Little is known about what the world looked like in what is now the southern tropics 278-million years ago, but new research could provide some clues.

During this time, the continents were merged as one supercontinent called Pangaea, and the discovery of several new amphibian species and a reptile from northeastern Brazil could shed light on how animals moved across the landmass, the Field Museum reported.

"Almost all of our knowledge about land animals from this time, comes from a handful of regions in North America and western Europe, which were located near the equator," said Field Museum scientist Ken Angielczyk, one of the paper's authors. "Now we finally have information about what kinds of animals were present in areas farther to the south, and their similarities and differences to the animals living near the equator."

The paper describes two "archaic aquatic carnivorous" amphibians: one called Timonya annae that was relatively small and had fangs and gills; and Procuhy nazarienis, or "Fire Frog." Both of these species belonged to a now-extinct group, but are distant relatives of modern salamanders. The paper also described a collie-sized amphibian. The findings provide insight into how animals spread during the Permian to populate new regions, and what local animal communities were like.

"Fossils from classic areas in North America and Europe have been studied for over a century, but there are long-standing questions about how different animal groups dispersed to other areas that we can't answer using just those fossils," Angielczyk said. "Exploration in understudied areas, such as northeastern Brazil, gives us a snapshot of life elsewhere that we can use for comparisons. In turn, we can see which animals were dispersing into new areas, particularly as an ice age was ending in the southern continents and environmental conditions were becoming more favorable for reptiles and amphibians."

The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communications.