A giant bullfrog has been found in a rainforest in northern Australia. The animal is six times larger than the average frog it weighs 2.70kg and could set a world record, according to BBC News.
“I’ve never seen anything that big,” Kylee Gray, a park ranger who first spotted the giant amphibian while on a patrol in north Queensland’s Conway National Park, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “[Parecia] almost a football with legs”he added.
When the animal, believed to be a female, was found, it was placed in a container and taken out of the wild to be weighed on the ground. The current Guinness World Record for the largest existing frog is held by a pet amphibian in Sweden named Prinsen, which weighed 2.65 kg in 1991.
The bullfrog has been euthanized, a common practice for the pests in Australia, as brown and warty toads can be deadly to wildlife and cause the local extinction of some of their predators, The Guardian reveals. The amphibian carcass will be donated to the Queensland Museum.
Kylee Gray is unsure of the animal’s age of the species, which can live up to 15 years in the wild, but believes “it’s been around for a long time” and that it likely feeds on insects, reptiles, and small mammals has.
First introduced to Australia in 1935, frogs are one of the country’s most damaging pests and are now estimated to number in the hundreds of millions.