The incredible frog skeleton

Ever since I was young, frogs have been one of my favourite animals. and a few years ago I even had a young frog in my room for a short while to study it, which I kept in an old fish tank. You can read about that here. I've always thought that frogs are cool with the way they have adapted to jump and swim.

The day after I appeared on The One Show, I received a kind email from a man called Mr Lydamore asking me if I would like a frog skeleton.It had been in his family for a long time after he found it under a cooker - he doesn't know how long it was there, but it could have been decades. It was a very kind offer ! This is what I've learned from it:

Studying a wild common frog from my bedroom.

One of the most difficult thing in studying nature is being able to get close enough to the animal to look at it closely; wild deer run away, foxes hide and buzzards fly away when you get close.

Two months ago I decided that I wanted to find out more about common frogs (Rana temporaria). At this time of year, the tadpoles have turned into small baby frogs which hop around in long grass and near ponds,  so me and dad went out in to the woods to find some. Dad remembered a pool he had seen in the hollow left by an upturned tree which had been full of tadpoles but it was all dried up when we went there. We did not find any for a week until we went out to the Secret Lake Woods near my village.

Finding great bones in old ice houses

I was going to write about something else this week, but I had a really good walk yesterday and found some great new bones.

In the village where I live there used to be a big country mansion called Ardoch House in the woods which I call the Pheasant Woods which was built in the early 1700s. It was knocked down about 30 years ago but you can still walk round where it used to be. The house was built before there was electricity or freezers so they used ice houses to keep ice in. Ice house are built near lakes or lochs, and in winter ice was taken from the lake and stored.

Yesterday me and dad were walking through the old estate and we decided to explore the old icehouses and I made some amazing finds.

The Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris

For the last two weeks I have been writing about my trip to Paris, when I visited a fantastic bone museum with a collection of dinosaurs. This week I am going to write about the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, which is the oldest public zoo in the world, and which is in the same park as the museum.

As soon as we left the Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée we walked over the park to the zoo. It was mum's idea and it was a brilliant one. It's not the biggest zoo in Paris - that one is called the Zoo Bois de Vincennes - but it has lots of animals in it.

Looking for frogs and toads

When I was being filmed for Scottish Television, we went up to Tam Breck wood just outside my village and I noticed lots of baby frogs hopping about.

Today Dad and I made a special trip to the wood to see if we could find any baby frogs and if we could work out what they were.