Developments in Brief : Frog Fossil Found in Amber Should Provide Clue to Caribbean Animal Life

A tiny Caribbean tree frog has been found embedded in amber and preserved nearly intact about 40 million years after its death, UC Berkeley scientists have reported.

The inch-long frog is the first documented find of an ancient amphibian embedded in amber, they said. The find--the oldest complete frog fossil in the Mesoamerica region--should provide valuable insights into how and when animals arrived in the Caribbean.

The fossil was discovered last year by a worker in a subterranean amber mine in the mountains of the Dominican Republic.

The frog, along with two lizards and insects found earlier in other Dominican Republic amber samples, suggests that 40 million years ago, the Caribbean region already had a far more diverse animal population than had been thought, according to George O. Poinar Jr. and David C. Cannatella in a report in the current issue of Science magazine.

They said the fossil provides strong evidence that a diversity of animals thrived on the land mass that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic long before the Caribbean islands were formed by the movement of earth plates from North and South America.