Beelzebufo: A Giant of a Find
Summary:
A team of researchers in Madagascar have found a fossil of possibly the biggest ever existing frog. This giant frog weighed 4.5 kilograms and could grow up to be 40.6 centimeters (which is about the size of a beach ball). Also, this frog was a predator and could kill lizards and maybe even small dinosaurs. This is why scientists named this frog Beelzebufo or “the devil frog”. The name Beelzebufo came from the Greek word “Beelzebub” which means devil and from the Latin word “Bufo” which means toad. Now, scientists are wondering why these frogs fossils were found in Madagascar because a close relative to a South American frog called “ceratophyrines” or “pac-man” frogs, because of their huge mouths. Some scientists think that Antarctica, South America and Madagascar could all have been connected by land in the Late Cretaceous Period. This gigantic frog is defiantly one of the biggest or even the biggest on the record of scientists. In, comparison to this frog the largest frog living today lives in West Africa is the goliath frog and could grow up to 31.7 centimeters long and could weigh 3.2 kilograms but in Madagascar today the biggest frog is only 10.1 centimeters long!
I think that this current event is good for our society because scientists have a taken a step forward and it will be easier for them to make further discoveries. I chose this article because I thought it was truly amazing how a frog could be so gigantic. I found this article because I went to http://kids.nationalgeographic.com and I looked what articles there were and I found this one the most amazing one of them. Also, National Geographic kids is a site which I really like and I go on it a lot to see all the interesting articles. From this article I learned a lot of interesting facts about the Beelzebufo frog. Also, I learned about other frogs in our world and a little about the prehistoric world. I agree with the scientists that this discovery is really important and very fascinating. I felt really amazed while reading this article because I thought that the sizes of the Beelzebufo are really huge and I was amazed about how much information scientists could uncover by just finding a fossil.
This was a really amazing article! I love frogs and these must have been huge! I wonder if the Goliath frog is a relative of the Beelzebufo frog. Index fossils are what help scientists to know when species existed and where they were found when continents were together. Very important!
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