Giant prehistoric frog could eat small dinosaurs

A giant, beach ball-sized frog that lived 70 million years ago had a bite that would have been strong enough to snap up small dinosaurs.

At the size of a beach ball, the giant Beelzebufo ampinga was the largest frog to have ever lived - at least that we know of. But it was similar to the modern Ceratophrys frogs, and now scientists have used those similarities to make a fascinating discovery.

Ceratophrys frogs are also known as Pacman frogs, for their round bodies and almost comically large mouths. They're grumpy creatures, sitting quietly in wait and snapping at anything that passes by with force.

It's these Ceratophrys frogs that researchers studied to determine the bite force of Beelzebufo.They used a custom-made force transducer, two plates covered with leather. When the frog bites down on the plates, they act as scales that can accurately measure the force of the bite.

So the team used it to scale the bite force up for the mouth size of Beelzebufo, around 15.4 centimetres (6 inches) wide, and found a bite force of up to 2,200 Newtons (around 224 kg or 494 lb).A Ceratophrys frog was found to have a bite force of 30 Newtons or approximately 3 kilograms.

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.