By SINDYA N. BHANOOPublished: February 15, 2010
STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Now appearing in the lobby of Stony Brook University Medical Center: a frog that lived in the era of the dinosaurs and is as big as a beach ball. Scientists believe it to be the largest frog ever.
The immense frog is part of a permanent exhibition that also features reconstructions of a vegetarian pug-nosed crocodile and a small meat-eating dinosaur.
“This was undoubtedly the heaviest frog ever, we estimate about 10 pounds,” said David Krause, the Stony Brook University paleontologist who unearthed the fossils of the frog and the other creatures in Madagascar. “It probably ate any available prey — lizards and snakes and mammals. It was large enough to maybe even eat hatchling dinosaurs.”
The frog’s scientific name is Beelzebufo ampinga, which means “armored devil toad.”
About 150 schoolchildren from public schools here on Long Island attended the unveiling of the exhibition last week — none of them as small as hatchlings, but small enough to find the frog impressive.
“Looks like he ate a human,” said one, pointing at the frog’s stomach.
The reconstruction of the creature, described as the “frog from hell” by the scientists who dug it up in Madagascar, portrays Beelzebufo as a grim-looking amphibian, with a large pink tongue and sand-colored skin to match its desert environment. It took 15 years and 75 fossils to put together an accurate reconstruction.
The frog lived about 65 million years ago, in a semi-arid environment that experienced sporadic heavy rains, said Dr. Krause, who analyzed sediments to deconstruct the frog’s living conditions. Dr. Krause and his colleagues believe that the frog is related to the Pac-Man frog, a modern-day species in South America that is named for the video game character.
Like the Pac-Man, Beelzebufo was probably an ambush predator, meaning it wriggled its rear end into the ground, sticking its head out, in anticipation of the oblivious lizard or snake.
The reconstruction on display is the only one of the devil frog that the researchers know of, and was made by Joe Groenke, a fossil technician, and Luci Betti-Nash, a scientific artist. Mr. Groenke created a cast of the frog’s head — essentially an enlarged version of the Pac-Man frog — and Ms. Betti-Nash sculpted the body with clay and painted it with water-based acrylics. The colors are a guess, based on where Beelzebufo lived and the coloration of modern desert amphibians.
The exhibit, financed by the Stony Brook University Medical Center Development Council, is intended not only to raise public awareness of science but also to draw attention to Dr. Krause’s side project — the Madagascar Ankizy Fund. The fund, which is a nonprofit, finances health clinics and schools in rural Madagascar.
“We get so much from these digs,” Dr. Krause said. “We get these phenomenal fossils; we have had many graduate students get their Ph.D.’s through this work. We were looking for ways to give back, and they really wanted their children to have an education.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/science/16frog.html?ref=science
(Submitted by T. Peter Park)
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