Elemental creatures of darkness, toads have always been linked to the supernatural. Stone-like themselves, they were thought capable of surviving within solid rock. Even today, every encyclopedia of the “unexplained” offers sober accounts of entombed toads. Yet despite all the stories, there’s just one tangible example. It’s a mummified toad nestled within a hollow flint-and the most famous speciment in Brighton’s Booth Museum. Its sterling credentials are tarnished by just one thing: the man who presented it to science was Charles Dawson, the discoverer of Piltdown man.
BY VICTORIAN times, entombed toads had become a simmering controversy that refused to go away, rather like psychic phenomena or UFOs today. Predictably, the media leapt on each new example: the living toad discovered 2 metres down in bedrock beneath a cellar in Stamford, or the one found embedded in a block of limestone, 8 metres below ground, during the excavation of Hartlepool waterworks. Even Scientific American ran a story about a silver miner called Moses Gaines who came across a tiny but plump toad lodged in a boulder.
It was all too much for the scientific establishment. When a live frog, allegedly released from a lump of coal mined in Monmouthshire, was shown at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, the letters pages of The Times were filled with furious demands for its removal.
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So on 18 April 1901, when the Linnean Society met in London, its august fellows must have been intrigued to see the exhibit brought by one Charles Dawson. A solicitor from Sussex and a fellow of the Geological Society, Dawson was a charming man with wide-ranging interests in geology, natural history and antiquities. In his bag he carried a curious find – “a hollow flint nodule which had been picked up on the downs at Lewes, and which on fracture was found to contain the desiccated body of a Toad”.
A small hole visible at one end must have provided the way in for a very young toad, the fellows agreed. Helpfully, Dawson had unblocked the hole, removing the chalk that must have subsequently filled it. Once inside the rock, he suggested, the toad lazily remained, content to dine on such insects that found their way in, until, too big to escape, it died entombed.
So it was curiosity, laced with sloth, that ensured the toad’s fate – a salutary lesson from nature. Even better, Dawson’s specimen offered a rational explanation for all those troublesome tales of toads living for millennia buried in stone. Now, at last, the truth was clear: the flint was ancient – the hollowed remains of a Cretaceous sponge – but the toad was a recent arrival. Thanks to Dawson, the mystery was solved.
A little over a week later, the toad made its second public appearance before the Brighton and Sussex Natural History Society. If anyone doubted the stories about toads being found alive in rocks, here was the explanation, he proclaimed. “Toads when small will often creep into holes in rocks and hollows in trees, and in these situations they may find sufficient food; being slothful in their habits, and capable of existing upon but little food or of abstaining from it for a long time, they are apt to remain in their snug quarters and content themselves with what insects &tc may come to them.” Besides, he reckoned, flies might have been quite plentiful – perhaps lured inside by the “fetid and acrid exudations” from the toad’s skin, or the soft scratching of its claws.
To safeguard the specimen’s future, Dawson gave it to his friend Henry Willett, a wealthy Brighton collector, who included it in his generous gifts to the new Brighton Museum. In a small way, Dawson had made his mark in the annals of science.
And so the matter might have rested, had not Dawson gone on to “find” the Piltdown skull. Fifty years ago, this fossil was exposed as a deliberate fraud – with bits of a medieval human cranium married to fragments of an orang-utan’s jaw. By that time, however, Dawson was long dead, and the fraudster’s trail had gone cold.
Could it be that the toad-in-the-hole was a dry run for the Piltdown fraud? Not everyone agrees that Dawson was the culprit. In a frenzy of speculation, nearly every scholar in the vicinity has been accused at some time. The smart money, though, is still on Dawson. Now it looks as though he used the toad-in-the-hole to perfect a style of disclosure that would convince, for a time, the world’s leading palaeontologists.
Consider the curious parallels between the two finds. In both instances, Dawson said the objects had been discovered several years earlier. The flint tomb, he told the Brighton naturalists, had turned up “about two summers ago”. He gave the skull an even longer trajectory, dating finds to 1908 and 1911; then he waited until February 1912 to write to Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum (Natural History) – now London’s Natural History Museum.
Both times, too, the reputed finders were local workmen, who Dawson named, confident that in the class-ridden society of his day no one would ever bother to interview them.
In both cases, Dawson provides exquisite detail. Workmen digging gravel for road repairs found the pieces of skull at Barkham Manor near Piltdown, while the toad-in-the-hole had come from a quarry at the foot of the downs, north-east of Lewes. Its peculiar lemon shape and its comparative lightness had attracted the attention of the men, Dawson claimed. Curious, one labourer, Mr Thomas Nye, broke it open, and found the “mummied” toad.
In retrospect, the whole thing seems suspicious. The downs are littered with hollow flints, formed around Cretaceous sponges, so Dawson’s specimen would hardly be a novelty for the road menders. Equally implausibly, in the Piltdown story he tells us the workmen thought they’d found a coconut, and so decided to smash it. This yarn explained the fragmentary remains, which made disguising the true nature of the fake far easier.
With both hoaxes, his next move was to associate the specimen with someone in authority who was already a friend. For the flint, he brought in the respected businessman Henry Willett, known for his collection of Cretaceous fossils from the chalk quarries of Lewes. For his later scam, Dawson aimed higher: to validate the skull forgery, he recruited a distinguished colleague he knew from the Geological Society, Woodward of the British Museum. In 1913, Dawson was first author on their joint paper, “On the Discovery of a Palaeolithic Human Skull”, published in the society’s journal. Now at last, Dawson must have imagined, a fellowship of the Royal Society could not be far away.
Alas for Dawson, that ultimate accolade never came. He died suddenly of septicaemia in 1916, aged 52. But he lived long enough to see his skull the talk of the town, and his toad one of the most popular exhibits in Brighton.
The toad’s caretaker today, geology curator John Cooper of the Booth Museum, is amused by the toad’s enduring popularity. At first, he took it at face value, but was troubled by the fact that the amphibian looked considerably bigger in the original 1901 photograph than it does now. For it to have continued to shrink over the ensuing century, it must have only just begun to dry out in 1901. It all fits, Cooper argues. If you had this great idea – you’d seen just the right flint, and were going to concoct a hoax – you wouldn’t spend 10 years drying a toad. You’d get on with it.
And just how plausible is Dawson’s story anyway, Cooper began to wonder? Toads don’t hang about on the dry chalk, and if the cobble had at some stage been transported to a wet stream bed, why didn’t the entombed toad just rot once it died? Every fossil owes its existence to a series of improbable events, but even so, this toad was pushing it.
So how did Dawson mummify the toad? Did he inject it with alcohol, or dry it in an oven? Perhaps he pickled it. It would be interesting to test it for salt, suggests Cooper, and fitting too, for it was chemical analysis that ultimately revealed the Piltdown skull’s true history. Whatever happens, the toad-in-the-hole postcards in the Booth museum shop are likely to remain bestsellers.