New Ice Age toad species discovered in La Brea Tar Pits collection

In the archives of the La Brea Tar Pits, a fossil collected in the 1950s has finally been recognized for what it always was: a species unknown to science. Researchers have named it Spea labreae, a spadefoot toad that navigated an Ice Age Los Angeles tens of thousands of years before the city existed. Its quiet emergence from decades of institutional obscurity is a reminder that discovery is not always a matter of digging deeper — sometimes it is a matter of looking more carefully at what we already hold.