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Show Frogs Reveal tlie Earth's Past From Them Scientist Has Learned of Lost Continents and Vanished Seas; Finnish Information of a Long-Ago Ultra Far West. When the frogs erouk you can well Imagine, with scientific backing, that you hear the nature songs of lost continents and vanished seas of the past 175,000,000 years. For, in a new kind of frog geography, geog-raphy, the records of these lost places have been found in living frogs by Maynard M. Metealf of the National museum. His studies are an almost unique method of reading the earth's past. He has published the first report in the official journal, Science. The frog map shows the possible existence of a great continent in the Pacific, in Trinssic times, 175,000,000 years ago. This was Gondwanda-land, Gondwanda-land, some evidences of which scientists scien-tists have found previously by other methods. Gondwandaland probably connected with South America. Another lost frog continent was Lemuria. It likewise was about 75,-000,000 75,-000,000 years back, but in the Indian ocean. It appears to have connected Africa, Madagascar, Ceylon, southernmost south-ernmost India, the islands of southwest south-west Maylasia and probably some of the southwestern Malay archipelago islands. Then the frogs show an ultra-Far West. This was a strip of land west of the present Pacific coast of the United States. It ran from Siberia, down past Alaska, Central America, and perhaps even for a time, Maynard May-nard finds, to Ecuador and Chile. Its heyday was 50,000,000 to 100,000,-000 100,000,-000 years ago. In this same cretaceous times, there probably wasn't much Texas. Instead the frogs indicate an arm of the sea there, running up from the western Gulf of Mexico all the way Into the Arctic ocean. Finally, 100,000,000 years ago Byrd apparently might have walked to Little America from South America, Australia or Africa, as he chose. Seemingly then there was an extended ex-tended Antarctica, connecting with all three continents. The usual method of reconstructing reconstruct-ing the past is through skeletons of animals, but the frogs left too few bones. Maynard gets his frog map from the "commensals" of these animals. ani-mals. A commensal is "one who dines at the same board with another or others." oth-ers." In human society some commensals commen-sals are honored positions, but in frogs they are just plain parasites. These studied by Mr. Metealf are the intestinal commensals, the family opalinidae. A remarkable family, too. It has developed 130 species in the rog. These species are the clews to the frog's geographical migrations. He couldn't swim the oceans. There had to be land to account for all the places he has gone. The commensals commen-sals show where these places were, by the changes they underwent and evolved while dining with the frogs. |
