We (6 of us including Palaeomike) went to a remote fossil site to find reptile remains. All we found, which I must brag was found by me, was a crocodile tooth from around 60 million years ago.


...but we found something else. (que dramatic music and pause)

Tadpoles. Well, someone saw a toad but was too scared to pick it up. That was disappointing. We found tadpoles in copious amounts and collected 9 of them to bring home and watch grow. We'll release them when they get bigger, no worries. I suspect they are toads. Some of the bigger ones already have back limbs starting up.

Oh yes, one more thing- what is a general time that I can expect to wait before they metamorphose into land capable animals?

I can't offer a time frame, but I suspect it would be slightly different depending on the species it actually is.

What I would like to suggest though, which would be interesting to see, is that you take photos every 3 days until they do turn into land creatures! lol

This way, you could toss up a picture for every 3 days and we could all see in progression how they matured.

__________________

Interesting prospect. I'll endeavor to do something along those lines.

Since the duration of morphogenesis is species specific, the only way that you're going to pin down an actual time-frame is to know what species you have. Morphogenesis is typically broken up into 50+ Gosner stages (Gosner, 1960), with rear limb buds appearing around stage 30 and fully functional front limbs appearing at stage 43. You'll just have to wait until one specimen develops both sets of limbs and then use that as a outline for future estimations of development.

Hope that helps a little bit.

__________________
Grammostola rosea 0.1.0
Pandinus imperator 2.0.0
Lampropeltis getula nigrita 0.1.0
Uromastyx maliensis 0.1.0
Rhacodactylus ciliatus 2.2.2
Uroplatus henkeli 0.0.1
Eublepharis macularius 1.0.0

i had ghost frog tadpoles once that take 2 years! haha but used to rear up some toad tadpoles for when I had little baby turtles, they took a couple weeks. It is all species dependant

__________________
Don't be jealous the voices only speak to me...

www.herprecon.org

I doubt it'll matter much anyways, 3/6 of them died already.

Ugh. The babies I have are dropping like crazy, just lost another one. They won't live through the night. It's a shame because the other person with some tadpoles has them swimming around all the time, happy and healthy. I think it's because her apartment is like 10 degrees C hotter than my place. I tried feeding them a big of lettuce to see if they would eat it. I would guess it's that and the lack of heat that is doing it. I'll try to get any survivors to the other persons tank tonight when she's done work.

So sad. Poor little guys. I just had to be selfish and want to observe metamorphosis.