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Researchers in Antarctica discover the remains of a 40-million-year-old frog, suggesting that the continent once had a much warmer climate and supported a diverse variety of wildlife.
- Scientists in Antarctica found bone fragments of a frog 40 million years old.
- They believe the remains are from a hooded frog, a species that is still alive today and is most commonly found in the warm regions of the Chilean lowlands.
- The discovery supports the idea that Antartica was once covered in forests.
Researchers in Antarctica discovered the remains of a frog that dates back 40 million years, to a period when the icy continent had a radically different climate.
The remains were found on Seymour Island, at the end of the Antarctic Peninsula in a region closer to the southern tip of South America.
The team, which was co-directed by Thomas Mörs of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, found the skull and hip bone of a frog believed to be part of the Calyptocephalellidae family.
A team of researchers, co-led by Thomas Mörs of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, discovered the remains of a 40-million-year-old frog in Antarctica, the first evidence of amphibian life on the continent from that period.
More commonly known as hooded frogs, these small amphibians are still found in South America, mainly in the lowlands of Chile, where temperatures are warm and humid.
A hooded frog is unlikely to survive long in the icy conditions of Antarctica today, but the discovery offers a new insight into how long the previously temperate period of Antarctica lasted.
“The question now is: How cold was it and what was living on the continent when these ice sheets began to form?” Mörs said in an interview with Science News.
‘This frog is one more indication that in [that] Over time, at least around the peninsula, it remained a suitable habitat for cold-blooded animals such as reptiles and amphibians.
In the past, scientists believe Antarctica was part of a larger supercontinent called Pangea with what is now Australia and South America.
The team found the remains on Seymour Island, on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, near the continent’s closest point to South America.
During that time, the region was covered in temperate rain forests similar to those found in New Zealand today, which would have been compatible with a completely different set of creatures that are associated with Antarctica today.
Previous research has found teeth and other fragments of marsupials dating from the pre-freeze period, but according to Mörs, no one has found evidence of frogs.
About 34 million years ago, Pangea began to separate, and Antarctica began to cool and formed large glaciers that would eventually render it uninhabitable for most of life.
The remains are believed to come from the hooded frog, a species that still lives in the warmer areas of South America, including the warm lowlands of Chile.
The remains consisted of a skull and hip bone, which the team believes predates the freezing and glaciation period that radically changed the terrain of Antarctica.
Earlier expeditions to Antarctica have found small bony fragments of marsupials and other mammals, but no one has found evidence of amphibian life in the past 200 million years.
Mörs’s team had started their expedition in hopes of learning more about what the terrain was like during that period and what exactly caused the cooling.
Mörs believes that learning more about the kinds of life the region supported could help scientists better understand what caused the drastic change in Antarctic climate.
‘It would be great to have more data for these [six million years] to get a better idea of the cooling process, “he told Vice.
