It’s not easy being green, but a newly described amphibian ancestor is seeing limelight after decades safely tucked away in the Smithsonian’s National Fossil Collection in Washington DC. This new species is named Kermitops gratus, in honor of world-famous amphibian Kermit the Frog. It lived more than 270 million years ago and its discovery is altering the story of amphibian evolution. The findings are described in a study published March 21 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
A stout salamander-like creature
Based on an inch-long skull fossil, scientists believed that Kermitops likely would have resembled a stout salamander. The fossil has large, oval-shaped eye sockets, much like the distinct eyes on the Muppet it is named after. Kermitops was likely a temnospondyl–a member of a diverse group of early amphibian relatives that lived for more than 200 million years from the Carboniferous Period up to to the Triassic.
“It probably was a little more terrestrial than some other frogs and salamanders,” study co-author and Smithsonian vertebrate paleontologist Arjan Mann tells PopSci. “The ecosystems that would have inhabited probably marginal pond environments, similar areas to where you find amphibians living today.
At times, Kermitops’ environment was potentially similar to the swamp where viewers first meet Kermit singing and strumming the banjo in 1979’s The Muppet Movie. This prehistoric ecosystem also saw large shifts in seasonal rainfall and dry spells, similar to the monsoons seen today in the Southwestern United States and Southeast Asia.
[Related: These pleasantly plump salamanders dominated the Cretaceous period.]
“That rainfall would really feed this ecosystem in pulses,” study co-author and George Washington University evolutionary biologist and PhD student
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