By Helen BriggsBBC News
14 June 2018
Frogs trapped in amber for 99
million years are giving a glimpse of a lost world.
The tiny creatures have been
preserved in sticky tree resin since the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs.
The four fossils give a window
into a world when frogs and toads were evolving in the rainforests.
Amber from Myanmar, containing
skin, scales, fur, feathers or even whole creatures, is regarded as a treasure
trove by palaeontologists.
Dr Lida Xing of China University
of Geosciences in Beijing said it was a "miracle" find.
"In China, frogs, lizards
and scorpions are called three treasures of amber," he told BBC News.
"These amber fossils provide
direct evidence that frogs inhabited wet tropical forests before the mass
extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous."
The fossil record of the earliest
amphibians is sparse, which makes the discovery particularly valuable for
science.
Dr David Blackburn of the
University of Florida, who worked on the fossils alongside Dr Xing, said being
small and living in a tropical forest makes the likelihood of ending up in the
fossil record "pretty low".
"Frogs have been around on
earth for approximately 200 million years," he said.
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