The BBC news item, Puzzle over three-headed frog (originally titled “‘Warning’ over three-headed frog”) spawned this story that swept the news media and the weblog circuit over the week following March 5th 2004. Briefly: staff and pre-school children at the Green Umbrella day nursery, Weston-super-Mare, UK, found the above. After they’d taken photos and a video, it escaped. The BBC took up the story, citing one of their own wildife experts, biologist and presenter Mike Dilger, as “stunned” and saying “it could be an early warning of environmental problems” (they published the same factoid in their CBBC Newsround children’s section). From there, the tale snowballed to newspapers worldwide. Here’s a slideshow of images at local6.com, and there are videos at CBS News (scroll down to “Freak Frog”) and ITV West. But is it really a three-headed frog, or a hoax as some have suggested?
—Three-headed Frog… not! (Apothecary’s Drawer)
I didn’t blog the “freaky three-headed frog” story when I found it, becuase the lack of expert opinion troubled me. Obviously, it didn’t trouble me enough to blog about it (though I was busy getting ready for a conference that weekend… but I digress).
This “Apothecary’s Drawer” looks like a great site, with posts debunking the Nanniebot and face on Mars stories.
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Slightly OT, but I can hardly believe that Hoagland guy is still at it (Mars face). The uni where I did my undergrad has a NASA imaging lab, and he and/or one of his cronies would regularly come in and rant about the face on Mars, and how it was a huge coverup, ad nausaeum.
Wild.
The version of the article I read claimed that the frog escaped after they took the pictures. Yeah, right! It would take that thing hours to get anywhere! Escaped..hmm...awfully convenient, I would say.