by Wesley Harris
The first horned toad I ever saw was on the playground at Ruston Elementary School in the late 1960s. The strange little creature was flat, spiky, and looked like a miniature dinosaur.
Back then, spotting one in north Louisiana wasn’t unusual. Maybe rare, but not unusual. Every now and then a horned toad would appear our playground. Kids would gather around, gently picking it up to admire its prehistoric look and watching it puff up when startled. We called them “horny toads” since their spikes looked like the horns on our plastic dinosaurs.
Most of the horned toads I ever saw in the wild were on that playground. Today, the animal that fascinated generations of Louisiana children has effectively disappeared from the state.
The Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), the species native to Louisiana, has been in steep decline for decades. Habitat loss, pesticide use, and the collapse of harvester ant populations—its main food source—have erased it from Louisiana’s landscape, according to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries. It went from common backyard creature to something most Louisiana kids today will never see in the wild. It’s even becoming scarce in Texas, its home territory.
The LDWF considers the horned toad is “extirpated” from Louisiana.
Extirpated means a species has disappeared from a specific region (local extinction), but still exists elsewhere, while extinct means the species has completely disappeared from the entire planet.
“The last known record is from 1965 near Quitman in Jackson Parish,” state herpetologist Keri Lejeune with LDWF told me. “There are a couple of confirmed records from the 1920s in Caddo Parish.”
“It is unknown whether any of these records are from wild populations or extirpated introductions,” Lejeune said. “It is speculated that some or all of these records may be from released pets.”
I don’t know if the horned toads we saw at Ruston Elementary were former pets or from wild populations, but we saw them about 1967-69, a few years after LDWF records say they disappeared from the state.
Lejeune noted George Beyer’s 1900 publication Louisiana Herpetology reported the horned toad was common in north central Louisiana.
Of the lizard, Beyer’s pamphlet is brief: “Horned Lizard; Horned Toad. This lizard occurs only in the northwestern section of the state, It is reported from the vicinity of Monroe as fairly common.”
The citizen-scientist site Herpmapper.com logs reptile sightings across North America. None of the horned toad listings in its database have been in Louisiana and few in Texas. Most of the documented sightings come from New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.
While the lizard’s disappearance in Louisiana is stark, a coalition of nonprofits, government agencies, and zoos is working to prevent outright extinction and—eventually—restore populations.
Texas has become the front line in the horned lizard’s comeback story. Conservation programs there have reported successful reproduction in the wild among released lizards, a milestone many thought might never happen again. Although Louisiana is not yet ready for large-scale reintroductions, experts say lessons learned in Texas will be invaluable when the time comes.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, in partnership with the Fort Worth Zoo and other facilities, has been breeding horned lizards in captivity and releasing them into protected habitats. “We’re seeing the first signs of stabilization and even growth in certain release sites,” a wildlife biologist involved in the program said.
Nonprofits such as the Horned Lizard Conservation Society are tackling the problem at its roots, restoring habitat and working with landowners to reduce pesticide use that kills the ants the lizards depend on.
Biologists are focusing on identifying and safeguarding potential reintroduction sites. It’s not enough to breed them. They must have the right kind of sandy soil, open sunlight, and a healthy ant population to thrive.
The horned lizard is more than just a conservation case—it’s a cultural icon, particularly in Eastland, Texas. Known locally as the “horned toad,” it has been the town’s unofficial mascot for more than a century. The most famous of them all, “Old Rip,” was a horned lizard purportedly found alive after being sealed in a courthouse cornerstone for 31 years—a legend that still draws curious visitors to Eastland.
Biologists caution that restoring the horned lizard to Louisiana will be a slow, careful process. But the small victories in Texas have given conservationists new optimism.
If we can rebuild the right habitat and keep working across state lines, there’s no reason Louisiana kids can’t grow up seeing horned lizards again.
For now, the horned toad remains a symbol of resilience—a spiky little survivor whose comeback is being written one sandy acre at a time.
