Animals Sealed in Stone

MORE AMAZING CASES

Live toads and frogs have also popped out from inside impossible tight and enclosed spaces within trees that were being cut open:

• Toad in an elm tree. The French Academy of Sciences published an account in a 1719 edition of it Memories of the felling of a large elm tree. In the exact center of the trunk, about four feet above the root, was found "a live toad, middle-sized but lean and filling up the whole vacant space."
• 68 toads in a tree. The Uitenhage Times of South Africa in 1876 printed the experience of timbermen who were cutting a tree into planks, when deep inside of it a hole was found containing 68 small toads, each about the size of a grape. "They were of a light brown, almost yellow color, and perfectly healthy, hopping about and away as if nothing had happened. All about them was solid yellow wood, with nothing to indicate how they could have got there, how long they had been there, or how they could have lived without food, drink, or air."

Odder still, it is not just natural stone and trees in which these impossibles occur:

• Toad in a plaster wall. When a castle wall was being demolished in September 1770, a live toad was plucked from the solid plaster. That wall had stood undisturbed for more than 40 years.
• Frogs in a concrete floor. Renowned biologist Julian Huxley received a letter from a gas fitter in Devonshire, England, who had broken up some concrete flooring to install some pipe extensions: "My mate was at work with a sledge hammer when he dropped it suddenly and said, 'That looks like a frog's leg.' We both bent down and there was the frog. [The] sledge was set aside and I cut the rest of the block carefully. We released 23 perfectly formed but minute frogs which all hopped away to the flower garden."
• Turtle in concrete. In 1976, a Fort Worth, Texas construction crew was breaking up some concrete they had set just a year before. Within the broken concrete, a living green turtle was found in an air pocket that matched the shape of the creature's body. If it had somehow got in when the concrete was poured a year earlier, how did it survive over that time? Ironically, the poor turtle died a few days after its release.

There are no easy explanations for these incredible anecdotes. Those who found the creatures nearly always state that there was no discernable way - no small hole, crack, or fissure - by which they could have gotten into these pockets inside the rock. And the pockets are always about the exact size of the animals within - some even bearing an impression of the animal, as if the rock had been cast around it. Even if a fertilized egg of a toad or frog had somehow seeped into the rock cavity, what did it live on? What did it eat, drink and breathe to grow, in some cases, to full size? Being unable to move inside the rock, how did its muscles develop so that it could hop away upon being released? Geologists tell us that rock is formed over thousands of years. How old are these animals?

The most incredible of such anecdotes was recorded in 1856 in France. Workmen laboring in a tunnel for a railway line were cutting through Jurassic limestone when a large creature stumbled out from inside it. It fluttered its wings, made a croaking noise and dropped dead. According to the workers, the creature had a 10-foot wingspan, four legs joined by a membrane, black leathery skin, talons for feet, and a toothed mouth. A local student of paleontology identified the animal as a pterodactyl!

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