Diplocaulus

My parents' used to have a little pond at the bottom of their garden but they filled it in with little boulders when they had grand children as they were told that it would kill anyone who dared toddle in a five foot radius of it by some aggressive telly show . It was OK for us when we were kids, but those were different times. My mum even put down a patio slab under the swing to stop the grass getting worn away rather than protect our childish skulls from cracking if we fell off when my siblings and I were kids. To her credit, she still stands by this attitude of tidiness before common sense and practicality which results in many a heated debate on household management between us.

Despite all the rocks in the pond the frogs still get in and leave their eggs in the pond year after year. For some reason, maybe another question of aesthetics I discovered a bucket of frogspawn in the garage which had been removed from the pond. Mum told me she was going to take them to the pond in the park - which seemed a bizarre notion. On one hand why would you not want pest eating frogs in the garden and secondly the pond in the park is a froggy version of an Hieronymus Bosch landscape. Bleak and littered with rubbish, it's not a place for a frog to spend it's formative years.

Well the spawn is safely back in the garden pond and I've even bought them some fronds of oxgenating weed so these chaps owe me big time. Hopefully, when they're older the'll form a biblical plague swarm for me to command and smite my enemies with. Let's hope they remember the fate I saved them from.

All this froggy fun is coinciding with my current obsession with diplocaulus. This boomerang headed creature was an ancient prehistoric amphibian and I feel a Prehistoric Erotic Terrors of the Deep show coming on.....