The earliest record of Caribbean frogs: a fossil coquí from Puerto Rico.

Biol Lett

Department of Mammalogy, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles CA, USA.

Published: April 2020

The nearly 200 species of direct-developing frogs in the genus (the Caribbean landfrogs, which include the coquís) comprise an important lineage for understanding the evolution and historical biogeography of the Caribbean. Time-calibrated molecular phylogenies provide indirect evidence for the processes that shaped the modern anuran fauna, but there is little direct evidence from the fossil record of Caribbean frogs about their distributions in the past. We report a distal humerus of a frog from the Oligocene (approx. 29 Ma) of Puerto Rico that represents the earliest known fossil frog from any Caribbean island. Based on its prominent rounded distal humeral head, distally projecting entepicondyle, and reduced ectepicondyle, we refer it to the genus . This fossil provides additional support for an early arrival of some groups of terrestrial vertebrates to the Greater Antilles and corroborates previous estimates based on molecular phylogenies suggesting that this diverse Caribbean lineage was present in the islands by the mid-Cenozoic.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211465PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0947DOI Listing

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