By Susan Milius
A skin disease that savaged frogs and toads on opposite sides of the globe in the 1990s now looks like the killer in mass die-offs 20 years earlier.
An ongoing effort to test old museum specimens for the newly identified chytrid pathogens has turned up signs of outbreaks in Colorado and California in the 1970s, scientists said last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.