Prehistoric frogs in amber surface after 99 million years
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.
The earliest direct evidence of frogs in wet tropical forests from Cretaceous Burmese amber (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-26848-w) (DX)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snotnose on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:50AM
He said he was going out for cigarettes, that was 20 years ago. Wat do?
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @02:23AM (1 child)
Something about those 2 words together makes me cringe.
In my field of study, we are flooded with Chinese articles that basically repeat prior work, but shoddier and without citing it. In fact, only citing other Chinese authors. Citation counts and publication counts strongly affect employment and promotion outcomes in science... and we wonder why there are so many Chinese people working in US science labs. It must be because they're good at math, right?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @03:52AM
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Sunday June 17 2018, @03:46AM (2 children)
99 million years is a long time
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday June 17 2018, @06:53AM (1 child)
I am impressed by the implied accuracy of the estimate. I would have expected something like "100 million years".
Just the number "99" implies to me almost an accuracy of 1 percent, which I seriously question.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Sunday June 17 2018, @03:38PM
The full Nature article itself briefly explains how the amber samples were dated:
The Uranium-Lead dating [wikipedia.org] used to date those zircons (see note 14: Shi, G. et al. Age constraint on Burmese amber based on U–Pb dating of zircons. Cret. Res. 37, 155–163 (2012) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cretres.2012.03.014 [doi.org] ) can routinely get precisions in the 1% to 0.1% range. The 1% accuracy implied is thus not at all unreasonable or unheard of.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 17 2018, @05:48PM
Great, now they have some closer DNA samples to splice with dinosaur DNA to make even weirder, more vicious dino-franken-monsters. :P
(Score: 1) by ChrisMaple on Sunday June 17 2018, @08:55PM
How big are these frogs? There's no scale on the photo and no data in the article.