I have to admit to feeling more than a little squeamish when it was suggested I review a website which featured frog dissection. After all, I'd spent most of senior school biology inventing excuses to absent myself from any session that involved scalpels and bloody entrails. So I was more than a tad(pole) anxious as I clicked on the URL, held my nose and plunged into the Virtual Frog Project.

I need not have worried for one of the joys of the virtual world is that technology has yet to work out how to simulate the evil miasma of three-day old, defrosted frog. Nor do the organs of the hapless frog glisten gorily, nor does the slime-slicked skin slip sickeningly under the silver scalpel - the gore factor has been completely eliminated which is all good news for yours truly.

The Virtual Frog Project is therefore the perfect learning tool for those students who like their biology bowdlerised. Put together by the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, the site allows you to interactively dissect a digitised frog with the click of a button, examine its organs in minute detail from every conceivable angle whilst learning their physiology and then (godlike) reassemble the wee beastie.

"The idea was to enter the heart and fly down the blood vessels," comments one of the website's creators, " poking our head out at any point to see the structure of the surrounding anatomy." Virtual Frog certainly allows you access to the very bowels of the frog (disconcertingly named Fluffy) and experience it from the inside out.

Computers can't teach everything in anatomy but they can teach some things better and this virtual frog is definitely a case in point. The dissection kit comes complete with every tool imagineable to manipulate Fluffy. I was able to remove skin with the click of a button, find out the function of the exposed organs with the same, simple click, view mechanical slices and cross-sections, inflate Fluffy to near life-size or shrink him to insignificance.

There are plenty of supporting learning tools along with the dissection kit. A tutorial takes you hop by hop through the functionality available with the kit showing the beginner how to change image sizes, rotate the image and remove and replace organs. It also shows how you to use the movie option and record your activities for later use or as part of an assessment task.

As well as the tutorial, there is a game you can play called the Virtual Frog Builder at which I proved an absolute dud. Supposedly, the game tests your knowledge of the 3D spatial relationships between the organs in the frog. The game starts with an image of the nerves in the frog and the object (I think!) is to build up the rest of the organs by selecting each organ and clicking on its correct position in the image. Judging by the genetic mutation (more aptly christened Frogenstein) I managed to produce, this game probably requires a more sophisticated understanding of frog anatomy than I currently possess.

For those who prefer to call a frog a "grenouille", the interactive webpages are available in a number of languages and there are also a number of interesting links to other biology-related pages which I was able to explore.

Apart from a number of papers about the technology behind the site, Frogwatch USA was one site which rewarded a gander. It provides an update on the (slightly loony) activities of a volunteer-driven frog monitoring program who leave no toad unturned in their efforts to track the amphibian population of America.

For the genuine frogophile, there is even an audio sampler of a CD beguilingly entitled "Sounds of North American Frogs" which treats the listener to the seductive tones of frogs in concert - no bull(frog)!

All in all, I found the Whole Frog project site well worth a visit despite my initial trepidation. The learning tools are easy to use, the tutorial helpfully frog marches you through the tricky bits and there is a wealth of supporting information.

Work continues on refining and improving the site. The Whole Frog Project is currently developing the technology to bring an optical microscope to the network in a way that will allow remote control manipulation plus display of live video output from the microscope. Hmm, sounds a bit beyond this user but no doubt there are plenty of generation Z'ers (with their nanosecond attention spans) who can grasp this techno-wizardry.

Whilst this award-winning site is supposedly pitched at high school biology classes, it was more than challenging enough for me especially as it does assume some understanding of the concepts of modern, computer-based 3D visualisation. So clear that frog out of your throat, and go visit The Whole Frog Project - it's clean, it's neat, it's quiet, it doesn't wriggle or smell and you don't even have to wash your hands afterwards - would I (am)fib(ian) to you?