Ancient tadpoles were huge in size, almost 5x the size of today

Jakarta –

Ancient animals were large in size. It’s called dinosaurs, pterosaurs, to… a pole’s head. yes, a pole’s head 161 million years ago this size was very large, in fact it could have reached almost five times its current size.

This newly discovered tadpole fossil breaks the previous record, from around 145 million years ago. Frogs themselves are known to have existed since the late Triassic (about 217-213 million years ago).

“The habitat where these tadpoles live may be shallow pools, which dry out from time to time, due to different climatic conditions,” said the lead author, Dr. Mariana Chuliver Pereyra from the National University of La Plata. IFLS science.

“Like most surviving species, not all tadpoles successfully adapted, so many died when the ponds dried up,” he continued.

The tadpoles found may have died naturally. Afterwards, his body was covered with volcanic ash and mud, which is a fine-grained sediment. This sedimentary deposit caused the tadpole fossil to be well preserved, even surviving for more than 160 million years.

In addition, a fossil tadpole still has its head, most of its body and part of its tail. The eyes, nerves and front legs were also visible, which means that the tadpole was on its way to becoming a frog before it died.

What is more interesting is that this tadpole has a very large size, which is 16 cm, equivalent to a medium-sized banana. Today, the average tadpole is 3.3 cm long. That means, their size could be 4-5x bigger than today’s tadpoles.

“What you need to pay attention to, president N. degiustoi and adults reach large sizes, indicating that tadpole gigantism occurs between the stem-anura. “This new discovery suggests that a biphasic life cycle, with filter-feeding tadpoles living in transient aquatic environments, was present in the early evolutionary history of gas-anurans and has remained stable for at least 161 million years,” the researchers said.

This study was published in Nature. So reported IFLS science.

(ask/ask)