Beelzebufo ampinga was a really big frog that lived about 60 million years ago, around the time of the dinosaurs. So even if you were a frog the size of a bowling ball, how much a chance would you have against a T-Rex and a Raptor? Beelzebufo, or the frog from hell, had armor and teeth and lived in Madagascar.
The illustration here is of the Pacman frog, a very large and scary modern frog. The closest thing we have to Beelzebufo are cane toads. There was a lot of talk about Cane Toads a few years ago, after the wonderfully weird film came out about them. These were some big toads, some growing up to two feet long. Sounds like a frog from hell to me.
Growing up in Fort Worth, TX I didn’t see too many cane toads, but I did see a very large bull frog at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens one time. This was not exactly a frog of Beelzebufo’s stature, but it was a frog from hell. This bull frog had just captured a baby Blue Jay and the bird’s feathers were sticking out of the frog’s mouth. I was a kid at the time and this pretty much freaked me out. Frogs are not supposed to eat birds. I still feel that way. Beelzebufo likely ate those distant, long lost relatives of birds, dinosaurs-and that would be pretty creepy as well.
“This frog, a relative of today’s Horned toads, would have been the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball, with short legs and a big mouth,” Susan Evans of the University College of London says in a press release. “If it shared the aggressive temperament and ‘sit-and-wait’ ambush tactics of living Horned toads, it would have been a formidable predator on small animals.”
Hmm, maybe it was a Horned toad that I saw eating that bird all those years ago-or maybe a descendant of the devil frog Beelzebufo.
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