Dinosaur Era Frog Discovered

[Richard W Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

picture of the critter at

 http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/10/15/frog_india031015
 http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/photos/frog_india_biju.jpg


http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=3620404&section=news

LONDON (Reuters) - A new species of frog, whose ancestors hopped around at
the feet of the dinosaurs, has been discovered in the mountains of
southern India, scientists said Wednesday.

The purple, small-headed creature with tiny eyes, protruding snout and a
bloated appearance belongs to a new family of frogs that scientists
thought had either never existed or had disappeared without trace millions
of years ago.

"It is not just a new species. It represents a deep branch in the
evolutionary tree of frogs, and as such merits the establishment of a new
family," Dr. Franky Bossuyt, an evolutionary biologist at the Free
University of Brussels in Belgium, said in an interview.

"It is an important discovery because it tells us something about the
early evolution of advanced frogs that we would not know otherwise because
there are no fossil records from this lineage."

Bossuyt and his colleague S.D. Biju discovered the frog in the Western
Ghats Mountains of India, one of eight biodiversity hotspots in the world
that are home to unusual species found nowhere else.

Its closest living relatives are a family frogs called sooglossidae that
are found only in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, 2,000 miles from
India.
...
Scientists had estimated that the family tree of frogs diverged about 230
million years ago. The discovery of the new species, which is reported in
the science journal Nature, shows there was a lineage 130 million years
ago on a fragment of the ancient super-continent of Gondwana, that
incorporated South America, Africa, Indo-Madagascar (India, Madagascar and
the Seychelles), Australia and Antarctica.

Gondwana started breaking up 160 million years ago and lost its eastern
end about 130 million years ago. Madagascar separated from it about 90
million years ago and the Seychelles followed about 65 million years ago.

"This (the discovery) tells us that there was a frog lineage in
Indo-Madagascar when it was one continent about 130 million years ago,"
said Bossuyt.