Beelzebufo Frog

The 70 million-year-old frog, dubbed Beelzebufo (‘the frog from hell’), is of a kind previously thought only to live in South America. Professor Susan Evans (UCL Biosciences) said: “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. Its diet would most likely have consisted of insects and small vertebrates like lizards, but it’s not impossible that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs. 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. ” A team from UCL and Stony Brook University, New York, have discovered a fossil of a giant dinosaur-eating frog in Madagascar, giving weight to the theory that the island off Africa’s east coast was once linked to India and South America. Weighing 4kg and with a body length of up to 40cm, it had a squat body, huge head and wide mouth.