Brazilian Horned Frog: Reminiscences and hopes

Awareness! There was such a thing as a horned frog, and a giant one at that.

My first awareness of this genus of frogs occurred at about 7 years old as I was, with parents, riding the rails - the rails of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford - home from New York. We had been to the Bronx Zoo and in my hand was a zoo guide, a thick paperback, devoted to identifying and discussing some of the creatures we had seen that day.

I scanned the mammal and bird sections and remember turning the pages to the reptiles and stopping at a picture of a horned frog in the amphibian section. I was dismayed for I had not seen this creature at the zoo, yet here it was, bigger than life, pictured in the guide.

I'm almost positive it was a giant horned frog, a Ceratophrys aurita, a horned frog about which to this day I know precious little.

The Brazilian horned frog is supposedly the largest of the genus, larger even that the biggest of the female ornate horned frogs. However, the very few breeders of "C. aurita" today have smaller frogs and believe that the actual size of C. aurita has been exaggerated or if not, that the species varies in adult size populationally and/or individually.

I know that having not seen one yet, I am anxiously awaiting the availability of a dinner-plate sized, long-horned, Brazilian horned frog in the pet trade.

For a moment of carefully supervised comparison, a post-metamorph Brazilian horned frog sits atop an adult Caatinga horned frog. This is a post-metamorph Brazilian horned frog.

Author, photographer, and columnist Richard Bartlett is one of the most prolific writers on herpetological subjects in the 20th century. With hundreds of books and articles to their credit, Richard and his wife Pat have spent over four decades documenting reptiles both in the field and in captivity. For a list of their current titles, please visit their page in our bookstore.