Newly Discovered Fossil from the Smithsonian’s Collection Named After Kermit the Frog
In a paper published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, museum paleontologist Arjan Mann and Calvin So, a doctoral researcher at George Washington University, describe a new species of proto-amphibian that they recently discovered in the museum’s fossil collection. They identified several unique features on the animal’s skull that required them to create an entirely new species. So, they decided to draw inspiration from the world’s most famous frog and name the discovery Kermitops gratus.
Kermitops was originally collected in 1984 during an expedition in Texas by Smithsonian paleontologist Nicholas Hotton. But Hotton and his team collected so many fossils at the time that they could only examine a fraction of them. When Mann was sifting through some of Hotton’s fossils in 2021, a nickel-sized skull of an ancient amphibian ancestor caught his eye. He teamed up with So to take a closer look, and the two ended up discovering a new member of the amphibian extended family tree.
