Fossil: scientists describe ancestral Kermit frog – 03/25/2024 – Science

Researchers at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) of the Smithsonian Institute, in the United States, named an amphibian fossil in honor of the famous green frog Kermit, from the Muppets, who in the original English is called Kermit.

The similarity of the fossil frog’s skull to the TV character is in the slightly tapered snout and the “bulging eyes” — in fact, the fossil’s two large eye sockets are preserved, but, as the top of the skull after the eyes is short, the fossil had the appearance of a small head with huge eyes.

The find describing the new fossil was published last Thursday (21) in the scientific journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The name in the new species comes from free kermitops, from the Greek “ops” (face of) and Kermit, the name of the TV doll, and the epithet “gratus”, from the Latin gratitude, a gesture to thank the work of Nicholas Hotton III, a now deceased paleontologist who contributed for four decades for research work in the paleontology branch of the Smithsonian. It was on one of his expeditions that the material was discovered.

The three-centimeter skull had been in a drawer in the collection of the museum’s paleobiology department for 40 years. He was part of excavations by the Smithsonian Institute team for the Clear Fork formation, in Texas, in 1984, but due to the amount of microvertebrates (bones related to smaller vertebrate animals that are difficult to identify) found, the team was unable to study all the excavated material.

For Calvin So, a doctoral candidate at George Washington University and first author of the article, the idea of ​​paying homage to the famous Muppet was to draw attention to the find. “We sincerely hope to reach a wider audience by naming the species after Kermit the frog,” he told Sheet by email.

Kermitops is considered a primitive representative of tetrapods — a group that includes all amphibians, reptiles (along with birds) and mammals, recent or extinct — and lived 270 million years ago, in the Permian (from 299 to 251 million years ago) , last period of the Paleozoic era, which preceded the Dinosaur Era or Mesozoic (251 to 66 million years ago).

It is likely that the animal, which could not have exceeded 15 cm in body, was a representative of the ancestral group of current amphibians, known as temnospondyls, fed on small insects and lived in a hot area with seasonal wet and dry seasons, such as It occurs in monsoon regions today in Southeast Asia.

In the study’s phylogenetic analysis, the new fossil had its “position” in the evolutionary tree “change several times”, but always within the unique group Amphibamiformes, which includes the ancestors and all descendants of modern amphibians.

It is, however, very distant from the clade that includes frogs, salamanders and caecilians (also known as blind snakes) that are found today, the representatives of the Lissamphibia lineage. Currently, there are more than 8,000 species of amphibians, living mainly in tropical regions of the planet.

The research also included the collaboration of Arjan Mann, a postdoctoral researcher in the Smithsonian’s paleobiology department and So’s advisor, and Jason Pardo, from the Field Museum in Chicago.

For So, the fact that the fossil has been stored for so long and is a distinct species reveals how scientific collections are a window into time. “In our context, collections are important because unstudied fossils are unused data that can potentially change our understanding of the natural history of organisms such as Kermitops did,” he says.

Finally, he hopes that the scope of scientific discovery will be great, but understands that there are barriers to accessing scientific knowledge, especially in the United States and other countries where higher education is not free and socioeconomic issues prevent participation at previous levels. “Addressing this is an important first step among many necessary systemic changes.”