Tadpoles have been wriggling in the world’s ponds for at least 161 million years.
A newly detailed fossil finding pushes the record for earliest known tadpoles back an additional 30 million years, researchers report October 30 in Nature. The petrified pollywog shows that the modern filter-feeding, puddle-dwelling characteristics of tadpoles had already evolved in some of the earliest frogs.
In 2020, a team of scientists from Argentina and China went to Argentinian Patagonia searching for dinosaur fossils, but instead found hundreds of fossilized frogs of the extinct species Notobatrachus degiustoi. Among them was a tadpole fossil in a sandstone slab.
The Notobatrachus degiustoi fossil was found preserved in
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