Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse

On July 29, 1897, a four-year-old named Will Wood caught a horned toad, and his father, the Eastland County clerk Ernest E. Wood, decided to test the West Texas belief that the creatures could live for years in hibernation. The lizard went into the cornerstone of the new courthouse along with a Bible and other mementos.

Thirty-one years later the town tore that building down to put up a new Art Deco courthouse, and a young Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, Boyce House, spent the weeks before the cornerstone was opened building up the mystery. On Saturday, February 18, 1928, about 1,500 people pressed around the old foundation. A worker broke the cement, an oilman reached in and lifted out a flat, dusty toad, and when the county judge held it up by one leg, the other leg twitched. The New York Times put the story on its front page. The lizard was named Old Rip, after Rip Van Winkle, toured the country, and was shown to President Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

Old Rip died on January 19, 1929. He lies in a small glass-topped casket in the courthouse. Scientists argued from the start over whether the survival could have happened; the Bronx Zoo's reptile curator called it utterly impossible. The fad had a cost: horned lizards were caught and sold by the thousands as souvenirs, and the Texas horned lizard declined sharply in the region.