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Science

Scientists Find 'Devil Toad' Fossil 38

Posted by samzenpus from the flies-beware dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new type of frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, that lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago has been discovered. It was intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad."
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Scientists Find 'Devil Toad' Fossil More

Scientists Find 'Devil Toad' Fossil

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  • Does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)

    by aurb ( 674003 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:29PM (#22475846)
    ... that robot devil and the hipno toad have the same ancestor?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by IgLou ( 732042 )
      That would go against intelligent design. He clearly created robot devil and hipno toad after he planted the fossil but before he sent Bender back to earth. It makes perfect sense really...
  • Is this battletoads?
  • I for one welcome our new Devil Toad overlords...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by MindKata ( 957167 )
      "I for one etc..."

      Don't worry, its dead ... as in an Ex-Toad ... he's not restin', so you can't wake him up ... This Toad is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e' rests in peace! If they hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'history! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS A

  • Etymological considerations... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wattrlz ( 1162603 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:33PM (#22475902)
    Wouldn't " beelzebufo" mean, " Lord of the Toads" in some unholy fusion of greek and latin? Personally I think that's a cooler name anyway.
    • Isaac Asimov maintained in "The Up-To-Date Sorcerer" that a scientist should have "a proper scorn for the niceties of classical philology." Thus the "amatogenic cortical principle" as named by Professor Johns.
    • The toad in TFA looks like Jabba the Hut. Hence I have tagged this article jabbathetoad :)
    • No, because Baalzebub doesn't come from Greek or Latin, but rather from Akkadian, named for the god Ba'al. This is frequently mis-cited as the Hebrew word "Bel" meaning lord, owner or master; such is incorrect, as the Hebrew word is simply an importation of the name of the Akkadian god. The word means "Ba'al of the Flies," and would be interpreted much as we would interpret "Apollo of the Sun". Neither Greek nor Latin have anything to do with this, other than the frog-namers' inability to stick to one la

  • Staggering lack of any real info (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:46PM (#22476082)
    I've done a quick Google search and none of the sites have anything more than the rather superficial msnbc link. Even the UCL page [ucl.ac.uk] doesn't really give much. What it breaks down to is
    • Fosil frog found in Madagascar
    • It's big - about the size of a bowling ball and estimated at 10lb - or around 5Kg for scientists
    • It's not like modern Madagascan frogs but more like South American ones which raises issues about lineage and land masses at the relevant (non specified - and why not - millions of years ago isn't very precise) era
    I guess they're saving the real info up for the PNAS [pnas.org] paper.
    • Yeah, until the paper actually goes up, it just comes off as half-assed. If I was working off just the news reports, I'd say "You want a land bridge between South America and Madagascar? It's called Africa. Oh, those frogs aren't related to these? So what...maybe you just havent found 'beezlebubo' fossils on Africa yet."

      I'm going to have to read this article because I really don't see how they came to this conclusion. It would have been quite plausible for these frogs to be spread across South Ameri

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Look, go here:

        http://www.odsn.de/odsn/services/paleomap/paleomap.html [www.odsn.de]

        Put "70" in the "Age to be reconstructed (My)" box. That's about the age of the Madagascar fossils -- 70Ma/70 million years ago, in the latest part of the Cretaceous Period. Notice that Africa and South America are well separated, as is Madagascar from either India on one side or Africa on the other. See the problem? Madagascar is an island by then, and swimming to/from S. America isn't an option for frogs. So, how is this explained?

        P
    • which raises issues about lineage and land masses

      While your points are well made, there's something I don't understand.

      What does frog lineage and land masses have to do with African Swallows [wikipedia.org]? And more important, what would be the air-speed velocity of said swallow ladened with a bowling ball sized toad?

    • Info here (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=459006&cid=22476190 [slashdot.org]

      They picked the crappiest of the submissions this time, I fear.

  • Artist rendering (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's definitely going to make us rethink where things came from. I found an artists rendering of what it probably looked like. here [uniserve.ca]

  • More info (Score:3, Funny)

    by Farmer Tim ( 530755 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:49PM (#22476134) Journal
    Another picture [insightbb.com].

    Apparently they sounded like Brian Blessed.

  • Guess it wasn't tagged 'notthebest'? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:52PM (#22476190) Journal
    Why'd they approve this submission, instead of the one with all the details I read in the Firehose yesterday?

    Paleontologist David Krause and his team have discovered the remains of a 'Devil Toad' [google.com] that was 4.5 kg (10 lbs) in weight and 41 cm (16 in) long. The bones of 'Beelzebufo' -- a combination of the Greek word for devil and the Latin word for toad -- were found in Madagascar and dated to the late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago. This is puzzling because Beelzebufo is actually a relative of South American horned frogs (Ceratophrys), rather than the Golaith frogs of West Africa which are almost as big as it. They take this as evidence that Madagascar was still linked to South America via a land bridge in the late Cretaceous, not fully separated as had been thought and speculate that the two might have been linked by a then-warmer Antarctica.
  • So it has at least one level in fighter maybe duskblade?

  • In soviet Russia... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ellis D. Tripp ( 755736 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:54PM (#22476236) Homepage
    Toad licks YOU!
  • If they do a Jurassic Park on us with this toad?

    Lord that thing could eat a cat, or the entire Toy Class at the Westminster Dog show.
    • "Lord that thing could eat a cat, or the entire Toy Class at the Westminster Dog show."

      Wrong direction on the food chain - think Super Jumbo Frog's Legs.

      MMmmmmmmm......

    • Lord that thing could eat a cat, or the entire Toy Class at the Westminster Dog show.
      Finally, an idea that will get the majority of people, and all stereotypical rednecks, to support cloning.

  • Not a toad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:33PM (#22476830) Homepage
    Based on the article, this is not a toad at all, but a frog. It seems to be only the writer at Scientific American who considers this a toad.
  • This animal really needs to become some university's mascot - maybe one with a politically incorrect mascot...
  • I bet some grad student licked the fossils when they found out it was a toad.

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