THE first ranid frogs were stuck in India for 60 million years according to
Belgian researchers who have studied the frog’s “molecular clocks”. Although
these frogs have since spread around the world, to the point where they
constitute one-fifth of the world’s amphibians, the frogs stayed in India
because it was an island—and frogs cannot cross salt water, says Michel
Milinkovitch a geneticist at the Free University of Brussels.
The “out-of-India” theory of the frogs’ evolution turns conventional wisdom
on its head. Most scientists thought that the frogs originally evolved in Asia
or Africa and only later spread to…
