TOADZILLA

When ranger Kylee Gray pulled over to give way to a red-belly black snake on the trail she was cleaning at Conway National Park with other Rangers she couldn’t believe her eyes. “A big warty brown ugly cane toad sitting in the dirt” was how she described it… saying that at first she thought one of her work-mates was playing a trick on her until she realised it was breathing.

The gi-normous toad, since dubbed Toadzilla, later weighed in at 2.8kg, heavier than your average house brick and also heavier than the largest known toad recorded by the Guinness world Records that weighed in at 2.65kg in 1991.

“It flinched when I walked up to it and I yelled out to my supervisor to show him. [It looked] almost like a football with legs,” Ms Gray said.

Measuring up at more than 25 centimetres in length, she said it was the biggest toad she had ever seen by far.

“A cane toad that size will eat anything it can fit into its mouth, and that includes insects, reptiles, and small mammals,” she said. The poisonous toads can live up to 15 years in the wild, there’s no way of telling how old this particular toad might have been.

Toadzilla was euthanised (imagine finding that in your freezer next to the Drumsticks) and is set to be taken to the Queensland Museum in Brisbane.

Article compiled from several sources including news.com.au  and abc.net.au published January 20th
Pictures: department of environment and Science via ABC News