Feeling Froggy

I can't believe I am on post 208 and all I can come up with are frogs. I do love frogs, but still. It's okay. My schedule will calm down in a bit. I am a bit over extended at the moment, but I know it will get better. Anyway, enough about me... onto the frogs.

The first frog was big in news in February and was known as the 'frog from hell.' Fossils for a frog that sat at 16 inches high (yikes) were found in Madagascar. The frogs structure resembles a horned-toad (see artists rendition to the right) and if it follows the family trait, would have been an ill tempered frog. The modern frogs- which are found in South America by the way- are ambush-style predators and will literally attack anything that goes by. I would not want to be caught in the jungle with this guy jumping on my head!


At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, is the tiniest frog ever found. The aptly named Noble’s Pygmy Frog holds the record for tiny frog at 11.4 millimeters. It was found in the Andes and is one of the smallest vertebrates ever found above 3000 meters (almost 10,000 ft) above sea level. Cute huh?

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Super-Sized Snake

Scientists uncovered a fossilized snake the size of a bus recently in Colombia. The snake has been dubbed the titanoboa and was a ridiculous 42 ft (13 m) long! The longest snakes today get to be about 32 ft but are quite thin. This snake was believe to weigh a ton! And I thought the snake I held was heavy... sheesh!

The picture to the left with the vertabrae gives a good idea of how massive these things were. The one on the left comes from an anaconda. The one on the right is the fossil of the super snake.

The snake (given the scientific name Titanoboa cerrejonensis) was found in a coal mine excavation. Scientists working together from the University of Toronto, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and the University of Florida determined the snake for what it was and using the fosilised evidence determined that this jumbo snake lived approximately 58-60 million years ago when this region of Colombia (Cerrejón, hence the species name cerrejonesis) was a flood plain. The mine operation here is enormous and is considered one of the world's largest. In recent years, however, there has ben a pretty decent haul of goods added to the fossil record extracted from this mine.

This recent discovery, however, seems to eclipse them all. The snake has broken all records for snakes found and honestly, I wouldn't want to swim in water where that thing may have lived! I don't mind snakes, but when one can eat me without even trying, time to admire from a distance. 60 million years is a great distance for me! This is about all the snake I can handle. Yes I am still glowing about my snake handling.

The original article was published in Nature.

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