Rebecca Twinn, nursery manager, said the children put the frog in a bucket and brought it to the teachers to see.

“At first we just thought it was three frogs stacked on top of each other but then it rushed straight at us as one thing. The skin of the three heads seemed to be just one piece of skin,” Ms. Twinn said. “The children were all very excited. They were all under four years old so I think they were too young to be scared. I think they thought it was a bit like Harry Potter going to the Green Box.”

“He ran away as soon as we caught him. A kid looked at him and he jumped out. We had Sky News, local TV people and the kids trying to find him. We searched all afternoon. They searched all over the garden and the pond but were unsuccessful.”

John Wilkinson, a frog ecologist at the Open University, said that from photos taken before the escape, it appeared to be an extremely unusual find. “I have certainly never seen anything like it before. It appears to be an example of Siamese birth in which three individual animals all arise from the same fertilized embryo but they don’t divide properly. We know this can happen because it happens.” in other animals,” he said. “I’m still a little skeptical, though. If you look at the photos, the frog below seems to have different characteristics from the other two frogs. It is not uncommon to find more than one male frog clinging very tightly to a single female frog. They became very aggressive, like all of us, and refused to let go. We are in breeding season.”

Mike Dilger, a wildlife biologist, said: “As far as I know this is unprecedented. Frogs have very primitive embryos – so is it normal to occasionally have extra toes? must be unusual. But this is something different.”

He believes that the cause of the three-headed frog’s development could be due to damage to the embryo, a spontaneous mutation as in the case of conjoined twins in humans, or environmental factors, including pollution.