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Question 54 of 75

Q.Presence of gills in the tadpole of frog indicates that:

(a) Frogs will have gills in future.
(b) Fishes were amphibious in the past.
(c) Frogs evolved from gilled ancestor.
(d) Fishes evolved from frog - like ancestors.
Tamil Nadu DgeTamil Nadu HSC First Year (DGE) Board 2022MCQ· 1mImportance★★★★★
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The presence of gills in the frog's tadpole stage is evidence, per the biogenetic law, that frogs (amphibians) evolved from gill-bearing, fish-like ancestors, even though the adult frog itself is air-breathing.

A frog's life cycle includes an aquatic larval stage (the tadpole), which resembles a fish in many ways — it has a fish-like tail for swimming and respires using external, and later internal, gills, just as fish do throughout their lives. As the tadpole undergoes metamorphosis into the adult frog, the gills are lost and lungs (along with skin respiration) take over as the adult respiratory organs. This transient reappearance of a gill stage during the frog's own individual development (ontogeny) is interpreted, under the biogenetic law proposed by Ernst Haeckel ('ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'), as a trace of the evolutionary history (phylogeny) of the amphibian lineage — amphibians are believed to have evolved from gill-bearing, aquatic, fish-like ancestors, and the tadpole's gill stage is a developmental echo of that ancestry. It does not mean adult frogs will regain gills in the fu …

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