While other life forms sought the external for survival, the Gastric-brooding frog turned inward. It possessed the singular, miraculous ability to shut down its own digestive acids—to transform its stomach from a furnace into a sanctuary. In those cool, rocky crevices, the mother would swallow her own eggs, halting the rhythm of hunger to provide a biological cathedral for her young.
The world is quieter now for the loss of that stillness. We have lost the sight of a mother opening her mouth not to consume, but to exhale life—watching fully formed froglets hop from her throat like secrets finally told. It was a biological poetry of sacrifice, a literal hollowing of the self to ensure the continuation of the kind.
I imagine the last one huddled near a moss-slicked stone in the Blackall Range, its golden eyes reflecting a moonlit ripple in a stream that had become a graveyard. It carried the silence of an entire lineage in its belly, waiting for a birth that would never come, as the microscopic spores of a quiet plague settled into its skin.