{"id":94502,"date":"2026-08-19T00:15:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T04:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=94502"},"modified":"2026-08-19T00:15:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T04:15:04","slug":"la-brea-toad-fossil-nobody-noticed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/la-brea-toad-fossil-nobody-noticed\/","title":{"rendered":"The La Brea Toad Fossil Nobody Noticed for 94 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>6 Minute, 31 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

In 1929, a crew digging through the tar seeps of La Brea in Los Angeles pulled up two tiny bone fragments. They went into a drawer with thousands of other specimens — the small stuff, the stuff nobody was in a hurry to look at. Everyone was more interested in what La Brea is famous for: dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, mammoths. Big, dramatic, unmistakably important animals.<\/p>\n\n

The little fragments sat there. Through decades of new excavations, new scientists, new theories about the Ice Age. Ninety-four years passed before anyone looked closely enough to realize what they actually were.<\/p>\n\n

A Fossil Too Small to Matter — Until Someone Finally Looked<\/h2>\n\n

The fragments came from a bone called the sacro-urostyle — a small structural piece near the base of a toad’s spine. Smaller bones like this one almost always get set aside in a big excavation. There’s simply more attention paid to the skulls and femurs of the animals that make headlines. Nobody was ignoring the toad bones on purpose. They just weren’t the priority.<\/p>\n\n

That changed in 2023, when Dr. J. Alberto Cruz, the lead author of a new study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology<\/em>, started sifting back through the old 1929 collection. Two fragments, both from the same kind of bone, caught his attention. They didn’t match anything in the existing record.<\/p>\n\n

Meet Spea labreae<\/em> — the Toad Time Forgot<\/h2>\n\n

What Dr. Cruz had found was a brand-new extinct species: a spadefoot toad now named Spea labreae<\/em>. Spadefoot toads are named for a hard, blade-like growth on their hind feet that lets them dig backward into soil to escape heat and drought — a survival trick still used by their living relatives today.<\/p>\n\n

Here’s what makes this find genuinely rare: extinct Ice Age amphibians almost never turn up in the fossil record at all. Amphibian bones are small, thin, and fragile, and they rarely survive tens of thousands of years intact. Before Spea labreae<\/em>, scientists had identified exactly one other extinct Pleistocene amphibian species anywhere in North America — a tree frog found in Florida. That’s it. One, for an entire continent, across an entire Ice Age.<\/p>\n\n

Now there are two. And this one came from a drawer in Los Angeles that had been sitting untouched since Herbert Hoover was president. It’s not even the first time this has happened recently — a hobbyist mathematician stumbled onto a shape mathematicians had searched fifty years for<\/a>, sitting in plain sight the whole time.<\/p>\n\n

A Second Surprise: A Toad 2,500 Kilometers From Home<\/h2>\n\n

The same paper turned up something else while Dr. Cruz’s team was re-examining the old collection: the first confirmed record of a Mexican burrowing toad at La Brea. Today, that species lives roughly 2,500 kilometers south of Los Angeles, largely in Mexico and parts of Central America. Finding its fossil remains this far north means that, during the Ice Age, Southern California’s climate was different enough to support a species that can’t survive there now.<\/p>\n\n

It’s a small detail with a big implication: species distributions aren’t fixed. They shift as climate shifts, they always have, and the tar pits — famous mostly for trapping enormous predators — also quietly recorded that story in bones nobody thought to check for almost a century.<\/p>\n\n

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Ever feel like the small, unnoticed parts of your own life might be pointing somewhere too?<\/p>\n

There’s a free guide for exactly that quiet feeling — a video and companion PDF for anyone who wants to notice God in the ordinary, overlooked moments of an actual day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n