Through her, Developmental Biology blossomed in a most unlikely place: Not having any funds to buy "Xenopus laevis", she came across a frog, called "Gastrotheca riobambae", in the very gardens of her University. A frog that she developed into a premier system to study the evolution of developmental adaptations. "Gastrotheca" is a marsupial frog that carries its eggs in a pouch on her back, where they are pushed in by the male with his hindlimbs. This terrestrial form of reproduction solely occurs in the Latin American frogs of the family Hemiphractidae. Out of the intense competition for reproductive sites in the South American rainforest had evolved over 90 species of these frogs, in which the female incubates her embryos inside her body bringing parallelism to mammalian reproduction.