August 16, 2025 • 47 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the curious biology of North America’s horned lizard – especially their ability to squirt blood from their eyes – as well as some culture and history surrounding their existence. (originally published 8/15/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and Hey, today's Saturday, so we have another
repeat for you. This is an older episode, this one
originally published eight fifteen, twenty twenty four. It is Blood
Squirting from the Lizard's Eye, Part two. We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Part two in our series on the horned lizards of
North America, also known sometimes as horned toads or horny
toads if you prefer, though they are in fact lizards
and not toads. The horned blizzard, of course, is a
genus scientific name Freno soma, meaning toad body, which contains
(01:00):
about twenty one species which have different geographical ranges, but
they're all found in western North America, from the southern
tip of Mexico up through parts of western Canada. Now again,
this is part two of the series. In Part one,
we focused mainly on the horned lizard's relationship with various
predators and their fascinating anti predator defense strategies which include camouflage, spikes,
(01:26):
and armored scales, which can make them difficult and in
some cases quite dangerous to eat. We talked about some
eating related mishaps from various predators, and then finally, they're
weaponized blood jets, the adaptation that allows them to shoot
streams of apparently foul tasting blood out of their eyes
when threatened by a dog. Robin, in your words last time,
(01:49):
a way of deterring predation with the most aggressive and
unpleasant free sample in the world. That's right to refer
back to something that came up last time, that we're
still interested in this question of why the blood apparently
tastes so foul to dogs, and I read in some
cases maybe also cats, but not noticeably so to humans,
(02:11):
and certainly not to predators such as birds.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Now I want to throw in right here at the top.
We described the horned lizards in detail in the last episode,
and I hope that everyone has had a chance to
check out some footage or images on their own. At
this point in our research, I've looked at a lot
of images, a lot of footage, and I do have
to give them props for just being tremendous splooters, you know.
(02:35):
They certainly the squirrels can splute like like none other.
You know, cats are great splooters. But man, I have
to say the horned lizard isn't natural as well.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Wait, I'm not understanding the word splute, then I thought
you were. You were meaning like squirting, like squirting the
blood out of the eye. That's all what it means.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
They're tremendous squirters as well. But spluting. Spluting is when
if you ever it's a hot day and you look
out and you see a squirrel like laying on its
belly like splluted out, you may see you can't do
much the same. Various other organisms will splute. This is
an unofficial terminology for what they're doing. But I feel
like that the horned lizard has this down as well.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Splute seems like a variation on display when the whole
body like flat against the ground, all limbs outstretched exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yes, but the kind of PLoP to it as well,
You know, like there's a certain you got the organism
really needs to have a certain amount of like semi
liquid solidness to it to really deliver it. You got
to have that toad body or you got to have
that slightly soft mammalian body to pull it off.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Oh, that's right. And of course the toad body, as
we talked about last time, is part of the horned
lizard's defensive camouflage strategy. Like the splluting is indeed part
of what keeps them safe from detection by predators. They
try to lay flat against the ground so as not
to cast a shadow and to make it harder for
(04:01):
a predator, say a bird flying overhead, to see their outline. Also,
since we're just talking about reviewing the tape on the
horned Lizard since the last time we talked, I was
watching just more blood squirting footage since we recorded the
previous episode, And I don't know if I emphasized enough
how much it really looks so alarming. If you haven't
(04:24):
seen this, look it up. The blood that the jets
out of the eyes somehow looks darker and thicker than
I expected. And it's also just weird how much blood
is coming out compared to the size of the animal,
which is quite small. It doesn't look like something that
should be happening.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, it is quite alarming. It's redder and bloodier than
I think I was anticipating it feels like a cut
scene from Event Horizon.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Yeah. Now, to get into the meat of today's episode,
I wanted to address just a few more lingering biological
facts about horned lizards, biological and ecological facts that we
didn't quite have time to get into last time. And
the first thing I wanted to talk about is the
horned lizard's relationship to water. Of course, horned lizards generally
(05:14):
live in dry places, deserts and semi arid ecoregions, where
the sun cooks you, the rain is scarce, water is
hard to come by, and horned toads, like all animals,
of course, need water to live, so much of their
biology has gone still suit mode. They are very efficient
at sourcing and preserving water. There is a great passage
(05:37):
about the horned lizard's relationship to water in a book
that I referred to in the last episode. That book
is Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America by Wade C. Sherbrook.
This was published by the University of California Press in
two thousand and three. The author, Wade Sherbrook, was director
of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of
(05:58):
Natural history, So of course, losing water is just part
of having a body. It is impossible to avoid losing
some water content through ambient interface with the air. We
lose some water vapor from our lungs when we breathe,
we lose some water through evaporation from our skin, and
the same is true for horned lizards. To reduce water
(06:21):
loss to evaporation, horned lizards have some behavioral adaptations. For example,
sometimes they burrow underground or partially bury parts of their
bodies in the soil. This can reduce water loss from evaporation,
but they also have some clever ways to source water
from their environment. They will, of course just drink free
standing water when they can get access to it, if
(06:42):
there are puddles after a rainstorm or something like that.
They will drink dew that collects on plants in the morning.
But much of the water that they get from external
sources comes from food like juicy juicy harvest or ants.
But here's where Surbrook gets into. Something I found really
fascinating of these strategies they have for sourcing water is
(07:04):
that some species of horned lizards use their own backs
as what Sherbrook calls a rain harvesting surface. So he
singles out three species as examples, the Texas horned lizard,
the round tail horned lizard, and the desert horned lizard.
And when these animals sense that rain is about to fall,
(07:26):
they do the opposite of what humans usually do. You know,
we go inside. They go outside. They run out of
cover into the open and stand with their backs sort
of cupped like they raise up there. They raise up
on their legs, they flatten out their backs, and they
lower their heads. Now what does this do. It turns
the lizards back into a kind of combination rain barrel
(07:51):
and whatever you call that. You know, the beer drinking
helmet where you got the beers on the sides and
it's got a straw running to the mouth. So you
combine that with the rain barrel concept. Their back collects
water over the widest possible surface area, which is the
lizard's flattened out dorsal scales, and then it funnels the
water to the edge of its mouth for drinking. So
(08:14):
like my body is a catch base and my mouth
is the receptacle.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I'm glad we're getting into this because as I was
looking into the culture of the horned lizard. I was
hoping to find an example of cowboy poetry about them,
but my search came up largely empty. But I did
find an interesting blog post by Charlie Buck of the
University of Arizona Poetry Center about an elementary school exercise
where they brought in a herpetologist to talk about horned lizards,
(08:40):
and then a poet led the class in filling out
horned lizard worksheets with descriptive text to create concrete poems
or visual poetry. So it's like an outline of a
horned lizard, and then you fill in with text. And
I included one example of this in our outline here.
Joe and folks can look up the blog post and
see an example. This is well and for instance, written
(09:02):
by one of the students in the head is a
horned lizard eats ants. I babysat horned lizards. I can't
read the rest of it. I spit my blood out
of my eye at snack. I drink water from the sky.
And then like later on one of the legs, it
says I eat ant every day. And then there's also
(09:24):
a part of the anatomy that says I drink water
from my back. So I read that before I actually
got to that point in reading about their biology. So
I was like, I wonder if that's true. Gonna have
to fat fact check this child.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes, this child's poetry passes fact check. The horned lizards,
at least some species do drink water from their backs.
And it's interesting the way Sherbrook describes it. It's not
just like you know, water randomly running off the back
and some of it sort of getting into the mouth.
It seems like it has a fairly sophisticated system of
like this sort of this matrix of layers underneath in
(10:01):
between the scales absorbing water and then routing it by
capillary action down to the edges of the mouth where
the where the lizard then sort of sits there, opening
and closing its jaws slowly to drink the water as
it trickles in from the corners of the mouth. And
so it's got a fairly sophisticated top topography on the
(10:23):
back there to get the water to the mouth.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
It's a great system. You can't follow them.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Another interesting way that horned lizards can serve water They
do not urinate. Now, how is that possible? They're animals.
Surely their bodies produce and collect waste products like excess
salts and the nitrogen bearing compounds that are the byproduct
of animal metabolism, like uric acid common in reptiles. Well,
(10:50):
they do still have to purge these waste products, but
they purge them not as liquid urine, but as a
semi solid substance rather than dissolved in water. So Sherberch writes, quote,
water carrying uric acid from the kidney is reabsorbed in
the kloaca. From here, the uric acid, mixed with some
(11:10):
insoluble crystals of urate salts, is voided as a white
mass attached to the end of the fecal pellet. And
I thought this was interesting because in just a minute,
I want to mention, there was a video I was watching,
like a short documentary about some conservation efforts with horned lizards,
and it was showing some of their feces that the
(11:31):
researchers were finding in the wild. And yeah, their fecal
pellets did have these interesting little white caps on them.
So apparently that is what the lizard releases instead of
liquid urine solid P and some in solidness crystals of
solid P. Also, as we have discussed with some other
(11:52):
reptiles in the past, horned lizards can sometimes remove excess
salts from the body, not by urinating, but by sneezing.
So salts accumulate in glands around the nostrils where they
are secreted as this hyper concentrated salty brine in the nose,
(12:12):
which you can then you just hank it right out.
And Sherbrook says that you can find horned lizard individuals
with noses covered in this salty white crust from the process.
So the moral of the story is when you don't pee,
you poop, and you sneeze. Different other anti predator considerations
that we didn't have time to talk about in the
(12:33):
last episode, we were talking about the advantages of the
horned lizard's armor for self defense, you know, the tough scales,
but especially the sharp bony spines around the crown of
the horned lizard's head. That these pieces of armor increase
(12:54):
the risk a predator has to take in trying to
eat one of these lizards. The predator has to make
judgment call, is it too big for me to survive
swallowing this? Will the head spikes split open my throat
or puncture my organs that can actually happen. But in
the context of looking at another predator prey relationship that
(13:14):
we didn't talk about last time, Sherbroke had some interesting
thoughts on the evolution of these head spikes. So Sherbrooke
is talking about the southern grasshopper mouse or ani Comis torridus,
and this animal will prey on some smaller horned lizard
species by biting the skull right over the eye socket.
(13:36):
So this is before you get to the crown of spikes.
This is the skull above the eyes. And when the
grasshopper mouse attacks other prey animals, most other vertebrate prey,
it bites in a different place. It bites at the
back of the neck, near the base of the head,
attempting to damage and sever the spinal cord. And this
(13:58):
is apparently a common attack area for predators to target.
I was actually kind of thinking, I know, I've read
about big cats often targeting the back of the neck
and the base of the skull in those rare cases
where they happen to attack humans, and I was trying
to remember where I came across that fact, and finally
I realized It was from Mary Roach's book fuzz When
(14:20):
Nature Breaks the Law, which we interviewed her about on
the show. That was one of my favorite interviews we've done,
and it's from the part of the book where she's
talking about taking the class learning to identify different common
wound patterns from different types of animal attacks. And so
for example, she talks about how when a grizzly bear
attacks a human sometimes a lot of the injuries are
(14:43):
sort of face on. They're like to the face in
the front of the head, almost as if the bear
is fighting a human the way it fights a rival bear,
where they're both kind of like biting at each other's faces.
Whereas cougars are used to killing their prey with a
power bite to the back of the neck, which they
in these rare cases where a cougar attacks a human,
(15:05):
they will sometimes target the same sort of place on
the body, like the back of the neck, base of
the back of the head.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I believe in Jurassic Park this is also how the
velociraptors are depicted as preying on humans biting the back
of the neck.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
But anyway, coming back to the relationship between the Southern
grasshopper mouse and the horned lizard. So these mice will
try to prey on the lizards, especially the smaller ones,
but they don't bite where they bite most prey because
in the lizard's case, this is right where the head
horns grow. So the mouse doesn't even bother trying to
(15:42):
attack this well defended area. Instead, it's got to kind
of like awkwardly chew with the head over the eyes
and Sherbrook speculates that these horns could have evolved from
what was originally a more modest kind of bony defensive
ridge at the base of the skull designed to protect
against this kind of attack to the back of the neck,
(16:03):
and studies have shown that the spines do protect against
predator attacks. And you can measure this because the size
of the spines around the head actually matters, like research
has shown that lizards killed by birds tend to have
shorter spines around the head than lizards of the same
(16:25):
species in that area, So the ones that are picked
off the most tend to have the shortest head spikes. Now,
there's one more thing we brought up in the last
episode that I did want to make sure we came
back to today because I wanted to clarify something about it.
(16:49):
This was when we were talking about the relationship between
horned lizards and the red imported fire ant or solenopsis
in Victa. It came up that non native fire ants
in North America are thought to be a reason for
some horned lizard population declines, and this does appear to
be true. There are a number of horned lizards whose
(17:12):
ranges have been shrinking in recent decades. There are places
where you used to find them, you don't find them anymore.
Many of their populations are in decline, and in the
case with the case with a lot of these species,
does seem to be that the fire ant is playing
a role there, especially because the lizards have such an
important relationship with the native harvester ants, which are sometimes
(17:34):
sort of driven out by the fire ants. So while
it's true that the fire ants appear to be playing
a role in population and range declines for these horned lizards,
they're not thought to be the only factor, or necessarily
even the main factor everywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
That's very much the case. Yeah, and reading about the
Texas horned lizard like urbanization vast urbanization and Texas is
often singled out as one of the prime imary factors
there exactly.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, so the fire ant, the imported fire ant, seem
to be one factor among many. And this came up
when I was watching a short documentary video that was
just delightful. I recommend people look this up. A documentary
video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife in twenty twenty
one called Horned Lizard Homecoming. You can find this on YouTube.
(18:23):
It is a video specifically that's focused on an attempt
by the San Antonio Zoo to breed Texas horned lizards
in captivity and then release them back into areas from
which they have largely disappeared since the nineteen seventies. Just
one of the many charming things in this short documentary
is that the conservation biologists are working with a lizard
(18:46):
sniffing dog. So you know, imagine the canine unit at
the airport, but instead of a drug sniffing dog or
a bomb sniffing dog, it's a dog that is trained
to find Texas horned lizard in the wild and not
to bother them by the way, not go like pick
them up in the mouth and harass them until they
get a blood squad. Just to signal from a safe
(19:08):
distance that they've found one.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Ah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
It's also very cute that the lizard sniffing dog in
the video is sort of wearing shoes as it goes
about its business. I think this is probably because there,
you know, it's a very scrubby area, and there's probably
a lot of like thorns and stuff that can get
stuck in a dog's paw around there. But anyway, the
conservation biologists and the parks and wildlife workers they interview
in this video, they talk about a few other things
(19:34):
that are affecting the range and population of Texas horned lizards.
For example, human attempts to eliminate harvester ants from large
areas of land. Of course, again, Texas horned lizards need
to eat harvest or ants. Without the ants, the land
cannot sustain the lizards. And then also things like replacing
native grasses with different grass types, so you replace what
(19:58):
are called bunch grasses with turf grasses. This is not
what the lizards are adapted to and they can't really
survive in it. Of course, as you mentioned, Rob, just
general urbanization and reformatting of a lot of land area
roads cutting through natural land ranges, which interferes with movement
back and forth. But there's another thing I just wanted
(20:19):
to mention from this video because I found it hilarious.
There's a part where they're showing a lab at the
San Antonio Zoo where they're trying to breed lots of lizards,
so it's sort of it's a lizard's sex lab, and
they are trying to facilitate mating, and they will put
a male lizard into a female lizard's tank. And there's
one part where the technician is explaining that the head
(20:41):
movements that we are seeing back and forth between these
two lizards indicate that they are both interested in mating.
But it totally looks like two lizards on a log
just nodding back and forth at each other, like yep, yep,
it's great. It's a very Texas kind of nod as well.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah, you can image like the little cowboy hats being
on their heads, right yeah, all right, Well, at this point,
I'd like to get back into some cultural connections to
the hornet lizard, and in the last episode, we teased
out some connections in Navajo culture among the Dnet people,
and I wanted to get into some of that so
(21:21):
there are several mentions of the hornet toad in the
nineteen forty four book Navajo Witchcraft by Clyde Kluckhohn, who
lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty. I've talked about
this text a little bit on the show before. The
version I have is from nineteen eighty nine with some
additions made to it, and there are several mentions of
the horned toad's use as a key ingredient in various
alleged spells in Navajo Witchcraft, which I want to stress
(21:45):
the term witchcraft is used here as shorthand, not for
mainstream religious rituals and practice, but rather for what is described,
as described by Kluckhohn as quote Navajo ideas and action
patterns concerned with the influencing of events by supernatural techniques
that are socially disapproved.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Right, So what would be viewed by the people as
a sort of illicit, outsider form of magic.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Right right, And it's my understanding as I understand it,
these are not necessarily things that were practiced, but were
believed to be practiced by these few individuals. So the
book outlines various alleged curses, including the placing of a
personal item or a bit of clothing from a man
you want to death curse inside a grave, or inside
(22:35):
the mouth of a dead man, in the cursing of
a pregnant woman, a personal item is placed inside the
body of a horned toad or a horned lizard, or
a purse made from its hide.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh interesting, and so.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
That these would again, these would be specialized alleged uses
practiced by these you know, these outsiders that are practicing
this kind of like co or said to be practicing
this kind of like negative magical system. But there is
a fragment of a story shared late in the book
that is indeed a reference to a major Navajo story
about the horned lizard, and it does get into some
(23:10):
aspects of its biology, as we've discussed. So this is
the quote that is included in Navajo Witchcraft as a
commentary on something else that's referenced in the book quote.
The story is about the holy toad who eats ants
that give him power. One day he was swallowed by
a coyote who he had kindly given of his best corn.
(23:33):
So while inside he asked the code what all the
things he sees are for, and finally comes to the
back brain and asked what it was for, and the
code said, that is what I live by. Leave it alone.
So the toad cut it into killed the coyote and
came out of his throat. Wow. So I looked up
(23:54):
some other versions of this amazing story, and there appear
to be different versions of it, or you know, there
are different retellings of it. I was reading a version
from Navajo Religion, Volume one by Gladys A. Reichard from
nineteen fifty, and the way this one goes is, Okay,
there's a theft of corn. The corn belongs to the
(24:16):
horned toad, and coyote steals it, and then the horned
toad accuses the koty of the theft, but coyote kind
of laughs about it and says, well, yeah, I am hungry,
and then he eats the horned toad. But then horned
toad begins to move around inside the code he's belly,
and at first coyote thinks it's just the corn that
he ate, but then the toad begins to talk to him.
(24:39):
He's like, where am I It's dark in here, and
he like kicks the inside of the stomach just to
sort of punish the coyote a little bit, but then
he moves to the windpipe, keeps speaking. Then he moves
to the heart and this is where he carves across
in the heart and it kills the code. He dead,
and then he emerges from the code he's body in
this telling or retail of it from the codes anus.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
This is interesting in how it matches with the cases
we talked about from biology in the in the previous
episode about animals that died from trying to eat a
horned lizard that was too big and too thorny, like
the various birds and snakes all. You know, it's like
a dangerous proposition to get too greedy with attacking a
(25:24):
horned toad that they have really serious spikes and they
can mess you up from the inside.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, And so you can imagine the story being inspired
by observations of that having occurred in predators, perhaps including
the coyote. And then, of course, as we referenced in the
last episode, this nugget about them getting their power from
the ants that they eat, like, that's that's right on
as far as they're they're they're irritating blood is concerned.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Right, because the idea as we talked about last time,
is that there is something in the harvest or ant
diet that causes their blood to have the properties that
make it foul smelling or foul tasting. To can it,
it's like foxes and coyotes. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Now, according to Navajo historian Wally Brown on Navajo traditional
teachings this is a twenty twenty three video, the grandfather
horned toad is a symbol of protection, with the spikes
serving as arrow points that protect one. And he also
drives home that the horned toad is close to the
Earth and which matches up with the way that it
(26:23):
lives its life, you know, not only being a very
terrestrial organism, but being solo to the earth, flattening itself
so that it doesn't cast that shadow as we discussed.
But he stresses that it can be used to bless
one's mind, to bless one's spirit, and to bless one's
physical well being.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I am interested in the way that it seems that
at least two humans the spiritual connotations of the horned
toad or the horned lizard are really taken as almost
entirely positive, despite the fact that it is a very
spiky looking creature, there seems to be a kind of
tension there. You would think, I think you see a
(27:01):
creature that's all like spiky and thorny like that, and
I don't know, people might just be more inclined to
attach a kind of negative spiritual energy to it. But
so we have these traditions that can consider the horned
lizard as like a route for a blessing, a blessing
of the mind and spirit and the health of the body.
(27:22):
But also just if you read about people's personal relationships
who grew up around these lizards, people have overwhelmingly positive
feelings about them, like very positive feelings about catching them
and handling them as children and things like that. Do
you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, And I was thinking about this as well.
I guess on one hand, it's worth stressing that like,
they're not a direct threat to humans. You know, it's
not even like a situation where you know, obviously there
are a lot of like say, like venomous snakes out
there that are also not out there in the game
trying to have encounters with humans, but it just happens,
(28:00):
and you know, and you know, injuries and so forth
can result. It's not really the case here, Like, they're
pretty much not a threat to us, and so there's
almost a certain like natural kinship with them because they're
out there in the world. They're dealing with stresses, they're
dealing with predators, enemies, and they have these natural defenses
against them. But they also seem very much like an
(28:21):
underdog because they are small, and you know, it doesn't
always work. Yeah, So there are some other details on
some of these traditions mentioned in another book I looked at,
Jane Manister's Horned Lizards. This is a two thousand and
two book from Texas Tech University Press. The author here
cites that at least in some tellings of this the
(28:42):
code is being punished for stealing corn from the sacred stalk,
that the horned lizard is associated with inner protection, especially
for warriors traditionally, and then the author also cites that
there may be a Navajo taboo, or there may have
been a Navajo taboo against including certain animals, including this one,
(29:02):
in various rug weaving designs, perhaps in deference to its
special strength. Now, I want to stress that Navajo traditions
vary across time and geography, as with pretty much any
belief system, and there are also aspects of Navaja traditions
that are not meant for me to know of. And
I hope that I've been respectful with what I've brought
to the discussion here. But I think this is always
(29:25):
there's always a fascinating relationship to be observed between a
people's beliefs and a people's natural environment, and I think
that we see that here with the horned toad or
horned lizard, both as a metaphor as well as an
interpretation of what I assume were observations of the horned
lizard's biology in the wild. Now, another source I looked
(29:54):
at I was looking at an article by Joyce Gibson
Roach writing for TCU magazine talking about different cultural interpretations
of the of the horned lizard. And this author points
to Spanish folk beliefs. So this would have been, you know,
in Mexico for the most part, where they would sometimes
refer to the horned lizard as torrito dilo virgin or
(30:19):
the little bull who protects the virgin. And so this
is there's kind of like two different things going on
with this this nickname. So we we talked about this
in the last episode how they may be observed to
charge like a bull and are sometimes referred to as
the little bull.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, like against an absurdly larger predator, like
against a human shoe.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, And I think that I think this again, this
is one of the things that makes this animal charming.
You know. It's an underdog, stand in its ground, you know,
And like, how can you not want to be like
the like the humble, horny toat in this respect? But
then where does the virgin come in? Well, this seems
to be connected to various interpretations that what's going on
(31:02):
here is that the horned toad is crying tears of blood.
So there is a long, sometimes controversial, and also generally
skeptically debunked history of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping
tears of blood in Catholicism, and accounts of weeping statues
in general, dating back at least to the writings of
(31:23):
Plutarch in the first and second century. See Now. I
should also point out that humans can experience blood in
the tears or blood from the tear ducks or hematuria
for various reasons. So for instance, when my son was younger,
he had tubes put in his tear ducks to correct
a minor problem, and immediately after surgery he shed a
(31:43):
single tear of blood, which was pretty awesome. At the time,
we knew everything was fine, you know, and it was
just kind of like, oh wow, that was a blood tear,
but only got the one.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Agreed, if you know, not to worry. That is pretty cool,
all right.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Now. There a connection to the horned toad the horned
lizard in culture. This is one that was shared in
that book by Jane Manister Horned Lizards from two thousand
and two. She gets into to a number of different traditions,
at least mentioning like that there are a number of
ideas about them being tied up in weather prediction and
(32:22):
rain generation, which I guess is understandable of a creatures
that clearly is able to thrive in a very arid environment,
and we have these unique observations, you know, concerning the
way that they catch rain and so forth. But then
she also gets into this account that some of you
may have heard of before. I believe stuff you missed
(32:43):
in history class did a whole episode about this last
couple of years. There's the story of Old Rip. This
is a horned lizard originally named Blinky, that was placed
in an Eastland County, Texas time caps along with a bible,
some coins, and some newspapers. And then when the capsule
(33:05):
was dug out thirty one years later, the lizard was
allegedly still alive.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
I don't know about that.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, a lot of solid reasons to doubt this detail
of the story, but this is the main detail of
the story. So it's like everyone who's celebrating this, it's
like they're basically the idea being that they were saying
the cowboy lore is correct. This is a victory of
cowboy biology. They were right the cowboys when they said
(33:33):
that the horned toad could live for one hundred years
without food or water. Because clearly, this particular horned lizard
was locked away for thirty one years and we just
got him out and he's still alive. Everyone and take
a look at him. So this was very popular at
the time. Old Rip toured the country, even met President
Coolidge at the White House, and ultimately died in nineteen
(33:54):
twenty nine. Now, various folks later took credit for switching
out lizards at the capsule's opening. So this is that
I want to stress that this is almost certainly a hoax,
and there's a lot of reason to believe it was
a hoax. This was not carried out with any kind
of like scientific rigger, but it was a big deal
(34:15):
and it was covered in the New York Times, among
other major publications. In fact, I want to read to
you from the New York Times. This is from February twentieth,
nineteen twenty eight. Oh boy toad alive after thirty one
years sealed in Texas cornerstone, Eastland, Texas, February nineteenth ap
Hey hornage toad sealed alive in the cornerstone of the
(34:36):
courthouse here thirty one years ago, was alive when the
stone was removed yesterday. According to County Judge Edward S. Pritchard,
the old courthouse is being raised, and it goes into
some additional details, including this bit that I also have
to include. After the cornerstone was removed, the toad appeared
lifeless for some time, but in a little while it
(34:57):
opened its eyes in about twenty minutes a begin and
to breathe. The mouth however, appeared to have grown together.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
What grown together?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, yeah, so I was looking around. There's some other
takes on this as well.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
That oh, they're also saying they're going to open the
mouth by surgery and force it to eat food. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Yeah, that was also the New York Times story. So yeah,
this story, I should be clear, there were a number
of skeptics at the time that were like, that doesn't
sound right. Let me see this toad. I think there
was maybe there may be one or two support supporters
in the scientific community who are maybe like, well, it's possible.
(35:42):
I don't know, but generally people were very doubtful about this.
And then on the other hand, you had others pointing out, well,
clearly the animal survived in the time capsule because there
was a Bible in there. The Bible sustained the lizard.
I guess the Bible also made the lizard's mouth grow together.
I'm not sure. I've read other accounts that it had
(36:03):
a broken leg and worn down horns but was otherwise healthy. Yeah,
And then others claim that the eyes were sealed shut
as well. There seems to be a certain amount of
drift in the telling and retelling of this feat But
here's what we actually know to be true. So hornet
lizards can live around five years, but normal lifespan in
the wild is not fully known, according to the Oklahoma
(36:26):
Department of Wildlife Conservation, but I think we can probably
take that as like a ballpark. According to Texas Monthly
in a twenty fifteen article by Alex Dropkin, the Texas
horned lizard species hibernates, or rather birmates between October and April,
and this is likely where that cowboy lore originated, that
(36:47):
these creatures can live without food or water for one
hundred years. And this is the lore that the folks
in Eastland, Texas decided to put to the test. This
is why they put a hornet lizard inside of a
time capsule to test or I think, if we're being
rightfully skeptic here to prove that the cowboy lore was correct.
(37:09):
There is no evidence that hornet lizards in the wild
choose hibernation spots based on the presence of biblical texts
or coins or newspapers. But I guess we should note
that long lifespans for lizards are not completely unheard of.
The New Zealand tuatara can live twenty five to thirty
five years, typical age ages to sixty or apparently common,
(37:33):
and one captive specimen apparently lived to be over one hundred. Meanwhile,
some wizards can go without food or water for weeks
or months. I think it's safe to say that the
accounts of Old Rip places the story so far outside
of anything reported or at least, you know, authenticated to
any reasonable degree, that common sense leans us very strongly
(37:54):
in the direction of hoax here.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know, we talked not too long ago on the show,
we were doing so stuff about cave biology, and we
ended up talking about the cave dwelling amphibian, the olm,
which is notable for being one of the most sort
of sedentary creatures on Earth that it can live for
a long time. It's an aquatic salamander. It's found in
(38:18):
the dynamic alps in cave systems, where it lives in
the dark for much of the time. And it is
thought that sometimes these creatures can go for like ten
years without food, and that in itself is incredible, But
that seems to be sort of the upper bound of
where you can where you can push push the slow
(38:38):
motion metabolism too.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah. Yeah, And so again, if this story of Old
Rip were true, it would just it would triple that
ten year record. So yeah, I think we are very
right to be highly skeptical of this. And again various
folks came forward and claimed that they were involved with
the hoax and so forth, So there's a lot of
(39:02):
smoke there that suggests the fire. I should also point
this out. You know we were talking about in endangered
status of horned lizards. This particular incident was so popular
that it resulted in a horned toad boom, so the
specimens being harvested and then exported for novelty's sake, hurting
(39:26):
local populations in the process. But hey, Old Rip is
allegedly currently entombed in Eastland, Texas. I think he's on display.
So if we have any Eastland listeners or visitors to Eastland,
or folks who have been to Eastland and can report
on the body of Old Rip right in, we would
love to hear from you. I believe he has at
least historically been stolen at least once and returned.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Are you, County Judge Edward S. Pritchard, what criteria did
you use to judge that this was the real original lizard?
Speaker 1 (39:58):
All right? I have another interesting bit that I ran
across in these texts that I want to talk about
This is from Manister's book as well, and it is
the Horny toad Man, something that I know, on the
surface absolutely sounds like a cryptid or some American Western
horror story. And the fact that it's associated with the railway,
I think only compounds this possibility.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Yeah, it sounds like he belongs alongside Sasquatch and paramouth a. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
So, according to Manister, the figure emerges in response to
a unique problem on a segment of the Santa Fe
railroad connecting Albuquerque and El Paso, a segment of track
that was dubbed the Horny toad a segment where anything
bad that ever happened on the railroad could happen and
had happened, including a unique problem first reported apparently in
(40:47):
the Jiorada del Niorto desert basin, and that is trains
losing traction on the rails due to the grease and
moisture of hundreds of squashed hornet what so. Apparently it
was so bad that brakemen and firemen aboard the train
would have to scramble down onto the tracks and sweep
(41:08):
it all off to get all this gunk off the tracks,
And it led to the idea nay, the ideal of
the horny toad man. So a horny toad man is
not merely like somebody that goes down and sweeps off
the rails. In the scenario, this is a railway man
with eyes on corporate promotion, willing to do anything and
(41:28):
everything the company requires in order to advance, and that
certainly includes going out onto the tracks in the desert
heat and removing lizard guts from the rails.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
So this is a railroad company version of I'll get
the boss's coffee, you know, I will sweep the sweep
all of the horny toad grease off of the rails.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Right, And to put it in an alien context, since
we're talking about alien in the last episode, you might
consider Burke from Aliens a horny toad man of sorts,
you know, a complete scoundrel, but he proves that, if
nothing else, he is more than ready to get down
there on the tracks and get his hands dirty for
the company. He's a company man.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
All the way. That's right, all right.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Now, in trying to understand this, I guess we do
have to acknowledge that horned lizard populations would have been
greater back in this time period. As opposed to what
they are now, so we can't compare what we see
in the world today to what would have been happening then.
But I needed more clarity on why are there so
many horned lizards getting run over by trains? And I
(42:32):
found a possible answer here in a nineteen twenty two
paper by J. P. Givler. Givler writes, it is an
interesting fact that at such times horned lizards are very
abundant under the crossties of railroad tracks. Often they burrow
through into the area between the two rails. Here they
emerge and are literally trapped. The rails are usually too
(42:54):
high to be climbed over, and the lizards run up
and down frantically. Occasionally one climbs up on a rail
just in time to be crushed by a passing train.
Many live for the rest of the summer in this
uncomfortable pasture.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Bummer.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Now, it doesn't I mean, it doesn't completely answer my question,
but it at least puts a lot of horned lizards
in the vicinity of those train tracks. And you know,
he only mentions it as being like an occasional squashing,
But may I guess that's close enough to like a
mass squashing that we can consider this reality now. I
(43:28):
look for any discussions out there in the literature about
loss of traction due to animal railway mortalities, and I
looked at it at least one full source on animal
railway mortalities or one that deals with this in depth
titled railway ecology. And there's no mention in this of
tracks getting greased up by dead animals or dead lizards.
(43:51):
So if true, maybe this was indeed more of a
concern with an historic engine and an historic local population
of lizard. I'm not sure, but I will add the
following from another paper. I looked up Experimental evaluation of
effect of leaves on railroad tracks and loss of braking
by Kumar at All. This is in the Journal Machines
(44:13):
in twenty twenty four. Quote loss of traction results in
either breaking of the train or slip, which arises at
lower tractive coefficients. This case occurs when there are third
body layers that cause reduce traction, such as in the
case of leaves. Various traction enhancers are adopted by the
railway to improve adhesion when the rail is contaminated.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Okay, so you can certainly imagine that leaves falling on
railroad tracks could reduce the traction between the wheels and
the rails. So yeah, you can guess that if like
lizard especially not just like lizard body fluids, but whole
lizard bodies were on the rails, that might interfere in
(44:58):
some way.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
That's my ga. You know, if we're not dealing with
leaves here, we're dealing with lizard bodies and lizard guts
and lizard liquids. But I guess if there were enough
of them, and also dealing with the idea that these
are not modern trains, these are historic drain engines, I
can I guess it's conceivable that there would have been
some sort of issue here, thus necessitating the horny toad man.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
Horny toad man, we salute you.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
So yeah. I don't know if we have any anybody
out there who is, you know, verse more versed than
the history of locomotives and in the railway in America,
you know, right in we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
What's your company's version of the horny toad man.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Yeah, I guess there's there's probably a horny toad man
in any business, in any corporation. So those were some
of the cultural connections to the horned lizard or a
horned toad or horny toad that I was able to
come across. But I'd love to hear from anyone out
there if you have some additional insights to share, be
they related to something we discussed in this episode, or
(46:04):
something we missed altogether. Be it something from Native beliefs
and traditions that you want to share, or cowboy lore
or indeed cowboy poetry. I'm still at a loss that
there's not at least one cowboy poem out there on
the Internet that deals with these guys.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Surely there is. I'm gonna blame Google being bad now
for the inability to connect with that literature.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, all right, well we're going to gohead and close
out this episode. But yeah, right in, we'd love to
hear from you. Let's see a little housekeeping here. Hey,
if you're on Instagram, look us up. We're STBYM podcast.
That's our handle. You can follow us there and keep
up with some of what's coming out in the old
podcast feed. And in that old podcast feed, we've got
core science and culture episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
(46:50):
form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, her
JJ Posway, and special thanks to our excellent guest audio
producer Chandler may Is for sitting in with us today.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hi, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
(47:18):
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and Hey, today's Saturday, so we have another
repeat for you. This is an older episode, this one
originally published eight fifteen, twenty twenty four. It is Blood
Squirting from the Lizard's Eye, Part two. We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
Part two in our series on the horned lizards of
North America, also known sometimes as horned toads or horny
toads if you prefer, though they are in fact lizards
and not toads. The horned blizzard, of course, is a
genus scientific name Freno soma, meaning toad body, which contains
(01:00):
about twenty one species which have different geographical ranges, but
they're all found in western North America, from the southern
tip of Mexico up through parts of western Canada. Now again,
this is part two of the series. In Part one,
we focused mainly on the horned lizard's relationship with various
predators and their fascinating anti predator defense strategies which include camouflage, spikes,
(01:26):
and armored scales, which can make them difficult and in
some cases quite dangerous to eat. We talked about some
eating related mishaps from various predators, and then finally, they're
weaponized blood jets, the adaptation that allows them to shoot
streams of apparently foul tasting blood out of their eyes
when threatened by a dog. Robin, in your words last time,
(01:49):
a way of deterring predation with the most aggressive and
unpleasant free sample in the world. That's right to refer
back to something that came up last time, that we're
still interested in this question of why the blood apparently
tastes so foul to dogs, and I read in some
cases maybe also cats, but not noticeably so to humans,
(02:11):
and certainly not to predators such as birds.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Now I want to throw in right here at the top.
We described the horned lizards in detail in the last episode,
and I hope that everyone has had a chance to
check out some footage or images on their own. At
this point in our research, I've looked at a lot
of images, a lot of footage, and I do have
to give them props for just being tremendous splooters, you know.
(02:35):
They certainly the squirrels can splute like like none other.
You know, cats are great splooters. But man, I have
to say the horned lizard isn't natural as well.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Wait, I'm not understanding the word splute, then I thought
you were. You were meaning like squirting, like squirting the
blood out of the eye. That's all what it means.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
They're tremendous squirters as well. But spluting. Spluting is when
if you ever it's a hot day and you look
out and you see a squirrel like laying on its
belly like splluted out, you may see you can't do
much the same. Various other organisms will splute. This is
an unofficial terminology for what they're doing. But I feel
like that the horned lizard has this down as well.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Splute seems like a variation on display when the whole
body like flat against the ground, all limbs outstretched exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yes, but the kind of PLoP to it as well,
You know, like there's a certain you got the organism
really needs to have a certain amount of like semi
liquid solidness to it to really deliver it. You got
to have that toad body or you got to have
that slightly soft mammalian body to pull it off.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Oh, that's right. And of course the toad body, as
we talked about last time, is part of the horned
lizard's defensive camouflage strategy. Like the splluting is indeed part
of what keeps them safe from detection by predators. They
try to lay flat against the ground so as not
to cast a shadow and to make it harder for
(04:01):
a predator, say a bird flying overhead, to see their outline. Also,
since we're just talking about reviewing the tape on the
horned Lizard since the last time we talked, I was
watching just more blood squirting footage since we recorded the
previous episode, And I don't know if I emphasized enough
how much it really looks so alarming. If you haven't
(04:24):
seen this, look it up. The blood that the jets
out of the eyes somehow looks darker and thicker than
I expected. And it's also just weird how much blood
is coming out compared to the size of the animal,
which is quite small. It doesn't look like something that
should be happening.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, it is quite alarming. It's redder and bloodier than
I think I was anticipating it feels like a cut
scene from Event Horizon.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Yeah. Now, to get into the meat of today's episode,
I wanted to address just a few more lingering biological
facts about horned lizards, biological and ecological facts that we
didn't quite have time to get into last time. And
the first thing I wanted to talk about is the
horned lizard's relationship to water. Of course, horned lizards generally
(05:14):
live in dry places, deserts and semi arid ecoregions, where
the sun cooks you, the rain is scarce, water is
hard to come by, and horned toads, like all animals,
of course, need water to live, so much of their
biology has gone still suit mode. They are very efficient
at sourcing and preserving water. There is a great passage
(05:37):
about the horned lizard's relationship to water in a book
that I referred to in the last episode. That book
is Introduction to Horned Lizards of North America by Wade C. Sherbrook.
This was published by the University of California Press in
two thousand and three. The author, Wade Sherbrook, was director
of the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of
(05:58):
Natural history, So of course, losing water is just part
of having a body. It is impossible to avoid losing
some water content through ambient interface with the air. We
lose some water vapor from our lungs when we breathe,
we lose some water through evaporation from our skin, and
the same is true for horned lizards. To reduce water
(06:21):
loss to evaporation, horned lizards have some behavioral adaptations. For example,
sometimes they burrow underground or partially bury parts of their
bodies in the soil. This can reduce water loss from evaporation,
but they also have some clever ways to source water
from their environment. They will, of course just drink free
standing water when they can get access to it, if
(06:42):
there are puddles after a rainstorm or something like that.
They will drink dew that collects on plants in the morning.
But much of the water that they get from external
sources comes from food like juicy juicy harvest or ants.
But here's where Surbrook gets into. Something I found really
fascinating of these strategies they have for sourcing water is
(07:04):
that some species of horned lizards use their own backs
as what Sherbrook calls a rain harvesting surface. So he
singles out three species as examples, the Texas horned lizard,
the round tail horned lizard, and the desert horned lizard.
And when these animals sense that rain is about to fall,
(07:26):
they do the opposite of what humans usually do. You know,
we go inside. They go outside. They run out of
cover into the open and stand with their backs sort
of cupped like they raise up there. They raise up
on their legs, they flatten out their backs, and they
lower their heads. Now what does this do. It turns
the lizards back into a kind of combination rain barrel
(07:51):
and whatever you call that. You know, the beer drinking
helmet where you got the beers on the sides and
it's got a straw running to the mouth. So you
combine that with the rain barrel concept. Their back collects
water over the widest possible surface area, which is the
lizard's flattened out dorsal scales, and then it funnels the
water to the edge of its mouth for drinking. So
(08:14):
like my body is a catch base and my mouth
is the receptacle.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I'm glad we're getting into this because as I was
looking into the culture of the horned lizard. I was
hoping to find an example of cowboy poetry about them,
but my search came up largely empty. But I did
find an interesting blog post by Charlie Buck of the
University of Arizona Poetry Center about an elementary school exercise
where they brought in a herpetologist to talk about horned lizards,
(08:40):
and then a poet led the class in filling out
horned lizard worksheets with descriptive text to create concrete poems
or visual poetry. So it's like an outline of a
horned lizard, and then you fill in with text. And
I included one example of this in our outline here.
Joe and folks can look up the blog post and
see an example. This is well and for instance, written
(09:02):
by one of the students in the head is a
horned lizard eats ants. I babysat horned lizards. I can't
read the rest of it. I spit my blood out
of my eye at snack. I drink water from the sky.
And then like later on one of the legs, it
says I eat ant every day. And then there's also
(09:24):
a part of the anatomy that says I drink water
from my back. So I read that before I actually
got to that point in reading about their biology. So
I was like, I wonder if that's true. Gonna have
to fat fact check this child.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes, this child's poetry passes fact check. The horned lizards,
at least some species do drink water from their backs.
And it's interesting the way Sherbrook describes it. It's not
just like you know, water randomly running off the back
and some of it sort of getting into the mouth.
It seems like it has a fairly sophisticated system of
like this sort of this matrix of layers underneath in
(10:01):
between the scales absorbing water and then routing it by
capillary action down to the edges of the mouth where
the where the lizard then sort of sits there, opening
and closing its jaws slowly to drink the water as
it trickles in from the corners of the mouth. And
so it's got a fairly sophisticated top topography on the
(10:23):
back there to get the water to the mouth.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
It's a great system. You can't follow them.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Another interesting way that horned lizards can serve water They
do not urinate. Now, how is that possible? They're animals.
Surely their bodies produce and collect waste products like excess
salts and the nitrogen bearing compounds that are the byproduct
of animal metabolism, like uric acid common in reptiles. Well,
(10:50):
they do still have to purge these waste products, but
they purge them not as liquid urine, but as a
semi solid substance rather than dissolved in water. So Sherberch writes, quote,
water carrying uric acid from the kidney is reabsorbed in
the kloaca. From here, the uric acid, mixed with some
(11:10):
insoluble crystals of urate salts, is voided as a white
mass attached to the end of the fecal pellet. And
I thought this was interesting because in just a minute,
I want to mention, there was a video I was watching,
like a short documentary about some conservation efforts with horned lizards,
and it was showing some of their feces that the
(11:31):
researchers were finding in the wild. And yeah, their fecal
pellets did have these interesting little white caps on them.
So apparently that is what the lizard releases instead of
liquid urine solid P and some in solidness crystals of
solid P. Also, as we have discussed with some other
(11:52):
reptiles in the past, horned lizards can sometimes remove excess
salts from the body, not by urinating, but by sneezing.
So salts accumulate in glands around the nostrils where they
are secreted as this hyper concentrated salty brine in the nose,
(12:12):
which you can then you just hank it right out.
And Sherbrook says that you can find horned lizard individuals
with noses covered in this salty white crust from the process.
So the moral of the story is when you don't pee,
you poop, and you sneeze. Different other anti predator considerations
that we didn't have time to talk about in the
(12:33):
last episode, we were talking about the advantages of the
horned lizard's armor for self defense, you know, the tough scales,
but especially the sharp bony spines around the crown of
the horned lizard's head. That these pieces of armor increase
(12:54):
the risk a predator has to take in trying to
eat one of these lizards. The predator has to make
judgment call, is it too big for me to survive
swallowing this? Will the head spikes split open my throat
or puncture my organs that can actually happen. But in
the context of looking at another predator prey relationship that
(13:14):
we didn't talk about last time, Sherbroke had some interesting
thoughts on the evolution of these head spikes. So Sherbrooke
is talking about the southern grasshopper mouse or ani Comis torridus,
and this animal will prey on some smaller horned lizard
species by biting the skull right over the eye socket.
(13:36):
So this is before you get to the crown of spikes.
This is the skull above the eyes. And when the
grasshopper mouse attacks other prey animals, most other vertebrate prey,
it bites in a different place. It bites at the
back of the neck, near the base of the head,
attempting to damage and sever the spinal cord. And this
(13:58):
is apparently a common attack area for predators to target.
I was actually kind of thinking, I know, I've read
about big cats often targeting the back of the neck
and the base of the skull in those rare cases
where they happen to attack humans, and I was trying
to remember where I came across that fact, and finally
I realized It was from Mary Roach's book fuzz When
(14:20):
Nature Breaks the Law, which we interviewed her about on
the show. That was one of my favorite interviews we've done,
and it's from the part of the book where she's
talking about taking the class learning to identify different common
wound patterns from different types of animal attacks. And so
for example, she talks about how when a grizzly bear
attacks a human sometimes a lot of the injuries are
(14:43):
sort of face on. They're like to the face in
the front of the head, almost as if the bear
is fighting a human the way it fights a rival bear,
where they're both kind of like biting at each other's faces.
Whereas cougars are used to killing their prey with a
power bite to the back of the neck, which they
in these rare cases where a cougar attacks a human,
(15:05):
they will sometimes target the same sort of place on
the body, like the back of the neck, base of
the back of the head.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I believe in Jurassic Park this is also how the
velociraptors are depicted as preying on humans biting the back
of the neck.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
But anyway, coming back to the relationship between the Southern
grasshopper mouse and the horned lizard. So these mice will
try to prey on the lizards, especially the smaller ones,
but they don't bite where they bite most prey because
in the lizard's case, this is right where the head
horns grow. So the mouse doesn't even bother trying to
(15:42):
attack this well defended area. Instead, it's got to kind
of like awkwardly chew with the head over the eyes
and Sherbrook speculates that these horns could have evolved from
what was originally a more modest kind of bony defensive
ridge at the base of the skull designed to protect
against this kind of attack to the back of the neck,
(16:03):
and studies have shown that the spines do protect against
predator attacks. And you can measure this because the size
of the spines around the head actually matters, like research
has shown that lizards killed by birds tend to have
shorter spines around the head than lizards of the same
(16:25):
species in that area, So the ones that are picked
off the most tend to have the shortest head spikes. Now,
there's one more thing we brought up in the last
episode that I did want to make sure we came
back to today because I wanted to clarify something about it.
(16:49):
This was when we were talking about the relationship between
horned lizards and the red imported fire ant or solenopsis
in Victa. It came up that non native fire ants
in North America are thought to be a reason for
some horned lizard population declines, and this does appear to
be true. There are a number of horned lizards whose
(17:12):
ranges have been shrinking in recent decades. There are places
where you used to find them, you don't find them anymore.
Many of their populations are in decline, and in the
case with the case with a lot of these species,
does seem to be that the fire ant is playing
a role there, especially because the lizards have such an
important relationship with the native harvester ants, which are sometimes
(17:34):
sort of driven out by the fire ants. So while
it's true that the fire ants appear to be playing
a role in population and range declines for these horned lizards,
they're not thought to be the only factor, or necessarily
even the main factor everywhere.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
That's very much the case. Yeah, and reading about the
Texas horned lizard like urbanization vast urbanization and Texas is
often singled out as one of the prime imary factors
there exactly.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, so the fire ant, the imported fire ant, seem
to be one factor among many. And this came up
when I was watching a short documentary video that was
just delightful. I recommend people look this up. A documentary
video produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife in twenty twenty
one called Horned Lizard Homecoming. You can find this on YouTube.
(18:23):
It is a video specifically that's focused on an attempt
by the San Antonio Zoo to breed Texas horned lizards
in captivity and then release them back into areas from
which they have largely disappeared since the nineteen seventies. Just
one of the many charming things in this short documentary
is that the conservation biologists are working with a lizard
(18:46):
sniffing dog. So you know, imagine the canine unit at
the airport, but instead of a drug sniffing dog or
a bomb sniffing dog, it's a dog that is trained
to find Texas horned lizard in the wild and not
to bother them by the way, not go like pick
them up in the mouth and harass them until they
get a blood squad. Just to signal from a safe
(19:08):
distance that they've found one.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Ah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
It's also very cute that the lizard sniffing dog in
the video is sort of wearing shoes as it goes
about its business. I think this is probably because there,
you know, it's a very scrubby area, and there's probably
a lot of like thorns and stuff that can get
stuck in a dog's paw around there. But anyway, the
conservation biologists and the parks and wildlife workers they interview
in this video, they talk about a few other things
(19:34):
that are affecting the range and population of Texas horned lizards.
For example, human attempts to eliminate harvester ants from large
areas of land. Of course, again, Texas horned lizards need
to eat harvest or ants. Without the ants, the land
cannot sustain the lizards. And then also things like replacing
native grasses with different grass types, so you replace what
(19:58):
are called bunch grasses with turf grasses. This is not
what the lizards are adapted to and they can't really
survive in it. Of course, as you mentioned, Rob, just
general urbanization and reformatting of a lot of land area
roads cutting through natural land ranges, which interferes with movement
back and forth. But there's another thing I just wanted
(20:19):
to mention from this video because I found it hilarious.
There's a part where they're showing a lab at the
San Antonio Zoo where they're trying to breed lots of lizards,
so it's sort of it's a lizard's sex lab, and
they are trying to facilitate mating, and they will put
a male lizard into a female lizard's tank. And there's
one part where the technician is explaining that the head
(20:41):
movements that we are seeing back and forth between these
two lizards indicate that they are both interested in mating.
But it totally looks like two lizards on a log
just nodding back and forth at each other, like yep, yep,
it's great. It's a very Texas kind of nod as well.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah, you can image like the little cowboy hats being
on their heads, right yeah, all right, Well, at this point,
I'd like to get back into some cultural connections to
the hornet lizard, and in the last episode, we teased
out some connections in Navajo culture among the Dnet people,
and I wanted to get into some of that so
(21:21):
there are several mentions of the hornet toad in the
nineteen forty four book Navajo Witchcraft by Clyde Kluckhohn, who
lived nineteen oh five through nineteen sixty. I've talked about
this text a little bit on the show before. The
version I have is from nineteen eighty nine with some
additions made to it, and there are several mentions of
the horned toad's use as a key ingredient in various
alleged spells in Navajo Witchcraft, which I want to stress
(21:45):
the term witchcraft is used here as shorthand, not for
mainstream religious rituals and practice, but rather for what is described,
as described by Kluckhohn as quote Navajo ideas and action
patterns concerned with the influencing of events by supernatural techniques
that are socially disapproved.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Right, So what would be viewed by the people as
a sort of illicit, outsider form of magic.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Right right, And it's my understanding as I understand it,
these are not necessarily things that were practiced, but were
believed to be practiced by these few individuals. So the
book outlines various alleged curses, including the placing of a
personal item or a bit of clothing from a man
you want to death curse inside a grave, or inside
(22:35):
the mouth of a dead man, in the cursing of
a pregnant woman, a personal item is placed inside the
body of a horned toad or a horned lizard, or
a purse made from its hide.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh interesting, and so.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
That these would again, these would be specialized alleged uses
practiced by these you know, these outsiders that are practicing
this kind of like co or said to be practicing
this kind of like negative magical system. But there is
a fragment of a story shared late in the book
that is indeed a reference to a major Navajo story
about the horned lizard, and it does get into some
(23:10):
aspects of its biology, as we've discussed. So this is
the quote that is included in Navajo Witchcraft as a
commentary on something else that's referenced in the book quote.
The story is about the holy toad who eats ants
that give him power. One day he was swallowed by
a coyote who he had kindly given of his best corn.
(23:33):
So while inside he asked the code what all the
things he sees are for, and finally comes to the
back brain and asked what it was for, and the
code said, that is what I live by. Leave it alone.
So the toad cut it into killed the coyote and
came out of his throat. Wow. So I looked up
(23:54):
some other versions of this amazing story, and there appear
to be different versions of it, or you know, there
are different retellings of it. I was reading a version
from Navajo Religion, Volume one by Gladys A. Reichard from
nineteen fifty, and the way this one goes is, Okay,
there's a theft of corn. The corn belongs to the
(24:16):
horned toad, and coyote steals it, and then the horned
toad accuses the koty of the theft, but coyote kind
of laughs about it and says, well, yeah, I am hungry,
and then he eats the horned toad. But then horned
toad begins to move around inside the code he's belly,
and at first coyote thinks it's just the corn that
he ate, but then the toad begins to talk to him.
(24:39):
He's like, where am I It's dark in here, and
he like kicks the inside of the stomach just to
sort of punish the coyote a little bit, but then
he moves to the windpipe, keeps speaking. Then he moves
to the heart and this is where he carves across
in the heart and it kills the code. He dead,
and then he emerges from the code he's body in
this telling or retail of it from the codes anus.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
This is interesting in how it matches with the cases
we talked about from biology in the in the previous
episode about animals that died from trying to eat a
horned lizard that was too big and too thorny, like
the various birds and snakes all. You know, it's like
a dangerous proposition to get too greedy with attacking a
(25:24):
horned toad that they have really serious spikes and they
can mess you up from the inside.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah, And so you can imagine the story being inspired
by observations of that having occurred in predators, perhaps including
the coyote. And then, of course, as we referenced in the
last episode, this nugget about them getting their power from
the ants that they eat, like, that's that's right on
as far as they're they're they're irritating blood is concerned.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Right, because the idea as we talked about last time,
is that there is something in the harvest or ant
diet that causes their blood to have the properties that
make it foul smelling or foul tasting. To can it,
it's like foxes and coyotes. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Now, according to Navajo historian Wally Brown on Navajo traditional
teachings this is a twenty twenty three video, the grandfather
horned toad is a symbol of protection, with the spikes
serving as arrow points that protect one. And he also
drives home that the horned toad is close to the
Earth and which matches up with the way that it
(26:23):
lives its life, you know, not only being a very
terrestrial organism, but being solo to the earth, flattening itself
so that it doesn't cast that shadow as we discussed.
But he stresses that it can be used to bless
one's mind, to bless one's spirit, and to bless one's
physical well being.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I am interested in the way that it seems that
at least two humans the spiritual connotations of the horned
toad or the horned lizard are really taken as almost
entirely positive, despite the fact that it is a very
spiky looking creature, there seems to be a kind of
tension there. You would think, I think you see a
(27:01):
creature that's all like spiky and thorny like that, and
I don't know, people might just be more inclined to
attach a kind of negative spiritual energy to it. But
so we have these traditions that can consider the horned
lizard as like a route for a blessing, a blessing
of the mind and spirit and the health of the body.
(27:22):
But also just if you read about people's personal relationships
who grew up around these lizards, people have overwhelmingly positive
feelings about them, like very positive feelings about catching them
and handling them as children and things like that. Do
you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, yeah, And I was thinking about this as well.
I guess on one hand, it's worth stressing that like,
they're not a direct threat to humans. You know, it's
not even like a situation where you know, obviously there
are a lot of like say, like venomous snakes out
there that are also not out there in the game
trying to have encounters with humans, but it just happens,
(28:00):
and you know, and you know, injuries and so forth
can result. It's not really the case here, Like, they're
pretty much not a threat to us, and so there's
almost a certain like natural kinship with them because they're
out there in the world. They're dealing with stresses, they're
dealing with predators, enemies, and they have these natural defenses
against them. But they also seem very much like an
(28:21):
underdog because they are small, and you know, it doesn't
always work. Yeah, So there are some other details on
some of these traditions mentioned in another book I looked at,
Jane Manister's Horned Lizards. This is a two thousand and
two book from Texas Tech University Press. The author here
cites that at least in some tellings of this the
(28:42):
code is being punished for stealing corn from the sacred stalk,
that the horned lizard is associated with inner protection, especially
for warriors traditionally, and then the author also cites that
there may be a Navajo taboo, or there may have
been a Navajo taboo against including certain animals, including this one,
(29:02):
in various rug weaving designs, perhaps in deference to its
special strength. Now, I want to stress that Navajo traditions
vary across time and geography, as with pretty much any
belief system, and there are also aspects of Navaja traditions
that are not meant for me to know of. And
I hope that I've been respectful with what I've brought
to the discussion here. But I think this is always
(29:25):
there's always a fascinating relationship to be observed between a
people's beliefs and a people's natural environment, and I think
that we see that here with the horned toad or
horned lizard, both as a metaphor as well as an
interpretation of what I assume were observations of the horned
lizard's biology in the wild. Now, another source I looked
(29:54):
at I was looking at an article by Joyce Gibson
Roach writing for TCU magazine talking about different cultural interpretations
of the of the horned lizard. And this author points
to Spanish folk beliefs. So this would have been, you know,
in Mexico for the most part, where they would sometimes
refer to the horned lizard as torrito dilo virgin or
(30:19):
the little bull who protects the virgin. And so this
is there's kind of like two different things going on
with this this nickname. So we we talked about this
in the last episode how they may be observed to
charge like a bull and are sometimes referred to as
the little bull.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, like against an absurdly larger predator, like
against a human shoe.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, And I think that I think this again, this
is one of the things that makes this animal charming.
You know. It's an underdog, stand in its ground, you know,
And like, how can you not want to be like
the like the humble, horny toat in this respect? But
then where does the virgin come in? Well, this seems
to be connected to various interpretations that what's going on
(31:02):
here is that the horned toad is crying tears of blood.
So there is a long, sometimes controversial, and also generally
skeptically debunked history of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping
tears of blood in Catholicism, and accounts of weeping statues
in general, dating back at least to the writings of
(31:23):
Plutarch in the first and second century. See Now. I
should also point out that humans can experience blood in
the tears or blood from the tear ducks or hematuria
for various reasons. So for instance, when my son was younger,
he had tubes put in his tear ducks to correct
a minor problem, and immediately after surgery he shed a
(31:43):
single tear of blood, which was pretty awesome. At the time,
we knew everything was fine, you know, and it was
just kind of like, oh wow, that was a blood tear,
but only got the one.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Agreed, if you know, not to worry. That is pretty cool,
all right.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
Now. There a connection to the horned toad the horned
lizard in culture. This is one that was shared in
that book by Jane Manister Horned Lizards from two thousand
and two. She gets into to a number of different traditions,
at least mentioning like that there are a number of
ideas about them being tied up in weather prediction and
(32:22):
rain generation, which I guess is understandable of a creatures
that clearly is able to thrive in a very arid environment,
and we have these unique observations, you know, concerning the
way that they catch rain and so forth. But then
she also gets into this account that some of you
may have heard of before. I believe stuff you missed
(32:43):
in history class did a whole episode about this last
couple of years. There's the story of Old Rip. This
is a horned lizard originally named Blinky, that was placed
in an Eastland County, Texas time caps along with a bible,
some coins, and some newspapers. And then when the capsule
(33:05):
was dug out thirty one years later, the lizard was
allegedly still alive.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
I don't know about that.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, a lot of solid reasons to doubt this detail
of the story, but this is the main detail of
the story. So it's like everyone who's celebrating this, it's
like they're basically the idea being that they were saying
the cowboy lore is correct. This is a victory of
cowboy biology. They were right the cowboys when they said
(33:33):
that the horned toad could live for one hundred years
without food or water. Because clearly, this particular horned lizard
was locked away for thirty one years and we just
got him out and he's still alive. Everyone and take
a look at him. So this was very popular at
the time. Old Rip toured the country, even met President
Coolidge at the White House, and ultimately died in nineteen
(33:54):
twenty nine. Now, various folks later took credit for switching
out lizards at the capsule's opening. So this is that
I want to stress that this is almost certainly a hoax,
and there's a lot of reason to believe it was
a hoax. This was not carried out with any kind
of like scientific rigger, but it was a big deal
(34:15):
and it was covered in the New York Times, among
other major publications. In fact, I want to read to
you from the New York Times. This is from February twentieth,
nineteen twenty eight. Oh boy toad alive after thirty one
years sealed in Texas cornerstone, Eastland, Texas, February nineteenth ap
Hey hornage toad sealed alive in the cornerstone of the
(34:36):
courthouse here thirty one years ago, was alive when the
stone was removed yesterday. According to County Judge Edward S. Pritchard,
the old courthouse is being raised, and it goes into
some additional details, including this bit that I also have
to include. After the cornerstone was removed, the toad appeared
lifeless for some time, but in a little while it
(34:57):
opened its eyes in about twenty minutes a begin and
to breathe. The mouth however, appeared to have grown together.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
What grown together?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, yeah, so I was looking around. There's some other
takes on this as well.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
That oh, they're also saying they're going to open the
mouth by surgery and force it to eat food. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Yeah, that was also the New York Times story. So yeah,
this story, I should be clear, there were a number
of skeptics at the time that were like, that doesn't
sound right. Let me see this toad. I think there
was maybe there may be one or two support supporters
in the scientific community who are maybe like, well, it's possible.
(35:42):
I don't know, but generally people were very doubtful about this.
And then on the other hand, you had others pointing out, well,
clearly the animal survived in the time capsule because there
was a Bible in there. The Bible sustained the lizard.
I guess the Bible also made the lizard's mouth grow together.
I'm not sure. I've read other accounts that it had
(36:03):
a broken leg and worn down horns but was otherwise healthy. Yeah,
And then others claim that the eyes were sealed shut
as well. There seems to be a certain amount of
drift in the telling and retelling of this feat But
here's what we actually know to be true. So hornet
lizards can live around five years, but normal lifespan in
the wild is not fully known, according to the Oklahoma
(36:26):
Department of Wildlife Conservation, but I think we can probably
take that as like a ballpark. According to Texas Monthly
in a twenty fifteen article by Alex Dropkin, the Texas
horned lizard species hibernates, or rather birmates between October and April,
and this is likely where that cowboy lore originated, that
(36:47):
these creatures can live without food or water for one
hundred years. And this is the lore that the folks
in Eastland, Texas decided to put to the test. This
is why they put a hornet lizard inside of a
time capsule to test or I think, if we're being
rightfully skeptic here to prove that the cowboy lore was correct.
(37:09):
There is no evidence that hornet lizards in the wild
choose hibernation spots based on the presence of biblical texts
or coins or newspapers. But I guess we should note
that long lifespans for lizards are not completely unheard of.
The New Zealand tuatara can live twenty five to thirty
five years, typical age ages to sixty or apparently common,
(37:33):
and one captive specimen apparently lived to be over one hundred. Meanwhile,
some wizards can go without food or water for weeks
or months. I think it's safe to say that the
accounts of Old Rip places the story so far outside
of anything reported or at least, you know, authenticated to
any reasonable degree, that common sense leans us very strongly
(37:54):
in the direction of hoax here.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know, we talked not too long ago on the show,
we were doing so stuff about cave biology, and we
ended up talking about the cave dwelling amphibian, the olm,
which is notable for being one of the most sort
of sedentary creatures on Earth that it can live for
a long time. It's an aquatic salamander. It's found in
(38:18):
the dynamic alps in cave systems, where it lives in
the dark for much of the time. And it is
thought that sometimes these creatures can go for like ten
years without food, and that in itself is incredible, But
that seems to be sort of the upper bound of
where you can where you can push push the slow
(38:38):
motion metabolism too.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah. Yeah, And so again, if this story of Old
Rip were true, it would just it would triple that
ten year record. So yeah, I think we are very
right to be highly skeptical of this. And again various
folks came forward and claimed that they were involved with
the hoax and so forth, So there's a lot of
(39:02):
smoke there that suggests the fire. I should also point
this out. You know we were talking about in endangered
status of horned lizards. This particular incident was so popular
that it resulted in a horned toad boom, so the
specimens being harvested and then exported for novelty's sake, hurting
(39:26):
local populations in the process. But hey, Old Rip is
allegedly currently entombed in Eastland, Texas. I think he's on display.
So if we have any Eastland listeners or visitors to Eastland,
or folks who have been to Eastland and can report
on the body of Old Rip right in, we would
love to hear from you. I believe he has at
least historically been stolen at least once and returned.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Are you, County Judge Edward S. Pritchard, what criteria did
you use to judge that this was the real original lizard?
Speaker 1 (39:58):
All right? I have another interesting bit that I ran
across in these texts that I want to talk about
This is from Manister's book as well, and it is
the Horny toad Man, something that I know, on the
surface absolutely sounds like a cryptid or some American Western
horror story. And the fact that it's associated with the railway,
I think only compounds this possibility.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Yeah, it sounds like he belongs alongside Sasquatch and paramouth a. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
So, according to Manister, the figure emerges in response to
a unique problem on a segment of the Santa Fe
railroad connecting Albuquerque and El Paso, a segment of track
that was dubbed the Horny toad a segment where anything
bad that ever happened on the railroad could happen and
had happened, including a unique problem first reported apparently in
(40:47):
the Jiorada del Niorto desert basin, and that is trains
losing traction on the rails due to the grease and
moisture of hundreds of squashed hornet what so. Apparently it
was so bad that brakemen and firemen aboard the train
would have to scramble down onto the tracks and sweep
(41:08):
it all off to get all this gunk off the tracks,
And it led to the idea nay, the ideal of
the horny toad man. So a horny toad man is
not merely like somebody that goes down and sweeps off
the rails. In the scenario, this is a railway man
with eyes on corporate promotion, willing to do anything and
(41:28):
everything the company requires in order to advance, and that
certainly includes going out onto the tracks in the desert
heat and removing lizard guts from the rails.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
So this is a railroad company version of I'll get
the boss's coffee, you know, I will sweep the sweep
all of the horny toad grease off of the rails.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Right, And to put it in an alien context, since
we're talking about alien in the last episode, you might
consider Burke from Aliens a horny toad man of sorts,
you know, a complete scoundrel, but he proves that, if
nothing else, he is more than ready to get down
there on the tracks and get his hands dirty for
the company. He's a company man.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
All the way. That's right, all right.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Now, in trying to understand this, I guess we do
have to acknowledge that horned lizard populations would have been
greater back in this time period. As opposed to what
they are now, so we can't compare what we see
in the world today to what would have been happening then.
But I needed more clarity on why are there so
many horned lizards getting run over by trains? And I
(42:32):
found a possible answer here in a nineteen twenty two
paper by J. P. Givler. Givler writes, it is an
interesting fact that at such times horned lizards are very
abundant under the crossties of railroad tracks. Often they burrow
through into the area between the two rails. Here they
emerge and are literally trapped. The rails are usually too
(42:54):
high to be climbed over, and the lizards run up
and down frantically. Occasionally one climbs up on a rail
just in time to be crushed by a passing train.
Many live for the rest of the summer in this
uncomfortable pasture.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Bummer.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Now, it doesn't I mean, it doesn't completely answer my question,
but it at least puts a lot of horned lizards
in the vicinity of those train tracks. And you know,
he only mentions it as being like an occasional squashing,
But may I guess that's close enough to like a
mass squashing that we can consider this reality now. I
(43:28):
look for any discussions out there in the literature about
loss of traction due to animal railway mortalities, and I
looked at it at least one full source on animal
railway mortalities or one that deals with this in depth
titled railway ecology. And there's no mention in this of
tracks getting greased up by dead animals or dead lizards.
(43:51):
So if true, maybe this was indeed more of a
concern with an historic engine and an historic local population
of lizard. I'm not sure, but I will add the
following from another paper. I looked up Experimental evaluation of
effect of leaves on railroad tracks and loss of braking
by Kumar at All. This is in the Journal Machines
(44:13):
in twenty twenty four. Quote loss of traction results in
either breaking of the train or slip, which arises at
lower tractive coefficients. This case occurs when there are third
body layers that cause reduce traction, such as in the
case of leaves. Various traction enhancers are adopted by the
railway to improve adhesion when the rail is contaminated.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Okay, so you can certainly imagine that leaves falling on
railroad tracks could reduce the traction between the wheels and
the rails. So yeah, you can guess that if like
lizard especially not just like lizard body fluids, but whole
lizard bodies were on the rails, that might interfere in
(44:58):
some way.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
That's my ga. You know, if we're not dealing with
leaves here, we're dealing with lizard bodies and lizard guts
and lizard liquids. But I guess if there were enough
of them, and also dealing with the idea that these
are not modern trains, these are historic drain engines, I
can I guess it's conceivable that there would have been
some sort of issue here, thus necessitating the horny toad man.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
Horny toad man, we salute you.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
So yeah. I don't know if we have any anybody
out there who is, you know, verse more versed than
the history of locomotives and in the railway in America,
you know, right in we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
What's your company's version of the horny toad man.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Yeah, I guess there's there's probably a horny toad man
in any business, in any corporation. So those were some
of the cultural connections to the horned lizard or a
horned toad or horny toad that I was able to
come across. But I'd love to hear from anyone out
there if you have some additional insights to share, be
they related to something we discussed in this episode, or
(46:04):
something we missed altogether. Be it something from Native beliefs
and traditions that you want to share, or cowboy lore
or indeed cowboy poetry. I'm still at a loss that
there's not at least one cowboy poem out there on
the Internet that deals with these guys.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Surely there is. I'm gonna blame Google being bad now
for the inability to connect with that literature.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Yeah, all right, well we're going to gohead and close
out this episode. But yeah, right in, we'd love to
hear from you. Let's see a little housekeeping here. Hey,
if you're on Instagram, look us up. We're STBYM podcast.
That's our handle. You can follow us there and keep
up with some of what's coming out in the old
podcast feed. And in that old podcast feed, we've got
core science and culture episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
(46:50):
form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, her
JJ Posway, and special thanks to our excellent guest audio
producer Chandler may Is for sitting in with us today.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hi, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
(47:18):
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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