Frog eating Snake or Snake-eating Frog

Howard and Clarice Benstead and two of their grandsons visited the Inquiry Centre to ask about a specimen of a frog found swallowing a snake.

It had been donated to the to the Museum many years ago by the boys’ great, great, grandparents, Mr and Mrs Charles Paterson. The family had learnt of the story through a letter that was discovered while sorting documents following the death of the boy’s great grandmother Mrs Edna Paterson.

With that slender amount of information, Jeanette Covacevich, Curator of Reptiles was contacted. She immediately knew where they were and invited the family to come and see them.

It was the second time that members of the family had come with that request. The other was about 25 years ago when an elderly woman, presumably Mrs Edna Paterson, visited the Museum with a story that her father had donated a frog swallowing a snake. At that time, a young Jeanette was unaware of its existence. She went to where it should have been stored in the research collection and there it was!

The frog and snake were collected by Mrs C. Paterson at Currumbin on the Gold Coast in April 1932. The specimens are in preservative and are in excellent condition except that they have lost their colour. The large Green Treefrog, Litoria caerulea, has a Keelback Snake, Tropidnophis mairii half way down its throat. Neither the family’s oral history nor the Museum records indicate if the frog was dead or alive when found.

Almost 70 years on and four generations later, the two boys Jonathon and Craig Dieckmann saw their family’s donation. The story is one example of how well the Museum cares for its collections and how efficient museum data retrieval and storage systems are.