the.com/horned toad

means A spiky, flat-bodied desert lizard (genus Phrynosoma) that looks like a horned toad but is actually a true reptile, famous for its defensive trick of squirting blood from its eye sockets.

from The name is a straightforward case of mistaken identity rather than deep etymology: early settlers and naturalists in North America saw a squat, wide-bodied, short-legged creature with a toad-like face and simply called it what it looked like — a 'horned toad,' pairing the plain English words for its spiky crown and its froggy silhouette. It's folk classification, not folk etymology in the trickster sense — the lizard really isn't a toad at all, just built like one by convergent evolution, so the common name stuck even after scientists sorted the family tree and filed it correctly under lizards (Phrynosoma, Greek for 'toad-body,' which scientists chose for the very same reason).