A frog of dino era

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Washington, Feb 19: A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armour and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago. It was intimidating enough for the scientists who unearthed its fossils, to name the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad.

But its size, 4.54 kilograms and 40.64 centimetres long, is not the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature’s bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography.

The discovery, led by paleontologist David Krause at New York’s Stony Brook University, was published on Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This frog, if it has the same habits as its living relatives in South America, was quite voracious,” Krause said. “It’s even conceivable that it could have taken down some hatchling dinosaurs.”

Krause began finding fragments of abnormally large frog bones in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, in 1993. They dated back to the late Cretaceous period, roughly 70 million years ago, in an area where Krause also was finding dinosaur and crocodile fossils. But only recently did Krause’s team assemble enough frog bones to piece together what the creature would have looked like, and weighed.

The largest living frog, the Goliath frog of West Africa, can reach 3.18 kilograms. But Krause teamed with fossil frog experts from University College London to determine that Beelzebufo is not related to other African frogs.