OKLAHOMA CITY (TNS) — The legend goes something like this: In 1897, the good people of Eastland, Texas, put a time capsule in the cornerstone of the courthouse being built downtown. In went a Bible, some newspapers, a bottle of whiskey.
And a Texas horned lizard.
The town grew and grew, and by 1928, it needed a bigger courthouse. The old one was torn down, and a couple of thousand people watched as the marble cornerstone was pried open. To everyone’s astonishment, the dusty critter buried 31 years earlier was still alive.
They called him Ol’ Rip, after Rip Van Winkle. To this day, his taxidermied body lies in state in a wood-and-velvet casket at the courthouse in Eastland, where there’s an annual Rips Ribs Cookoff and RipFest parade.
“He’s a pretty big deal,” said Eastland County Judge Rex Fields.
It’s hard to overstate the affection people in these parts of Oklahoma and Texas have for the Texas horned lizard, a prehistoric-looking creature with horns on its head and the ability to shoot blood from its eyes. Also called horny toads and horned frogs because of their squat, flat bodies, they are, in fact, lizards.
“They were everywhere when I was a kid,” said Fields, 63. “We’d pick them up and play with them.” Fields, as the keeper of the Legend of Ol’ Rip, tells schoolchildren the tale of the indestructible reptile. But these days many of those youngsters have never seen one before.
Which raises a question scientists are now trying to answer: What happened to the horny toads?
The Texas horned lizard — one of at least 17 known species of horned lizard — have virtually disappeared east of Interstate 35, which runs down the middle of Oklahoma and Texas, said Dean Williams, a Texas Christian University biology professor who runs the TCU Horny Toad Project.
Classified as a threatened species in Texas and a species of greatest conservation need in Oklahoma, they have been dying off for at least 60 years. But pointing to the start and extent of their decline isn’t easy.
“The problem, of course, is they used to be so common, probably one of the most common lizards in Texas,” Williams said. “People for the most part just ignored them. … Nobody started monitoring them. When they just started disappearing, people were like, ‘Whoa! What’s happening?’”
Scientists point to two major invaders: humans and fire ants.
In Texas and Oklahoma, the combined human population grew fivefold over the last century, to 33 million today from 6.7 million in 1920.
As cities expanded and highways stretched across the prairies, the lizards — which are not very mobile and prefer open habitats with sparse vegetation and loose soil — became isolated in smaller and smaller pockets.
Native grass was replaced on a massive scale with row crops and pastures of non-native groundcover like Bermuda grass, which is great for hay production and cattle grazing but too dense for horned lizards to hunt for food.
And then came the red fire ants. The invasive South American insects were accidentally imported via cargo ship into Alabama in the 1930s and steadily marched across the South, reaching Texas by the 1950s. They drove out the native, less aggressive harvester ants, which make up the bulk of horned lizards’ diet.
The fire ants also attack horned lizards’ buried nests and eat their young, Williams said.
