[h.gee@nature.com: Re: Frog]

[rowe@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu (Mickey Rowe)]

My apologies to those who saw this on VRTPaleo.  In any case, I
want to plug a fellow Penn person :-)  I also happen to like frogs and
think everyone else should too ;-)

  Date: Fri, 08 Sep 95 13:05:46 GMT
  From: h.gee@nature.com
  To: vrtpaleo@usc.edu
  Subject: Re: Frog

     For those that are interested, the full reference is: 
     
     Neil H. Shubin and Farish A. Jenkins Jr, "An Early Jurassic jumping 
     frog", Nature vol. 377, pp49-52; 7 September 1995
     
     Henry Gee, 
     Assistant Editor,Nature
     h.gee@nature.com


  ______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
  Subject: Frog
  Author:  vrtpaleo@usc.edu at Internet
  Date:    08/09/95 12:01


  I saw this today in one of the online news servers for those who are
  interested.......
     
  _________________________________________________________________________ 
  How evolution kept frogs a jump ahead
     
  By Bob Ward
     
  THE remains of the oldest frog ever found show that it developed
  jumping legs to avoid being eatenby dinosaurs, it is claimed
  today.The extinct frog, four specimens of which have been found on a
  Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona, had a skeleton very si milar
  to modern species, reports Nature.
       
  "These fossils show that the body plan of the frog has remained
  almost unchanged over the last 190 million years, so it appears to
  be very successful," says Prof Neil Shubin of the University of
  Pennsylvania.  Fossils of meat-eating fish and reptiles such as
  dinosaurs have also been recovered from the same site. "It was such
  a small animal that it had to be able to hop away to avoid these
  predators," says Prof Shubin. The back legs were already specially
  adapted for jumping, he says. The new frog has been named
  "Prosalirus bitis", after the Latin "prosalire" (to leap forward)
  and the Navajo "bitis" (high over it).
     
     
  ________________________________________________________________________
     
     
  so it's all in Nature for you Herp fans..
     
     
     
  Mark Leney
  Department of Biological Anthropology 
  University of Cambridge
  mdl1002@cus.cam.ac.uk