 Descendent Of Dino Contemporaries
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Oct. 16, 2003 — Biologists say they have uncovered a new species of frog — a purple, snub-nosed, hamburger-shaped critter that has been found in India and has an extraordinary genetic past.
The chubby, three-inch beast has been dubbed Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, from the Sanskrit word for nose (nasika); batrachus, meaning frog; and Sahyadri, the name for the hills along the western Indian coast that is also called the Western Ghats.
N. sahyadrensis, according to its discoverers, is no ordinary frog.
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Indeed, in evolutionary terms, it is of royal lineage, being the very last representative of the kinds of frogs that hopped around the feet of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago.
Its finders, S.D. Biju of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in Kerala and Franky Bossuyt, also said N. sahyandrensis' DNA shares a link with sooglossids. These are a small, clannish family of frogs that live across the Indian Ocean, in the Seychelles.
The genetic resemblance, they said, supports the theory that, millions of years of ago, the ancestor of both frogs lived on Gondwana, a "supercontinent" in which all of the Earth's continents formed a single landmass.
Eventually, Gondwana split up into two landmasses, one comprising Africa and South America, the other comprising Australia, Antarctica and Indo-Madagascar.
The Nasikabatrachidae/Sooglossidae ancestors were on the Indo-Madagascan fragment.
This, in turn, broke up and drifted apart to form the Indian subcontinent and islands in the Indian Ocean, and the frogs evolved separately according to their habitat, the pair wrote in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly.
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