The La Brea Tar Pits Have Been Hiding a Toad Since the 1950s

Mammoths. Saber-toothed cats. Dire wolves. And, apparently, one extinct toad nobody noticed for 70 years.

Spea labreae is a newly described species of extinct spadefoot toad from Ice Age Los Angeles. It's only the second extinct Pleistocene amphibian ever found in North America. The first was a tree frog from Florida. That's it. Two. The entire continent, across millions of years of fossil record, and amphibians have almost nothing to show for it. Spea labreae is now the entire West Coast entry on that list.

Lead author Alberto Cruz wasn't even looking for a new species. He's a paleoecologist, not a taxonomist, and when he first noticed the bones looked off, his working hypothesis was that the animal had been sick or injured during its life. He spent months comparing the bones against modern spadefoot toads before he was convinced he was looking at something new to science.

S. labreae was about 7% larger than living spadefoot species. The assemblage also includes the first southwestern U.S. record of Rhinophrynus, the Mexican burrowing toad, and together these finds point to major regional environmental and species-range shifts since the last ice age ended. The toad is a climate record as much as it's a new animal.

The mammoths get the gift shop. The toad gets the science.

Read the full story at La Brea Tar Pits, August 5, 2026

Hot Take: Seventy years in a museum drawer is what happens when your fossil neighbors include mammoths and saber-toothed cats. Natural history has a casting problem.