Czatkobatrachus
| Czatkobatrachus | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Triassic | ||||||||||||
| 245 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Czatkobatrachus | ||||||||||||
| Evans & Borsuk-Białynicka , 1998 | ||||||||||||
Czatkobatrachus polonicus was a frog-like amphibian and belongs to the taxon Salientia , in which the recent frog amphibian (Anura)are unitedwith some primitive, fossil relatives. It lived in the Lower Triassic about 245 million years ago and is considered tobe the second oldest frog-like animal known to scienceafter Triadobatrachus .
Fossil , incoherent remains of the animals were found in karst deposits near Czatkowice near Kraków . Czatkobatrachus is the first amphibian from the Salientia group from the Lower Triassic of the northern part of Pangea . It is possibly only 5 million years younger than Triadobatrachus from Madagascar (which was then part of southern Pangea). From this it is concluded that the frogs of the Salientia tribe were widespread around the world at the beginning of the Mesozoic Era and must have their origin in the Permian .
Czatkobatrachus polonicus was named after its place of discovery and the Greek name for frogs (batrachos).
The animals were about 5 cm long and probably still had a short tail, similar to Triadobatrachus . Compared to Triadobatrachus , Czatkobatrachus is further developed in terms of the anatomy of the vertebrae and the elbow joint.
The systematic position of Czatkobatrachus is clear from the following cladogram :
| Salientia |
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literature
- Susan E. Evans & Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka: A stem-group frog from the Early Triassic of Poland. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 43 (1998) 4: 573-580. ( PDF online )
- Magdalena Borsuk-Białynicka & Susan E. Evans: The scapulocoracoid of an Early Triassic stem-frog from Poland . Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 47 (2002) 1: 79-96. ( English abstract online, with link to PDF full text )