A five-legged bull frog’s extra appendage has saved him from the cooking pot in China, after a chef spotted the amphibian’s weird protrusion.

The oily black leg, which stuck out at an angle from the bull frog's body, wasn’t spotted by his first owner, as he was part of a wholesale batch crammed together at a local food market.

Eating frogs is common in China, and frog leg soup is considered to strengthen one’s bones. However now the unusual looking frog has been handed into a zoo in Zhuzhou China.

Five-legged frogs have been discovered before, in streams closer to home. A deformed frog was found in a river in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire in2007.

Experts thought that either a parasite or pollution attacking frogspawncould have caused the abnormality. However the mystery of the five-legged frog largely remained unsolved.