Entombed animal

Entombed animals are animals reportedly found alive after being encased in solid rock, or coal or wood, for an indeterminate amount of time. The accounts usually involve frogs or toads. The reputed phenomenon, sometimes called "toad in the hole", has been dismissed by mainstream science, but has remained a topic of interest to Fortean researchers.

References to entombed animals have appeared in the writings of William of Newburgh,J. G. Wood,Ambroise Paré,Robert Plot,André Marie Constant Duméril, John Wesley, and others. Even Charles Dickens mentioned the phenomenon in his journal All the Year Round. According to the Fortean Times, about 210 entombed animal cases have been described in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand since the fifteenth century.

At times, multiple animals are said to have been encased in the same place. Benjamin Franklin wrote an account of four live toads claimed to have been found enclosed in quarried limestone. In a letter to Julian Huxley, one Eric G. Mackley claimed to have freed 23 frogs from a single piece of concrete while widening a road in Devonshire. An 1876 report from South Africa said that 63 small toads were found in the middle of a 16-foot-wide (5 m) tree trunk.

Though reports of entombed animals have occurred as recently as the 1980s, scientists have paid little serious attention to the phenomenon since the nineteenth century. During the 1820s, English geologist William Buckland conducted an experiment to see how long a toad could remain alive while encased in stone. He placed toads of different sizes and ages into carved chambers within limestone and sandstone blocks, then buried the blocks in his garden. A year later, he dug up the blocks and found that most of the toads were dead and decayed. A few toads that had been in the limestone (which did contain small pores) were still living. However, Buckland found them all dead after reburying them in the limestone for another year. Buckland concluded that toads could not survive inside rock for extreme lengths of time, and determined that reports of the entombed animal phenomenon were mistaken. Most scientists agreed. A writer from the journal Nature wrote in 1910, "The true interpretation of these alleged occurrences appears to be simply this – a frog or toad is hopping about while a stone is being broken, and the non-scientific observer immediately rushes to the conclusion that he has seen the creature dropping out of the stone itself. One thing is certainly remarkable, that although numbers of field geologists and collectors of specimens of rocks, fossils, and minerals are hammering away all over the world, not one of these investigators has ever come upon a specimen of a live frog or toad imbedded in stone or in coal."

...
Wikipedia