Dinosaurs’ loss was frogs’ gain: The upside of a mass extinction
Based on earlier studies, biologists believed that the vast majority of today’s frogs originated in a blossoming of new species 100 million years ago. New and more complete genetic data pinpoints this radiation much earlier: 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, precisely when much of life on Earth was wiped out by a comet or asteroid. Frogs took advantage of flourishing angiosperms to escape to the treetops into many more ecological niches. …read more
