How did ancient frogs move between America and Australia? Easy: They hopped across Antarctica.
This Chilean frog's lookalike ancestor once hopped all over the now-frozen continent. (José Grau de Puerto Montt/)It’s no secret that millions of years ago, the world looked wildly different than it does today. Continents now separated by massive oceans were once next-door neighbors, and today’s frozen wilderness was temperate and green.And back in those days, it wasn’t cute emperor penguins hopping around Antarctica—it was ancient horned frogs. Swedish scientists discovered 40 million-year-old fossils of the little amphibians on Seymour Island, the only Antarctic spot where sediments aren’t hidden under masses of ice, and published their findings in Scientific Reports last week.“Frogs, nowadays, are known on all six other continents,” says Thomas Mors, the lead author of the study and senior curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. “Now we know they were also present on the seventh.”The little croakers that inhabited the icy wasteland millions of years ago weren’t...