So Apparently "Toads Found In Rocks" Is A Thing | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant hey there kiddos gather around and let me tell you the story of old rip old rip was a horny toad or as my lawyers have informed me to call it a horned frog horned frogs are these flat little lizards you find around here and all these parts they got spikes all over them and horns on their heads their ornery is all get out but they're cute kids love to catch them try to keep them as pets hell texans love them so much we named them the state lizard well in 1897 in eastland texas they was building them a new courthouse and they thought it might be a good idea to put a time capsule on the wall so that people from the future could learn something about it so a fellow named ernest wood gathered up some documents and a newspaper and a bible and last but not least a live horn frog and he sealed that up in a time capsule and they put that wait hold on a second wait a live horn frog they put a live animal in a time capsule what the frog so yeah they sealed the live horny toad in a time capsule and they bricked it into the keystone of this courthouse and i don't know how long they were supposed to leave it there what time they were supposed to open it up but about 30 years later they were doing some construction on the courthouse they were putting an addition on there and yeah they had to take the time capsule out so they opened the box and what they found inside was you know some documents in a newspaper and a bible and of course a dead horn frog or so they thought yeah in a matter of seconds after opening the box the horn frog's legs started to kick and it just woke up and went about trying to find some ants to eat this horned frog was named old rip after rip van winkle and it immediately became famous it was adopted as a as a town hero it actually went through a legal custody dispute for a while it actually got to meet president coolidge and then after all the hubbub old rip lived for another year before he passed away and yeah they put him on display at the eastland courthouse you can go there right now and see it yourself so growing up here in texas i knew all about old rip i actually have some family that live out near eastland it's definitely a big part of like local texas lore and everything but i was always fascinated with it growing up the idea that you know a frog could just sleep for 30 years as i got older i became more skeptical obviously i've become more skeptical about most things but as it turns out oh rep is not alone there's actually a lot of stories out there about frogs and lizards that have been found in rocks it's happened so much that the phenomenon actually has a name entombed animals [Music] so if you've ever been up late at night in some random memory from your childhood popped into your brain and then you got on the internet and started searching around and you just fall down a rabbit hole of crazy that's how this video got started no i was procrastinating getting some work done one day and yeah the memory of old rip popped in my head and i was like what was that all about so i get on the internet and i start looking around and i just find story after story after story after story that are just like this and yeah here we are and yeah i know you're skeptical about this i know it already but let me just let me just go down the list here in 1719 the french academy of sciences had a report of a thick tree that when feld contained a quote a live toad middle sized but lean and filling up the entire vacant space in 1733 in one lingamo sweden two quarry workers reported that they split a block of sandstone and inside the boulder they found a frog cover with a yellow membrane the rock was from the solarian hamra formation and believed to be 410 million years old in 1770 a live toad was found on the wall of a castle that was being demolished in 1818 a mineralogist named ed clark claimed that he found three salamanders in an old rock in 1821 a stone mason named david vercher claimed to find a lizard in a solid block of limestone and that it took some time to revive but it eventually did come back to life in 1825 a professor named william buckland decided to actually test this phenomenon so he sealed up 24 toads in a block of limestone and 24 in sandstone and buried them for a year frog genocide for science so yeah when he dug them up he found that some of them had survived but he also found some cracks in the blocks that you know something might have gotten in there air water maybe anyway he sealed them all up and they all died in 1856 two london rail workers were digging a new tunnel and claimed that they found a boulder and opened it up and a pterodactyl flew out but immediately died and turned to dust that one may have been a lie in the early 1900s in devonshire england a gas fitter named eric g mackley claimed to find 23 frogs encased in the concrete walls of a home saying quote the meter houses were brick walled but rather massively concrete floored and the concrete had to be broken up to allow me to get to the pipes for the extension my mate was at work with a sledgehammer when he dropped it and suddenly 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 into the flower garden in 1943 a british soldier stationed in algeria was quarrying stone for a road construction and he found both a toad and a lizard living inside a rock that had been dug out from 20 feet below the ground even benjamin franklin claimed to have studied a pair of frogs that had been cut out of a limestone boulder in paris in 1782 now let's get real for a second yes a lot of these could have been mistaken it's very possible that there was a crevice in the rock of the boulder that the the frog of the lizard had gotten into and then when it cracked open it looked like they were in the middle of the thing that's possible it's also possible they were just you know around the rocks and trees and then when they split open it just kind of looked like they were in there and this does kind of have the makings of a fad it seemed to be something that was reported a lot back then you know fads are nothing new we didn't create those and like the pterodactyl story some of them were probably just made up but maybe maybe some of them were true i mean after all the animal kingdom has adopted some amazing survival abilities over the years so for example one way to survive your environment is just to get out of that environment by hibernating so we're all familiar with the idea of hibernation you're probably thinking of bears that stuff themselves in the fall and then find a cave in the winter and just sleep it off the whole thing but of course it's it's more complicated than that see hibernation is a term for an animal that lives off of its fat stores throughout the winter the bear thing for example but there's another form of hibernation that's more specific to animals in dry environments called estivation and this is where they actually slow their metabolic rate down to near death in order to survive this is kind of nuts actually because it's it's like a gray area between life and death like the metabolism slows down so much that it's technically not alive but it's not quite dead either it's like you know nature hits the pause button on it one animal that's the champion of this is the wood frog there's nothing that special about the wood frog for most of the year but as winter starts to approach it does something interesting it stops peeing yeah it just lets the pee build up inside of itself and at the same time the liver starts creating large amounts of glycogen which gets converted into glucose and so the pee and the glucose gets mixed up in its blood and creates sort of an antifreeze and this makes it so that the frock can have 65 of its body freeze completely solid and survive it doesn't breathe it has zero synaptic brain activity it's in a state known as cryptobiosis and then in the spring it thaws out starts hopping around just like nothing ever happened now theoretically if it stayed in that unthawed state it could probably stay that way for years decades even and by the way it's not just lizards and and cold-blooded creatures the arctic ground squirrel can actually lower its body temperature to negative three degrees celsius and it can stay in that state for up to eight months of the year it slows its heart rate down to just like a couple beats a minute it's one of the most extreme hibernators in the world even humans can survive freezing to a surprising level in 2015 a kid named john smith apparently that's his actual name survived being underwater and frozen for 15 minutes and his breathing had stopped for over an hour before they finally brought him back to life and he survived just fine and there are other animals that develop protections against the cold like greenland shark and the antarctic tooth fish that both have antifreeze in their blood in the form of ammonia and glycoproteins crocodiles have protection against both the heat and the cold if it gets too hot they can go into an estimation state where they can go three to four years without food and if it gets too cold they can do a wood frog thing and just allow themselves to freeze with their snouts above the frozen water so they can breathe and then there's the lungfish which as the name implies has evolved lungs so they can breathe outside the water they can ride out droughts by burrowing into the ground and making a little nest there it coats itself in mucus that kind of dries into a leathery bag of sorts and then just waits it out its bodily functions come to a virtual standstill and it feeds off of its own muscle basically consuming itself in very slow motion and they can do this for up to five years and when the rains come back they reanimate go on with their lives like nothing ever happened but of course if you want to get into some real extremophiles you got to go a lot smaller and one of the most notable ones is one that was actually kind of a popular pet for a long time remember sea monkeys because i'm just ancient enough to remember it sea monkeys were a popular toy slash educational tool that were around and sold through comic books in the 60s and 70s and yeah it was this toy the kids would buy these kits and they would pour water into it and add these like magic crystals and then boom out of nowhere would be these little swimmy things of course they were not monkeys of any kind they were actually a type of brine fish they had been sort of genetically altered through selective breeding so they could only survive in this particular solution that they sold along with it the whole story is kind of crazy but brine shrimp are crazy uh in and of themselves because they also have a very extreme form of cryptobiosis yet when they dry out they enter this form of suspended animation and basically can stay that way indefinitely until they're rehydrated and then they reanimate again and this is basically how they became a thing their ability to kind of dry themselves out and survive that way long enough so they could ship these sea monkey kits all around the world and it was also kind of almost like a magic trick for kids you know you pour it in there and then just like watch these things come to life but they're fascinating creatures and they're really tough they actually did experiments on them in two apollo missions so brain shrimp are cool but it's in the microscopic world where you find the real extreme survivors enter the permian bacteria now we started this whole journey talking about things being found alive in rocks this one takes the cake the permian bacteria were found in a cavern near carlsbad new mexico and they were found deposited on some salt crystals that were embedded in iraq and now the reason why they're called the permian bacteria is because that particular rock dated back to the permian era and if you don't have a geological calendar in front of you the permian era was 250 million years ago and they came back to life now it does need to be said that this is hotly disputed just like some of those toad stories some people say it might be possible there was a tiny fissure in the rock that allowed that bacteria to get in there so it's actually from a more modern origin all that stuff but there was a study in 2006 that analyzed the dna and the fatty acids in this bacteria and determined that it is different enough from modern bacteria that it seems to be legit other studies have suggested that it's not different enough from modern bacteria to actually be that old so the debate continues science kind of science but last but not least you can't talk about amazing animal survivors without talking about the superman of the microbiological world tardigrades yeah some of you knew this was coming i know yeah there's a ton of videos that have been done on tardigrades i'll link to some of them down in the description if you want to check them out but let's just go down some of the crazier facts about tardigrade shall we they can live up to 10 years without food they can remove all water from their bodies and survive their metabolism can drop to 0.01 percent of normal they can survive the vacuum of space and the radiation of space they can survive radiation in general by swapping out their water with sugar to prevent ionization they can survive temperatures as high as seven degrees celsius that's 158 degrees fahrenheit and when they enter cryptobiosis they enter a state called a ton and this makes them virtually indestructible pretty much if whatever is keeping them alive begins to cease they have a way around it tardigrades are so hardy and impossible to kill that some people have actually speculated that they came here on a meteorite that they're actually like an alien species panspermia if you will now that's not true they have sequenced the genome of the tardigrade and have been able to determine that they are similar enough to animals from planet earth that they didn't come from somewhere else but they might be the first earth creature to colonize other worlds the bereshit lander that crashed on the moon in 2017 had some sample tardigrades on it to do some experiments on the moon so there are tardigrades on the moon right now and they're probably doing fine we do know that they can survive the vacuum and radiation of space because issa did an experiment back in 2007 with some tardigrades where they were totally exposed to space and cosmic rays and everything and uh yeah it did nothing if you've heard of the breakthrough star shot program the idea of actually putting little tiny light sails that can ride a beam of laser light to a nearby star there are plans and talks of actually putting tardigrades on one just because i guess so yeah frogs and rocks yay or nay what do you think was old rip just an old fraud now i didn't mention this before but when they actually found old rip in the time capsule it wasn't just some guy that got it out and went around telling everybody that he found this frog it was actually part of a little event they made a little event out of opening up this time capsule so when they pulled this frog out it came to life in front of many people so on one hand that kind of makes you think maybe it was real but then you might also say who knows they could have switched it out beforehand and it was all just a big publicity stunt and if that's the case while it worked but still it's a fun piece of texas lore and you know a good jumping off point to looking at the way nature has come up with survival abilities over the last billion years or so and who knows maybe there's something we can learn from these species that we can use in some medical advances ways to boost our own survival possibly because ultimately life is just a series of chemical reactions and survival is just finding ways to keep those chemical reactions going so if you'd like to learn more about chemical reactions and how they make life possible you might want to check out the chemical reactions course on brilliant i don't know that was a good segue they don't have a course on rocktoads in this course you'll learn the fundamentals of chemistry by learning how reactions occur and you'll do it through 15 interactive quizzes and puzzles to see how change energy and probability combined to determine the basic behavior of molecules interacting with other molecules you'll get a handle on acids and bases ions in charge moles and collision theory and much more and you'll do it in a way that's much more fun than high school chemistry class which i practically needed a pillow to sleep through and of course this is just one of dozens of courses on brilliant where you can learn everything from algebra and calculus which was also nap time for me in high school to astronomy solar energy basic physics all the way up to neural nets and statistical probability you can go as basic or as advanced as you want and it's a lot of fun viewers this channel can sign up at brilliant.org answers with joe and get access to their free weekly puzzles and brain teasers you can kind of test them out see how much you like it and if you do like it the first 200 people that sign up for the premium subscription gives you access to all their different courses you can get 20 off your subscription so yeah it's starting to look like this pandemic isn't going anywhere anytime soon so if you want to take this opportunity to get a little bit smarter while you're sheltering in place and whatnot brewing is a great way to do that so again brilliant.org answers with joe go check it out big thanks to brilliant for being awesome supporters of this channel and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are forming a community helping me grow a team i 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subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,350,418

Rating: 4.9101715 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, entombed animals, animal survival strategies, hibernation, old rip, horned toads, toads in rocks, tardigrades, permian bacteria

Id: NTC0gQFYqD4

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ThePAC_podcast]

Ok, but the demon pterodactylflying out and turning to dust is awesome.

[u/CountRackulah]

This guy does a good job. Doesn’t try too hard to be funny and has dry wit

[u/temujin64]

Did you not watch the video. The conclusion is that although there's no way to disprove these events, it's unlikely that they're true.

[u/ljcrabs]

Welp, lost my appetite

[u/SirKris602]

Joe gettin' some mealtime love... Love it!