Julian Huxley, a famous biologist, was sent a letter from Devonshire, England. A gas fitter while breaking up a concrete floor found something he thought was unbelievable. He said his coworker was using a sledge to break up the floor when suddenly he saw a tiny frog leg sticking out from the floor. They both bent down to get a closer look, and they saw a frog. They cut the concrete very carefully and released 23 frogs who after a couple of minutes hopped away.

In Forth Worth, Texan in 1975 workers were breaking up concrete they had laid more than a year before. A turtle crawled out. When they examined the concrete that was a hole shaped like the turtle. The turtle must have been caught when the concrete was poured and it survived without food, air or water for over one year.

A toad estimated to be over 6000 years old was freed from it’s stony prison in 1865, by excavators in Durham, England. The live toad was found in a block of magnesium limestone 25 feet underground. Its eyes were reported to be especially bright, its hind claws were particularly long and the claws of its forefeet were turned in. It grew darker in color, from a pale color matching the stone it was found in to a darker olive brown. It appeared to have difficulty breathing as it made a barking sound from its nostrils.

Is there an explanation for this seemingly long hibernation without air, food or water? It looks like there isn't yet. Doesn't a body need nourishment and liquid to survive, that is what we all have been taught? There are many theories bouncing around explaining how this could happen, but they are just theories and nothing more. One such theory states that nutrients and air filter through the stone into the animal, but this doesn't begin to explain the extreme longevity of the animal. What is really strange is that many of these animals are found hundreds of feet deep and the stone they are in is thousands of years old or older.

There doesn't seem to be any limitation to the type of rock animals are found in either. A Mr. W.J. Clarke in Rugby, England had a toad jump out of a lump of coal he had put in the fire. The toad didn't have a mouth and was transparent but lived over 5 weeks. There was a company in London called the Stereoscopic Company which was selling pictures of the animal.

In 1865 Scientific American talked about a miner named Moses Gaines and how he found a toad inside a large boulder. The toad was strange in that its eyes were much larger than toads of its day. Later Scientific American stated: "Many well authenticated stories of the finding of live toads and frogs in solid rock are on record."

Not all encased animals are encased in stone. The Uitrenhage Times of South Africa in 1876 printed a story about lumberjacks cutting a tree. Encased inside the tree were many small toads. They were in a small hole inside the tree. When the tree was cut they hopped away.

In 1853, a live horned lizard was freed from a block of solid stone. It was sent to the Smithsonian Institution. The lizard only lived two days after being freed. Source: http://www.qsl.net/w5www/livingfossils.html

I don't know what is going on here, but it certainly is worth study. If these amphibians are capable of stopping their bodily functions for years or even thousands of years at a time, might this not be useful to NASA or medical science in general? Think of a trip through space and suddenly tragedy strikes, and the ships atmosphere is lost and the ship is still about a year out from earth with nowhere it can stop. If people had the ability to survive by stopping their breathing and yet remaining alive in some sort of hibernation this could be quite a trick. Two of the early Russian Cosmonauts died where their returning ship lost its atmosphere.