BRUSSELS, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- Amphibians show a remarkable ability to bounce back from extinction events during their evolution, genetic analysis from Belgium said.
The research suggests that the amphibian class as a whole recovered from a series of mass extinction events affecting life on earth, NewScientist.com said.
While amphibian populations dropped recently, looking at their evolutionary tree suggests they have a remarkable ability to bounce back from environmental changes, said Kim Roelants of Vrije University in Brussels.
"For instance, right after dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago," Roelants said, "there was a huge explosion of frog species."
Researchers analyzed amphibian DNA to reverse-engineer an evolutionary tree because amphibian fossil records are scarce.
They took the equivalent fragments of DNA from 171 existing species. By looking at the similarity between corresponding fragments of DNA from two species, for example, they could estimate when each common ancestor diverged into two new species.
But amphibians' past rallying doesn't mean they will bounce back in the future.
"It is unfortunate, but you can't talk of super-amphibians," he said. "It is likely that survivors of (today's) extinction will re-diversify but this will probably take thousands or million of years."
