Although most students' interest in frogs does not stretch beyond The Muppet Show, one University professor has centered the past 13 years of his life around them. Biology Professor Neil Shubin has been studying the amphibian's origins since 1982. Now, his efforts have finally come to fruition. Shubin and Harvard University Professor Farish Jenkins have discovered the fossil of the earliest known frog -- dating back 190 million years. Their findings were printed last week in the science journal, Nature. Jenkins and his team first discovered an unusual fossil during a 1982 dig in Arizona. Shubin, then a Columbia University senior, began graduate school at Harvard the following year, and Jenkins became his advisor. After spending several years studying the fossil, Shubin and Jenkins discovered that it was from a frog. After more years of research, they realized the fossil was from the early Jurassic period -- making it the oldest frog fossil ever discovered. Shubin, who has taught at the University for six years and has recently been granted tenure, noted that the initial discovery led him to conduct further research into how frogs jump. By analyzing the fossil, Shubin realized that a rod-like structure located in the frog's pelvis area had evolved from the tail of an older amphibian. That structure, called the urostyle, gives the frog the capability to leap long distances. "The exciting thing about all this stuff was to take something that seemed initially so inexplicable and to all of a sudden find a very simple reason for it," he said. And although high school and college students often choose the ever- popular "Kermit" when naming the frogs they are dissecting, Shubin and Jenkins chose a more scientific and symbolic name for their discovery -- Prosalirus bitis. The name, which means "to leap forward high over it," comes from Latin and Navajo -- the latter because the fossil was found on Navajo land. Shubin's interest in paleontology took root in high school when he took classes in archeology. As an undergraduate at Columbia, Shubin went on a dinosaur dig through a volunteer job with the Museum of Natural History. "On that dig, I decided that's what I was going to do," he said. In graduate school, Shubin targeted the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods as his specialty. This era interested him because it included the origin of many reptiles and amphibians and the extinction of many older creatures. Throughout the 13 years in which Shubin was working on the project, he continued to teach evolution courses and other biology classes. And his students have said his research adds another dimension to his teaching. "It made what he was telling us credible," said Anthropology graduate student David Zonies, who took Shubin's class last spring. "I'm lucky enough to teach material I really like," Shubin said. "The research and the teaching feed back on one another." He has also led other unrelated digs throughout the United States, Greenland, Morocco and Canada. Shubin said that although his work is at times tedious, the moments of discovery make the hard work worth the extra effort. "You never know when something amazing is going to show up," he said. Shubin is continuing to do research -- this time focusing on the origins of hands and feet.
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