Paleontologists identify small fossils as that of oldest frog relative found in North America


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.

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-paleon...-frog.html#jCp