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Fossils
It was mostly mouth and belly, this amphibious beast from about 65 million years ago. Thick-skulled, ten-pound Beelzebufo ampinga (“armored frog from hell”) was one of the most massive frogs ever; today’s biggest is the seven-pound Conraua goliath. The ambush predator lived on Madagascar, where David Krause of Stony Brook University and his team began finding bone bits in 1993. Susan Evans of University College London and others shaped 15 years’ worth of fossils (72 fragments in all) into frog form. “When we scaled the bones against modern skulls, we saw just how big this thing could get,” Evans says. “It was a monster.” Many geologists believe Madagascar became geographically isolated some 88 million years ago, but Beelzebufo’s closest living kin are in South America. One theory is that the two landmasses remained linked via Antarctica longer than was thought.
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