Bufo

Holger Krisp · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikidata/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- BufonidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Life habit
- amphibiousPBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Temnospondyli
- Environment
- brackish,freshwater,terrestrialPBDB, for Tetrapoda
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 83.6 Mya to 0 Mya.
445 occurrences of Bufo on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
445 occurrences- Late Cretaceousunder 1%
- Eoceneunder 1%
- Oligoceneunder 1%
- Miocene16%
- Pliocene10%
- Pleistocene69%
- Holocene5%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
39 formations
- Alamosa Formation16
- Ash Hollow Formation9
- Ogallala Formation9
- Valentine Formation · Ogallala Group8
- Rexroad Formation7
- Long Pine Formation4
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The named rock units Bufo has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 15 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 337 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Bufo and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Bufo and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
2,766 taxa- Rana108 sites
- Equus44 sites
- Rana temporaria44 sites
- Lacerta36 sites
- Microtus33 sites
- Thamnophis33 sites
- Mimomys30 sites
- Ambystoma tigrinum28 sites
- Anguis fragilis28 sites
- Natrix natrix27 sites
- Lepus25 sites
- Sorex25 sites
- Hyla24 sites
- Natrix24 sites
- Beremendia fissidens22 sites
- Anura21 sites
- Chiroptera21 sites
- Rana pipiens21 sites
- Elaphe20 sites
- Serpentes20 sites
- Apodemus19 sites
- Colubrinae19 sites
- Myotis19 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus19 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 317 sites for Bufo, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
162 references- Pleistocene Amphibians and Reptiles in Britain and Europe120
- A Review of New World Fossil Bufonids34
- Middle Pleistocene (late Irvingtonian: Nebraskan) climatic changes in south-central Colorado16
- Pleistocene vertebrate faunas of Hungary14
- Long-term climate record inferred from early-middle Pleistocene amphibian and squamate reptile assemblages at the Gran Dolina Cave, Atapuerca, Spain10
- Salientia7
- Frogs in Hemphillian deposits of Nebraska, with the description of a new species of Bufo7
- Herpetofaunas of the Big Springs and Hornet's Nest quarries (northeastern Nebraska, Pleistocene: Late Blancan)6
- A Pleistocene herpetofauna from Eddy County, New Mexico6
- Biostratigraphy of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in Corsica and the role of man in the Holocene faunal turnover5
- Anurans and squamates from the Lower Pliocene (MN 14) Osztramos 1 locality (Northern Hungary)4
- Herpetofauna of the Sandahl Local fauna (Pleistocene: Illinoian) of Kansas4
Each of the 445 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 150 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2

Picture of Bufo
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Holger Krisp
- Licence
- CC BY 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Commercial use
- the licence does not allow it
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itBufonidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Laurenti 1768