Poyntonophrynus Frost, Grant, Faivovich, Bain, Haas, Haddad, de Sá, Channing, Wilkinson, Donnellan, Raxworthy, Campbell, Blotto, Moler, Drewes, Nussbaum, Lynch, Green, and Wheeler, 2006
The genus Poytonophrynus is chiefly distributed across southern Africa, with species occurrences in South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. (Channing & Tandy, 2004; Hogan, 2013).
Genus Poyntophrynus occurs in a number of habitats including subtropical or tropical dry shrubland; karoo shrubland; grassland; bushveld savanna; subtropical or tropical seasonally wet or flooded lowland grasslands; desert, including moderate altitude habitat up to 1500 metres; and intermittent freshwater marshes. One species, P. vertebralis, is additionally found in the Drakensberg alti-montane ecoregion and the Highveld grasslands of the middle reaches of the Orange River (Hogan, 2013).
P. beiranus, for example, is found in two distinct and disjoint ecoregions: the Zambezian flooded grasslands and the Zambezian coastal flooded savanna (World Wildlife Fund & Hogan, 2007). An example of the desert occurrence is P. damaranus, known only from the Kaokoveld Desert and Waterberg areas of northern and northwestern Namibia, where it occurs up to at least 1500 metres above mean sea level (Channing & Tandy, 2004; World Wildlife Fund & Hogan, 2008). P. fenoulheti presents an example within the genus of a bushveld savanna inhabitant.
Breeding may occur in a variety of surface water bodies: temporary shallow pans including hypersaline pans, freshwater pools or depressions containing rainwater, quarries, and rock pools along rivers.
Poyntonophrynus kavangensis provides an example within this genus of breeding in hypersaline pans, notably the Etosha Pan in Namibia. P. vertebralis presents an example of a less specialised breeder, utilising ephemeral pools or abandoned quarries (Minter et al. 2004).