A tiny toad that hopped through Ice Age Los Angeles has been hiding in plain sight at the La Brea Tar Pits for nearly 70 years. Scientists have now identified it as a brand new extinct species, a find so rare that only one other extinct Pleistocene amphibian has ever been found in North America. The discovery is reshaping what researchers thought they knew about the region's ancient climate and the creatures that lived through it.
A 1950s fossil finally gets a name
The new species, named Spea labreae, is an Ice Age spadefoot toad. Its bones were pulled from the tar pits back in the 1950s and sat in museum collections for decades. It was only when Dr. Alberto Cruz, a researcher at Mexico's SECIHTI Centro de Investigación Paleontológica Quinametzin and a Research Associate at La Brea Tar Pits, started studying the site's reptile and amphibian collections that something caught his eye.
Cruz noticed features on the bones that did not match any known spadefoot toad. At first, he wondered if the odd shapes came from an animal that had been sick or injured. But after comparing the fossils with modern spadefoot toads, he realized the differences were too consistent. They pointed to a species that had never been described before. The study appears in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
What a small toad says about a big climate shift
Spea labreae was tiny, especially next to the mammoths and saber toothed cats that usually steal the spotlight at La Brea. But its small bones carry big clues. The toad lived near the end of the last ice age, a time when Los Angeles was going through dramatic environmental changes. By studying how this amphibian differed from the spadefoot toads that live in the area today, researchers can piece together how the local climate shifted and what that meant for the species that called it home.
The discovery also highlights the value of old museum collections. The fossils had been sitting in storage for decades, overlooked by generations of scientists. Cruz said that when you study old specimens again, you can find gold in them. His work is part of a broader effort at the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research at La Brea Tar Pits, which is undergoing a major transformation as the museum expands its research programs.
This find is a reminder that even well studied fossil sites can still surprise us. The toad may be small, but it is helping scientists understand a pivotal moment in Earth's history, when the Ice Age was ending and the world as we know it was taking shape.
