Animals: Prehistoric Frogs

Frogs can breathe through their skins, but it is a vulgar error to suppose that they can bury themselves in sludge and sleep for centuries. After a miner named Ollie Jordan had set off a charge in a tunnel 75 feet below the surface of a hill near Ellensburg, Wash., he found “two handfuls of slimy, muddy substance.” Few minutes after he had put this muck near a stove, it came apart, turned out to be six drowsy frogs. He took them home, where during the next two days they gradually sat up and began to hop, croaked loud enough to keep Blaster Jordan & wife awake nights.

Last week the Ellensburg frogs were becoming as talked about as the jumping frog of Calaveras County. From accredited scientists came serious assertions that they might be so many Rip van Winkles. Geologist George Beck of Ellensburg’s State Normal School went to the Jordan home to see the monsters, said that these frogs might be early Eocene Age. “Just like seeing angels,” he exclaimed.

Fact is that no frog can live by cutaneous respiration for more than a year. Common-sense consensus was that the Ellensburg frogs, actually garden variety, must have climbed into some narrow crack to hibernate, been washed down & down by seeping water to the extraordinary depth at which they were found.