Palaeontology

Giant prehistoric frog ate small dinosaurs

By T.K. Randall
September 21, 2017 ·  1 comment

During the Cretaceous, even the frogs were enormous. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 Max Gross Reptiles weren't the only animals to grow to epic proportions during the age of the dinosaurs, as evidenced by the size of one of the prehistoric ancestors of today's Ceratophrys frogs.

Beelzebufo ampinga lived around 70 million years ago and had a mouth so large that it was even capable of gobbling up small dinosaurs.In a recent study, scientists measured the bite strength of its modern counterpart - the much smaller Pacman frog - using a custom-made force transducer built from two plates covered with leather.

By then scaling up this figure, it was determined that a Beelzebufo with a mouth six inches wide would have managed a bite force of 2,200 Newtons - the equivalent of a similarly sized snapping turtle.

"At this bite force, Beelzebufo would have been capable of subduing the small and juvenile dinosaurs that shared its environment," said researcher Marc Jones of the University of Adelaide.

Source: Science Alert | Comments (1)

Tags: Frog, Dinosaurs