By Mindy Weisberger, Senior
Writer | March 5, 2018 06:43am ET
Scientists recently took to Twitter to puzzle
over an unusual sight captured by a biologist in photos and video: a toad that
had no face.
The toad, a fully
grown adult, had a healthy-looking body and legs, but it was entirely lacking
eyes, a nose, jaws and a tongue. Instead of a face, it had only a stump covered
by smooth tissue and a small opening where its mouth used to be, according to
herpetologist Jill Fleming, who discovered the toad.
Fleming spotted the unfortunate creature — an
American toad (Anaxyrus americanus) — in April 2016 in a state forest in
Connecticut, where she was conducting research on Eastern red-spotted newts,
she told Live Science in an email. [In Photos:
The World's Freakiest Looking Animals]
"We sat down on a log to process the
samples, and the toad kept running into our feet. When we looked closer, we
realized it had no face!" Fleming wrote in the email.
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