Meet the Hairy Horrible Frog With Retractable Claws

There is a frog in Central Africa that is the stuff of nightmares. The Wolverine frog, also known as the hairy frog or most appropriately, the horror frog, is armed with retractable “claws,” sports a hairy hide, and to top it off is a bit poisonous.

The claws of this beast were first noted around 1900, but it took almost a century before scientists realized what they were. When threatened,  Trichobatrachus robustus deliberately breaks its own toe bones, the shards of which pierce through its skin to grip or rake across an attacker. Zoologists aren’t sure how these pseudo-claws retract when the fight is over but they do, and then the damaged tissue of the frog regenerates.

The frog’s hair isn’t quite hair either. Breeding males grow dermal papillae along its flanks and thighs that contain arteries and are thought to increase oxygen absorption, useful for when he guards his eggs, which are laid by the female under water – usually between rocks in fast-moving rivers.

The Wolverine frog lives in Angola, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Nigeria, and though it faces habitat loss and is up against pollution in some areas, the species thrives. That could be because it has no real natural predators (who would mess with this thing?), though the frog is roasted and eaten in Cameroon.

If the claws don’t get you, the toxins secreted through the skin might. The Bakossi people of Cameroon, who traditionally believed the frogs fell from the sky and that its eaten flesh would help with fertility, use spears and machetes to get around this creature’s impressive defense mechanisms. 

Some hairy, horrible video here.

Photo credit: Gustavocarra / Wikimedia CC