Fleas, locusts and frogs use their legs as springs to store energy and then fire them into the air.

BBC: Gibbons' extraordinary jumps 'down to technique'

They began with dead frogs, whose sciatic nerves had been stimulated to make their legs twitch by no less a scientist than Luigi Galvani, the first to look into the matter, in 1771.

ECONOMIST: Andrew Huxley | The

In the summer of 1995, locals began to notice that many frogs at their local watering holes were somehow deformed: some were missing legs, others had too many, some had eyes inside their mouth and so, grotesquely, on.

ECONOMIST: Small things often hold big secrets