Meet Beelzebufo — 'The frog from hell'

Long story short: Pictured above in an artist's illustration with a pencil and a modern frog for comparison, the prehistoric frog, which lived 70 million years ago, was the size of a bowling ball with heavy armor and teeth, weighed 10 pounds, and snacked on baby dinosaurs.

Here's Will Dunham's Reuters story from yesterday's Vancouver Sun about one formidable frog.

Froggie went a-killing

Prehistoric hopper, dubbed 'devil frog,' could have eaten newborn dinosaurs

It was the biggest, baddest, meanest froggy ever to have hopped on Earth.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery in northwestern Madagascar of a bulky amphibian dubbed the "devil frog" that lived 65 million to 70 million years ago and was so nasty it may have eaten newborn dinosaurs.

This brute was larger than any frog living today and may be the biggest frog ever to have existed, according to paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, one of the scientists who found the remains.

Its name, Beelzebufo ampinga, came from Beelzebub, the Greek for devil, and bufo — Latin for toad. Ampinga means "shield," named for an armor-like part of its anatomy.

Beelzebufo (pronounced bee-el-zeh-BOOF-oh) was 41 cm long and weighed an estimated 4.5 kg.

It was powerfully built and possessed a very wide mouth and powerful jaws. It probably didn't dine daintily.

"It's not outside the realm of possibility that Beelzebufo took down lizards and mammals and smaller frogs, and even — considering its size — possibly hatchling dinosaurs," Krause said in a telephone interview.

"It would have been quite mean," added paleontologist Susan Evans of University College London, another of the scientists.

Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Even though it lived far away, Beelzebufo appears to be closely related to a group of frogs that live today in South America, the scientists said. They are nicknamed "Pac-Man" frogs due to their huge mouths. Some have little horns on their heads, and the scientists think Beelzebufo also may have had horns -- a fitting touch for the "devil frog."

Beelzebufo was bigger than any of its South American kin or any other living frog — "as if it was on steroids," Krause said. The largest one today is the goliath frog of West Africa, up to 12.5 inches (32 cm) long and 7.2 pounds (3.3 kg).

The presence of Beelzebufo in Madagascar and its modern relatives in South America is the latest sign a long-lost land bridge once may have linked Madagascar to Antarctica — much warmer then — and South America, the scientists said.

That would have let animals move overland among those land masses. Fossils have been found of other animals in Madagascar from Beelzebufo's time similar to South American ones.

The first frogs appeared about 180 million years ago, and their basic body plan has remained unchanged. Beelzebufo lived during the Cretaceous Period.

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Here's a link to much more detailed report — a February 18, 2008 National Science Foundation press release — about the discovery.

The abstract of the scientific report about the discovery, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, follows.

A giant frog with South American affinities from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar

Madagascar has a diverse but mainly endemic frog fauna, the biogeographic history of which has generated intense debate, fueled by recent molecular phylogenetic analyses and the near absence of a fossil record. Here, we describe a recently discovered Late Cretaceous anuran that differs strikingly in size and morphology from extant Malagasy taxa and is unrelated either to them or to the predicted occupants of the Madagascar–Seychelles–India landmass when it separated from Africa 160 million years ago (Mya). Instead, the previously undescribed anuran is attributed to the Ceratophryinae, a clade previously considered endemic to South America. The discovery offers a rare glimpse of the anuran assemblage that occupied Madagascar before the Tertiary radiation of mantellids and microhylids that now dominate the anuran fauna. In addition, the presence of a ceratophryine provides support for a controversial paleobiogeographical model that posits physical and biotic links among Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent, and South America that persisted well into the Late Cretaceous. It also suggests that the initial radiation of hyloid anurans began earlier than proposed by some recent estimates.