Episode 299: Entombed in Stone!
This week's episode rates one out of five ghosts on the spookiness scale. It's not too spooky unless the thought of being ENTOMBED IN STONE creeps you out! Which it might, if you are a frog.\n\nFurther reading:\n\nA Tenacious Pterodactyl\n\nFurther watching:\n\n"One Froggy Evening"\n\nA frog supposedly found mummified in a stone:\n\n\n\nThe Texas horned lizard kind of looks like a pointy toad with a tail:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nWe\u2019re getting really close to Halloween and our 300th episode, and it\u2019s going to be a spooky one! This week, though, I rate this episode as one ghost out of five on our spookiness scale, meaning it\u2019s not very spooky at all...unless you\u2019re a frog!\n\nMost of us know this story. A worker helping to demolish a building finds a mysterious box hidden in the building\u2019s cornerstone. He opens the box and discovers a living frog\u2014a frog that can sing and dance! But only when no one else is looking!\n\nThat\u2019s the classic Looney Tunes cartoon \u201cOne Froggy Evening,\u201d and while it\u2019s really funny, it\u2019s also based on many stories about frogs, toads, and other animals supposedly discovered entombed but alive, or only recently dead, in clay, bricks, tree trunks, coal, and even rocks.\n\nFor example, in 1782, the American politician and naturalist Benjamin Franklin was living in France, and while he was there he heard about some workmen in a quarry who had found some living toads encased in stone. I\u2019ll quote from Franklin\u2019s writing:\n\n\u201cAt Passy, near Paris, April 6th, 1782, being with M. de Chaumont, viewing his quarry, he mentioned to me, that the workmen had found a living toad shut up in the stone. On questioning one of them, he told us, they had found four in different cells which had no communication; that they were very lively and active when set at liberty; that there was in each cell some loose, soft, yellowish earth, which appeared to be very moist. We asked, if he could show us the parts of the stone that formed the cells. He said, No; for they were thrown among the rest of what was dug out, and he knew not where to find them. We asked, if there appeared any opening by which the animal could enter. He said, No. [\u2026] We asked, if he could show us the toads. He said, he had thrown two of them up on a higher part of the quarry, but knew not what became of the others.\n\n\u201cHe then came up to the place where he had thrown the two, and, finding them, he took them by the foot, and threw them up to us, upon the ground where we stood. One of them was quite dead, and appeared very lean; the other was plump and still living. The part of the rock where they were found, is at least fifteen feet below its surface, and is a kind of limestone. A part of it is filled with ancient seashells, and other marine substances. If these animals have remained in this confinement since the formation of the rock, they are probably some thousands of years old.\u201d\n\nSince limestone generally takes about a million years to form, and requires considerable pressure and lots of chemical reactions to do so, we can be certain that the toads were not in the limestone for all that long. But limestone is porous, and the mention of damp yellow earth inside the capsules of stone suggests that there were significant fissures in the stones where the toads were found. Limestone dissolves in water, although it takes a long time. That\u2019s how caves form. Maybe over many years, tiny cracks and holes had formed in the limestone, large enough for some well developed tadpoles or young toads to end up in the holes, maybe during a rainstorm or flood.\n\nThen again, the whole thing might have been a mistake. The toads might not have actually been inside the stones, only nearby when the stones were broken open. The workers might have thought they were inside. Or it might just have been a hoax made up by a bored quarry worker.\n\nStories of animals found encased in stone or other impossible conditions ...