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We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,980,791-part monthly series, Wiki Wormhole.

This week’s entry: Ol’ Rip The Horned Toad

What it’s about: The most famous lizard in American history. In 1928, a time capsule was opened in Eastland, Texas, and inside was a still-living horned toad (technically a Texas horned lizard), who had survived a 31-year hibernation. The lizard was nicknamed Ol’ Rip, after Rip Van Winkle, and immediately became a national celebrity, appearing in movies, and meeting President Coolidge. (The President declined to touch the lizard, instead nudging it with his glasses. The two stared silently at each other for a full minute, prompting the newspaper report, “Silent Cal had met his match.”)

Biggest controversy: Horned toads were nearly casualties of Ol’ Rip’s popularity. The animals’ popularity soared once Rip caught the public imagination, and they were sold as souvenirs by the thousands, including at the 1928 Democratic National Convention. (Being upstaged by a lizard did not end up helping candidate Alfred E. Smith; he only won seven states against Herbert Hoover.) As a result, the horned toad population experienced a sharp decline, and the Texas Department Of Agriculture had to intervene to stop the animals from being taken from their habitat en masse.

Strangest fact: Ol’ Rip’s entombment and survival was all part of someone’s plan. There was a co*mon belief in West Texas that horned toads could survive for many years in hibernation. So when the time capsule was sealed in 1897, Eastland County Clerk Ernest E. Wood took a toad his four-year-old son Will had caught, and put it in the capsule alongside a Bible, a bottle of alcohol, and other memorabilia. The time capsule was then placed inside the cornerstone of the Eastland courthouse.

The experiment was well-known enough that, 31 years later, when the courthouse was slated for demolition, a crowd of 1,500 gathered to see the time capsule opened, and were largely concerned with the fate of the toad. The animal was held up for the crowd, which went wild when the lizard’s leg twitched. Ol’ Rip’s survival was a national news story, including a front-page article in The New York Times. (The Times reported an even stranger fact: During Rip’s long hibernation, his mouth had “grown together,” and that “if necessary, the mouth will be opened by an operation.” (It’s not clear whether this happened or not.)

Thing we were happiest to learn: At least one Looney Tunes short was ripped from the headlines. Writer Michael Maltese reworked Ol’ Rip’s story into One Froggy Evening, in which a construction worker finds a time capsule in a demolished building, with a live, top-hat-wearing frog inside. The gag is that, when no one’s around, the frog loudly belts out Tin Pan Alley songs (most memorably, “Hello! Ma Baby!“), but any time the unlucky sap tries to show someone else his miraculous frog, it’s dead silent apart from a half-hearted ribbit. Despite only appearing in that one short, the cartoon frog—eventually named Michigan—was such an iconic character he was used as the icon for the short-lived WB television network (at its launch, Warner made a second short, Another Froggy Evening, in which it’s revealed the frog has been unearthed and reburied over and over throughout history).

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: The rest of Ol’ Rip’s life was short and marred by scandal. After the initial media flurry, Will Wood, who initially found the lizard, took Rip to Dallas to be exhibited to the public. Eastland was none too happy to lose their claim to fame, so Wood returned home with the frog, only to have the Dallas exhibition sue for breach of contract. Wood then took Rip on a national tour (including the visit with Coolidge), which kicked off the craze that impacted the horned toad population. Upon his return from the tour, Ol’ Rip contracted pneumonia and died, which we were surprised to learn is a thing that can happen to lizards.

Ol’ Rip’s body was displayed, like Lenin’s, in a tiny satin-lined casket in the Eastland courthouse. Until, in 1961, the body was stolen, with the thieves demanding a $10,000 ransom. Rip was recovered after a citywide search. But a year later, gubernatorial candidate John Connally visited Eastland, and picked up Rip’s body by the leg for a photo—the leg promptly fell off. Rip’s body was stolen again in 1972, and when the City of Eastland announced they had recovered Rip, people quickly noticed he had all four legs again—they had clumsily replaced him with a fake. The original Rip was never found, although the fake remained on display until at least 1976. 

Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: We wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to read up and reminisce about old Looney Tunes shorts, but the most Wiki Wormhole-appropriate link is living entombed animals. Our old friends at the Fortean Times claim there are 210 documented cases of animals being entombed and surviving for long periods, although Wikipedia says that, despite Ol’ Rip’s story, “the phenomenon has been dismissed by science.”

Further down the Wormhole: Ol’ Rip’s namesake, Rip Van Winkle, was a character in a Washington Irving short story, who falls asleep for 20 years and awakens to find a changed world. Irving’s other most famous story was “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but he wrote countless books and stories, including a five-volume biography of George Washington. He was part of the Romanticism movement, which favored heroes embarking on adventure, often at sea, which led Romantic writers to embrace the unfortunate trope of the noble savage. This stock character was simplistic and “uncivilized,” but possessed of an innate goodness, as they hadn’t been poisoned by evil, corrupt society. 

This trope is upended by William Golding’s English class mainstay Lord Of The Flies, in which the absence of society turns a group of shipwrecked boys wild and murderous. But that book’s premise was in turn undermined by the Tongan castaways, real-life shipwrecked boys who turned wild but not murderous, and whose story we’ll talk about next month. In your face, high school English teachers.