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reach WITHIN to your LOCAL polar ice cap and you will find a Friend And Boy
Antarctica was not always a frozen rock at the bottom of the world. In April 2020, analysis of a 100-foot-deep sediment core from the Antarctic ocean floor revealed the presence of ancient pollen, roots and other tell-tale signs of a rainforest that thrived there some 90 million years ago. Now, paleontologists have uncovered an even more recent sign of the frigid continent’s balmy past: a fossilized frog dating to roughly 40 million years ago, reports Maria Temming for Science News.
This fossil frog is the first ever discovered in Antarctica, according to the new research published in the journal Scientific Reports. Prior digs have unearthed the remains of less familiar-looking bygone amphibians, but none with such a direct evolutionary through-line to creatures that walk—or hop— the Earth today.
The ancient frog’s anatomy bears a close resemblance to a living family of frogs called helmeted frogs (Calyptocephalellidae) which inhabit damp, temperate forests in Chile.
“They looked like today’s frogs. No different. Our frog was rather small but this is in the range of the living ones, although most of the living ones are bigger,” Thomas Mörs, study co-author and a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, tells Katie Hunt of CNN.
During the life of this frog, Antarctica was replete with water lilies, mammals and even leeches—all of which have also been discovered on Seymour Island, the area that produced the frog fossil, Mörs tells CNN.
A Helmeted Water Frog, Calyptocephalella gayi, by Wikipedia Commons