The world is filled with scams and hoaxes. Whether it is a prince in Nigeria saying he will send you millions of dollars, or a scientist claiming to have found the cure for cancer, when things sound too good to be true, they typically are. But what about the hoaxes that aren’t too good to be true, but instead are just weird. There is a hoax like that concerning frogs living inside of rocks.

Yes, that’s right. And while it sounds outrageous, this is a hoax (or at least a misunderstanding) that has managed to pop up from time to time for centuries, with reports of it in one form or another coming from all over the world. So, what do we know about this myth and why does it keep happening?

Let’s take a look.

Perhaps the earliest confirmed story about this comes from 1733 when Johan Graberg was working in the Nybro quarry. He found a sandstone bolder, and inside it was a frog that was grayish in color and had yellowish coloring around its mouth. He reported that while it didn’t move much, it most certainly was alive when he first found it.

For some unknown reason, he decided to smash it to death with a shovel. This story is told by David Bressan in Forbes, who explained that Graberg claims to have regretted his actions. The animal, which may have been living for hundreds of years within the stone, he claims, was nothing more than a mangled corpse when he was done with it.

Graberg did recognize that what he found was out of the ordinary, so he took the corpse around to various doctors and other experts in the region to try to come up with an explanation.

It got the name, “The Frog of Nybro” and eventually Dr. Jordan Phil analyzed the frog. He came up with the theory that, if it truly did live in that stone, it may have gotten there when frogspawn slipped into a gap in the stone before it was sealed up. This could have been sealed due to sentiment or other things that occur naturally. Of course, he offered no explanation of how it was able to live in the stone, and certainly not how it could have survived for the claimed hundreds of years.

If that were the only story like this, it likely would have been forgotten to history, but that is not the case. Professor William Buckland, who is most famous for being the first scientist to describe the very first dinosaur to be named, thought that it would be possible for frogs to live within stones like this.

So, in the 1820’s, he placed tiny toads inside of limestone and sandstone. He took those stones and buried them in his garden. After about a year, he dug them up, and surprisingly, there were a few toads that were still alive.

Not surprisingly, the ones that lived were inside of stones that had their seals broken so food, oxygen, water, and other things could still get in. When he repeated the experiment with the stones properly sealed up, all of the toads died. Ethical issues aside, this experiment should be enough to put this type of myth to rest, but of course, that is not the case.

In fact, there have been about 210 separate reports of frogs, toads, or other similar creatures becoming entombed within things like stone, wood, coal, and other materials according to the Fortean Times. They have been reported in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and North America.

There is even one reported from Texas, where the claim is that a toad was entombed within the cornerstone of a courthouse for 31 years. The toad got the name Old Rip. This seems to be more of an urban legend than an actual event though.

The bottom line is that while nature can be pretty weird sometimes, some things are just to outrageous to be believed.

And most importantly, nobody should be torturing frogs by putting them inside of stones to see if they can survive.

Thought that was fascinating? Here’s another story you might like: Why You’ll Never See A Great White Shark In An Aquarium