Colombian researcher María Camila Vallejo-Pareja is using fossil frogs from millions of years ago in order to understand the form and distribution of the vast diversity of frogs found in Central America today.
Vallejo-Pareja, who is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Biology and Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida says the fossils had been unearthed during the expansion of the Panama Canal over 10 years ago.
“One of the biggest challenges of working with fossil frogs is that frogs are usually very small and their bones break very easily,” she says, adding that frog skeletons are relatively difficult to study because they are so small and brittle.