Frog genes reveal the birth of the Himalaya mountains

India and China ’s plates smashed into each other 55 million years ago , and this collision ultimately created the Himalayas , home to the world ’s biggest mountains .. but we were n’t precisely certain when this part bechance . Now , thanks to batrachian factor , we know .

Huge mountain ranges are probably the most striking proof of dental plate architectonics , as collide plates station unimaginable amount of rock shooting straight up into the sky . base to the earth ’s biggest mountain in Mount Everest ( not to observe the world ’s toughened , K-2 ) , the Himalayas are an indelible admonisher of Earth ’s shift landmass . But as much as geologists long ago cipher out the “ why ” and the “ how ” of the Himalayas ’s formation , determining the “ when ” has proven trickier .

Now , evolutionary biologist have stepped in to help out , building a timeline of the formation of the Himalayas from the diverging development of frog species catch on either side of the growing mountains . UC - Berkeley life scientist David Wake explains :

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“ Geologists hump a lot about that area , but what they have n’t been able to do is give a sequence to the timing of the rise of exceptional mass stack and particular ridges and pieces . We use these frogs as a surrogate for a time automobile . What we have here is a radical of very old toad that are so fixed to their habitats that they just stuck there , sitting on that mountain mass when it got raised up . They were carve up by these uplifts and by the rivers between the mountains into unlike units , and these give us a locating on the timing of geological events . ”

The biologist discover metal money of frogs split apart at four different intervals tie to Modern geological natural process in the Himalayas , at 27 , 23 , 19 , and 9 million years ago . These foresightful breaks between speciation adds credence to an alternative , less - accepted geological theory that the Himalayas formed in sharp outburst alternatively of continuously .

The frogs had been overlooked as a potential pathfinder because all the species that live around the mountains today share two fundamental characteristics that permit them to survive in such a harsh , unconscionable environment : unusually strong arms and spines . It was only when Dr. Wake and his colleagues examined the frogs that they were able to demonstrate these feature article were not the result of one evolution 50 million age ago , but rather a case of the different , insulate species finding similar but disjoined solutions to the challenge of live on in the tail of Everest .

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