A recent Ripley’s strip http://www.comics.com/comics/ripleys/archive/ripleys-20041023.html
had a story of a toad found alive, apparently entombed in limestone that was thousands of years old. A Google search revealed thousands of sites with this and other stories of it’s type, including one from France of a (briefly) living Pterodactyl identified (post-mortem) by a university student!
Okay, on the face of it, this seems utterly ridiculous. Those who are willing to consider the possibility assert that at least some of the stories are “unexplained.” Those that are not willing to consider the possibility point to possible hoaxes, mistakes, and the problem of overturing of everything we understand about biology, zoology, etc.
What I’d like to know, and haven’t found, is does any evidence continue to exist; the animals themselves and/or the materials they were supposedly encased in? Have there been any controlled experiments to attempt to confirm this phenomenon? COULD IT BE POSSIBLE?
It’s been reported that the stone or other substance was almost perfectly in the shape of the animal. Again, do any of these stones exist, or any remains of the animals? If that toad was thousands of years old, or it really was a pterodactyl, I’d think those would be worth keeping around.
The pterodactyl thng would have turned the scientific world upside down - it must be a hoax.
There are such things as amphibians that can remain dormant in hardened mud foryears, possbily decades - maybe there are a few real cases based on this - in this particular case, the mud would retain the shape of the animal, but it wouldn’t pass for stone under even the most cursory examination by a competent geologist.
The one factor that makes it extremely unlikely that any of these animal-entombed-in-solid-rock stories are genune (at least as stated) is that limestone and other sedimentary rocks are formed under great pressure - how would a living animal survive such conditions?
I don’t know about the 1865 case in the Ripley’s column, but there’s a significant eyebrow-raising detail about the “1899” case linked to (by a sceptical) Desmostylus in the other thread: it was reported (in 1901) by none other than Charles Dawson, the bloke who also found most of the remains of Piltdown Man.
Since Dawson was almost certainly guilty at Piltdown (most of the arguments over the years have been about whether he had help) and the story he told there about the initial find is distinctly similar to his report here - some unidentifiable workmen found it a few years back - considerable doubt is in order. Miles Russell reviews the toad case in his recent Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson (Tempus, 2003, p126-8) and concludes it was a hoax. That was also the conclusion of the British Museum curators back in 1990 when they included it in their Fake? The Art of Deception exhibition.
Thanks for the link to the picture. This adds some very interesting information.
Okay, anyone could take a frog and place it in a cracked geode. If there’s nothing else but hearsay underpinning this example, it’s essentially useless. I’d like to see some photos that show the form of the creature.
This phenomenon, if there’s any reality to it, really fascinates me. Many creatures can achieve degrees of torpor and hibernation that enable them to live for months, sometimes years, without the conditions we normally consider necessary to sustain life. Reptiles and amphibians, in particular, have various legends associated with their abilities to stay alive in unlivable conditions.
So, I just wonder, is it possible that there are a few, rare examples of a kind of “ultra-torpor” in which a creature can continue to live in such an environment as described in the various reports?
Even for claims where the frog supposedly hopped out of a frog-shaped cavity, limestone is very soft and easily worked - splitting a limestone boulder, then carving a frog-shaped impression in both halves would be trivial - certainly easy to do well enough to satisfy the credulous reporting we see in evidence regarding this phenomenon.
These are animals that can go into suspended animation when their body tissues dry out…put them in water, and they revive. Can they survive for years this way?
Here is a story about a Texas Horned Toad that was put into a time capsule at the base of a newly erected building and was discoved alive when the building was demolished 31 years later. It sounds like it might be true.
Well it’s not as if the article gives any information surrounding the actual revelation at all. He was "lifted from his tomb, lifeless and covered with dust, and held aloft for all to see. " When was the stone unsealed? How was it unsealed? Doesn’t it seem more plausible that being the site was a demolition site, someone would have had access to the newly-uncovered stone well in advance of the public being there, and replaced the remains of the original with a dusty replacement? As to the excuse that “Besides, if Old Rip had been the subject of a hoax, how could anyone have come up with a live horned lizard in February when they were all hibernating underground?”, well that’s just about the sorriest excuse I’ve ever heard. Sure, most of them might be hibernating, but that certainly doesn’t preclude the notion that you could get your hands on one - the original was supposedly a kid’s pet, after all. And third, to think that anyone expected the frog to be alive, that anyone was on the edge of their seats waiting to see if he had survived is really on the outside boundaries of plausibility, in my opinion. Again, the article doesn’t clarify this, but it’s my bet that a few days before the “unveiling”, the paper ran an article about it, and mentioned oh-so-casually that there had been a lizard trapped in the tomb, setting the stage for a nifty publicity stunt.
There are no certifications by any scientists saying that the frog was indeed 31-some-odd years old referenced in the article. And if the article is correct in its statement that a stumping pol accidentally broke the frog’s leg off, and the Chamber of Commerce initially denied this, what makes you think they wouldn’t willing perpetrate a rather harmless, if corny, hoax?
Every bit of what TellMeI’mNotCrazy said, but also; was the presence of the lizard reported BEFORE the time capsule was scheduled to be opened?
Sorry, the whole thing just tries too hard to be convincing and it shows. At the same time as stinking of a hoax.
Also, but rather inconsequentially - if I’d been that kid, I’d have screamed and hollered until dad took the damn thing back out of the box.
My highschool was a Christian school which taught Young Earth Creationism. They used some of the examples cited as “evidence” that rocks form very quickly-- so quickly that a living frog could be trapped therein and then freed when the rock is broken! (Which, to them, “proves” that fossils in deep stone strata are not old, after all.)
Whenever I hear these stories, I always wonder if a Y.E.C. is behind the hoax.