βάτραχος / Batrachos

When the first report that frog populations were crashing began to circulate, a few decades ago, some of the most knowledgeable people in the field were the most skeptical. Amphibians are, after all, among the planet's great survivors. The ancestors of today's frogs crawled out of the water some 400 million years ago, and by 250 million years ago the earliest representatives of what would become the modern amphibian order -- one includes frogs and toads, the second nets and salamanders, and the third weird limb less creatures called caecilians -- had evolved. This means that amphibians have been around not just longer than mammals, say, or birds; they have been around since before there were dinosaurs. ~ Page 11

Amphibians emerged at a time when all the land on earth was part of a single expanse known as Pangaea. Since the breakup of Pangaea, they've adapted to conditions on every continent except Antarctica. Worldwide, just over seven thousand species have been identified, and while the greatest number are found in the tropical rainforest, these are occasional amphibians, like the sandhill frog of Australia, that can live in the desert, and also amphibians, like the wood frog, that can live above the Arctic Circle. Seven common North American frogs, including spring peepers, are able to survive the winter frozen solid, like popsicles. Their extended evolutionary history means that even groups of amphibians that, from a human perspective, seem to be fairly similar, may genetically speaking, be as different from one another, as say, bat are from horses. ~ Page 11