Date: February 27, 2019
Source: Virginia Tech
A team of
paleontologists led by Virginia Tech's Michelle Stocker and Sterling Nesbitt of
the Department of Geosciences have identified fossil fragments of what are
thought to be the oldest known frogs in North America.
The
fossils are comprised of several small pieces of hip bone, called an ilium,
from Chinle frogs, a distant long-extinct branch of, but not a direct ancestor
of, modern frogs. The fragments are packed into rock and are smaller than a
pinky nail. They represent the first known and earliest equatorial remains of a
salientian -- the group containing living frogs, and their most-closely related
fossil relatives -- from the Late Triassic, roughly 216 million years ago.
The name
of the fossil derives from where they were found, the Chinle Formation of
Arizona.
Stocker,
an assistant professor of geosciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science,
says the fossils, discovered in May 2018, underscore the importance of
microfossil collection and analysis for understanding extinct species whose
total length is under three feet in length.
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