Over 99 million years ago, 4 frogs in the rainforests of Myanmar found themselves enveloped in a sticky golden mess, trapped in some tree resin. The golden tree resin hardened over millions of years, and today these fossilized remains of the frogs are the oldest that experts have found preserved in amber.
What is amber?
Hint: the movie Jurassic Park introduced us to amber! The sticky resin from prehistoric trees that hardens over millions of years to form a soft-stone called amber. Sometimes small bugs, insects and amphibians can get trapped in this resin. The resin preserves the samples in it. In the Jurassic Park movie, John Hammond extracted dinosaur blood from a mosquito trapped in amber. He then extracted the DNA from this dinosaur blood, and cloned dinosaurs!
Back to the frogs: Paleontologists are excited about these particular lumps of amber because they contain the oldest frog fossils of their kind. These 4 tiny rainforest frogs lived alongside the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period. They are direct evidence that the Cretaceous environment was a tropical forest.
Written By: Biyash Choksey
