"It was one of the strokes of luck from whitch science is made", said Time magazine.

 

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) In March last year, British researcer Rachel Grant heppened to be monitoring the behaviour of toads in a dry lake in central Italy.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) One morning, there were far fewer of them; the next morning, there were fewer still - and soon they had vanished entirely.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) "It was so dramatic," she says.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) "I was trying to think of reason why they might have gone."

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) Five days later, an answer presented itself when the region was hit by the worst earthquake the country had known in almost 30 years.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) The medieval town of Aquila, 45 miles away, was reduced to rubble, and more than 300 inhabitants were killed.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) No one areforeseen the cataclysmic event- except, Grant believes, the toads.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) But what did they pick up that the seismologists missed? Grant, whose report is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Zoology, speculates that the creatures sensed changes in the Earth's magnetic field, specifically in the ionosphere, as a reasult of the release of charged particles that is thought to precede a major tremor.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) Of course it could just havebeen a coincidence that the toads left when the did, but such behavior is not unprecedented.

(earthquakes, science news, science magazine) According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, rats, centipedes and snakes escaped from the city of Helice a few days before an earthquake knoked in into the Gulf of Corinth in 373BC .

 

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