Thanks to Sy and Finn for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creeping Crinoids! Sea Lilies Crawl to Escape Predators, New Video Shows New and Unusual Crinoid Discovered Sea otters maintain remnants of healthy kelp forest amid sea urchin barrens Sea urchins see with their feet A sea lily [photo from this page]: A feather star [still from a video posted on this page]: Purple urchins [photo by James Maughn]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week as we bring invertebrate August to a close, we’re going to cover some animals suggested by Finn and Sy. We’ll start with Sy’s suggestion, crinoids, also called feather stars or sea lilies depending on what body plan a particular species has. We talked about them in episode 79 but it’s definitely time to revisit them. Crinoids are echinoderms, a really old phylum of animals. Fossils of ancient echinoderms date back to the Cambrian half a billion years ago and they’re still incredibly common throughout the world’s oceans. Ancient crinoids had five arms the way many starfish do, which makes sense because crinoids are related to starfish. At some point each arm developed into two, so many crinoids have ten arms or even more, and many have arms that branch. The arms are used for feeding and have feathery appendages lined with sticky mucus that traps tiny bits of food floating in the water. There are two big divisions of crinoids today, the feather stars and the sea lilies. Feather stars are more common and can swim around as adults if they want to, although most stick to crawling along the sea floor. They swim by waving their feathery arms. Sea lilies look like flowers as adults, with a slender stem-like structure with the small body and long feathery arms at the top. I specify that sea lilies have stems as adults because a lot of feather stars also have stems as juveniles, but when they reach maturity they become free-swimming. Even though the sea lily looks like a plant, and some species even have root-like filaments that help it anchor itself to the sea floor or to rocks, it’s still an animal. For one thing, it can uproot itself and move to a better location if it wants to, crawling with its arms and pulling its stem behind it, which is not something a plant can do except in cartoons. If a predator attacks it, the sea lily will even shed its stem completely so it can crawl away much faster. Since echinoderms in general are really good at regenerating parts of the body, losing its stem isn’t a big deal. The biggest sea lilies today are deep-sea species, but even they only grow a stem up to about three feet long at most, or about a meter. This wasn’t the case in the ancient past, though. The longest crinoid stem fossil ever discovered was 130 feet long, or 40 meters. Crinoids filter food particles from the water that flows through the feathery arms. Even though they look like feathers or petals, a crinoid’s arms are actually arms. They have tiny tube feet on them that act sort of like fingers to help the crinoid hold onto pieces of food, and to do a better job of holding the food, the tube feet are covered with a sticky mucus. The mouth is in the middle of the arms on the top of the body. Crinoids absorb oxygen directly from the water. Its body contains a system of chambers and pores that are full of water, and by contracting special muscles, the crinoid moves water around in its body to transport nutrients and oxygen and to collect waste material. Crinoids are closely related to starfish, sea cucumbers, sand dollars, and sea urchins, which brings us to Finn’s suggestion. Finn suggested urchins, which are also echinoderms. In fact, at the end of episode 79 I mentioned that one day I’d do an episode about urchins, and it only took me six years to get here! Many urchins look like living pincushions because they’re covered in spines. That’s where the name urchin comes from,

Thanks to Anbo and Siya for suggesting the mantis shrimp this week! The Kickstarter for some animal-themed enamel pins is still going on! Further reading: Rolling with the punches: How mantis shrimp defend against high-speed strikes The magnificent peacock mantis shrimp [picture by Cédric Péneau, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117431670]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As invertebrate August continues, this week we have a topic suggested by Anbo and Siya. They both wanted to learn about the mantis shrimp! The mantis shrimp, which is properly called a stomatopod, is a crustacean that looks sort of like a lobster without the bulky front end, or a really big crayfish. Despite its name, it’s not a shrimp although it is related to shrimps, but it’s more closely related to lobsters and crabs. It can grow as much as 18 inches long, or 46 cm, but most are about half that size. Most are brown but there are hundreds of different species and some are various brighter colors like pink, blue, orange, red, or bright green, or a rainbow of colors and patterns. There are two things almost everyone knows about the mantis shrimp. One, it can punch so hard with its claws that it breaks aquarium glass, and two, it has 12 to 16 types of photoreceptor cells compared to 3 that humans have, and therefore it must be able to see colors humans can’t possibly imagine. One of those things is right, but one is wrong, or at least partially wrong. We’ll discuss both in a minute, but first let’s learn the basics about these fascinating animals. The mantis shrimp lives in shallow water and spends most of its time in a burrow that it digs either in the sea floor or in crevices in rocks or coral, which it enlarges if necessary. Some species will dig elaborate tunnel systems while others just wedge themselves into any old crack that will hide them. It molts its exoskeleton periodically as it grows, like other crustaceans, and after that it either has to expand its burrow or move to a larger one. Most species live in tropical or subtropical areas, but some prefer more temperate waters. It has eight pairs of legs, which includes three pairs of walking legs, four pairs with claws that help it grasp items, and its front pair, which are hinged and look a little like the front legs of a praying mantis. That’s where the “mantis” in mantis shrimp comes from, although of course it has lots of other names worldwide. In some places it’s called the thumb splitter. The mantis shrimp has two eyes on stalks that move independently. Its brain extends into the eye stalks, and the section of the brain in the eye stalks, called the reniform body, is what processes vision. This allows it to process a lot of visual information very quickly. Reniform bodies have also been identified in the brains of some other crustaceans, including shrimp, crayfish, and some crabs. Scientists also think that the eyes themselves do a lot of visual processing before that information gets to the reniform body or the brain at all. In other words, part of the reason the mantis shrimp’s eyes are so complicated and so unusual compared to other animals’ eyes is because each eye is sort of a tiny additional brain that mainly processes color. The typical human eye can only sense three wavelengths of light, which correspond to red, green, and blue. The mantis shrimp has twelve different photoreceptors instead of three, meaning it can sense twelve wavelengths of light, and some species have even more photoreceptors. But while our brains are really good at synthesizing the three wavelengths of light we can see, combining them so that we see incredibly fine gradations of color in between red, green, and blue, the mantis shrimp doesn’t process color the same way we do. So while its eyes can sense colors we can’t, its brain doesn’t seem to do anything with the color information.

Thanks to Cosmo and Zachary for suggesting this week's monitor lizards! Further reading: No One Imagined Giant Lizard Nests Would Be This Weird The Mighty Modifications of the Yellow-Spotted Goanna The Asian water monitor: A yellow-spotted goanna standing up [picture by Geowombats - https://www.flickr.com/photos/geowombats/136601260/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2595566]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Last week we had our big dragons episode where we learned about the Komodo dragon and some of its relations, including goannas. I forgot to thank Cosmo for suggesting the lace monitor, also called the tree goanna, in that episode, and I also forgot that Zachary had also suggested monitor lizards as a topic, so let’s learn about two more monitor lizards this week. Cosmo is particularly interested in aquatic and semi-aquatic animals, and a lot of monitor lizards are semi-aquatic. Let’s learn about the Asian water monitor first, since it’s the second-largest lizard alive today, only smaller than the Komodo dragon. The Asian water monitor is common in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, including India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, southern China, and many islands. A half dozen subspecies are currently recognized, although there may be more. The largest water monitor ever reliably measured was 10 1/2 feet long, or 3.2 meters. It’s dark brown or black with yellow speckles and streaks, and young lizards have larger yellow spots and stripes. It lives wherever it can find fresh or brackish water, from lakes and rivers to swamps, ponds, and even sewers. Like the crocodile, the Asian water monitor’s tail is flattened from side to side, called lateral compression, and it’s also very strong. It swims by tucking its legs against its sides and propelling itself through the water with its tail. It can dive deeply to find food, and while it prefers fresh water, it will swim in the ocean too. That’s why it’s found on so many islands. Juvenile Asian water monitors spend most of the time in trees, but even a fully grown lizard will sometimes climb a tree to escape danger. Only saltwater crocodiles and humans kill the adults. In some parts of its range, the water monitor is killed by humans for its meat and its skin, which is used as leather. In other parts of its range, it’s never bothered since it eats venomous snakes and animals that damage crops. It’s sometimes kept as a pet, although it can grow so big that many people who buy a baby water monitor eventually run out of room to keep it. That’s how so many have ended up in the waterways of Florida and other areas far outside of its natural range, from people letting pets go in the wild even though doing so is illegal and immoral. While most of the time the water monitor isn’t dangerous to humans, if it feels threatened, it can be quite dangerous. Like the Komodo dragon and other monitor lizards, it’s venomous, plus its teeth are serrated, its jaws are strong, and it has sharp claws. It eats a lot of carrion, along with anything it can catch. A population in Java even enters caves to hunt bats that fall from the ceiling. Zachary didn’t suggest a particular type of monitor lizard, so let’s learn about the yellow-spotted goanna. Goannas are a type of monitor lizard found in Australia, New Guinea, and some nearby areas. We talked about some of them last week, including Cosmos’s suggestion of the lace monitor, but after the episode was released I found an article I had saved over a year ago. It’s about the yellow-spotted goanna, and a remarkable discovery about how it takes care of its eggs. The yellow-spotted goanna lives in parts of Australia and southern New Guinea, and a big male can grow up to five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It can swim and climb trees when it wants to, but mainly it stays on the ground, although it prefers to live near water if possible.

Thanks to Nikita for this week's suggestion that we learn all about the peregrine falcon! I'll be at the Next Chapter Book Fair in Dalton, Georgia on October 1, 2022! Come say hi! Further listening: Crossover episode with Arcane Carolinas from ConCarolinas 2022! Further reading: Falcons see prey at speed of Formula 1 car A peregrine falcon in flight: Baby peregrine falcons. Look at those giant peets! [photos by Robin Duska, taken from this site] Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Nikita, who wants to learn about the peregrine falcon! The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal known, and I thought about trying to talk very fast for this episode, but I decided I make enough mistakes just talking normally. A quick note before we start. On Saturday, October 1, 2022, I’ll be at the Next Chapter Book Fair and Convention in Dalton, Georgia. If you happen to be in the area, stop by and say hi! I’ll be selling books and I think I’m on a panel too. That’s the last event I have planned for the year and I’m not sure if I’ll be selling books at conventions next year. It’s fun, but it’s also a lot of work. Whatever copies of the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book that don’t sell next week, I can offer for sale directly from me. If you want a signed copy of a slightly banged-up paperback that’s been to a lot of conventions, email me and we can work out a price with shipping. Speaking of conventions, back in June I had a fantastic time at ConCarolinas, and one of the things I did was join the guys from Arcane Carolinas to record an episode of their excellent podcast. Well, they’ve just released that episode and it’s fantastic! I’ll put a link in the show notes in case you don’t already listen to their podcast. Now, let’s learn about the peregrine falcon! The peregrine falcon lives throughout the world, with as many as 19 subspecies, although experts disagree about a few of those. It’s about the size of a crow, with females being much bigger than males. Different subspecies have different patterns, but in general the peregrine falcon is dark above and pale below with a darker barred pattern. It has bright yellow around its eyes, and the base of its hooked bill and its feet are yellow. The peregrine mates for life, and reuses the same nesting site every year. Some populations of peregrine migrate long distances, and sometimes the male will stay year-round near the nesting site while the female migrates. Either way, at the beginning of the breeding season, which is usually around the end of winter, the pair performs courtship flights where the male will pass food to the female while they’re both flying. Sometimes the female turns over to fly upside-down to take food from her mate. The male typically prepares several potential nesting sites, and the female chooses which one she likes best to lay her eggs. The peregrine doesn’t build a nest, though, just kicks at the dirt to make what’s called a scrape. It’s just a shallow depression in the dirt. The female lays 2 to 5 eggs that hatch in about a month into fuzzy white babies with gigantic talons. Both parents help incubate the eggs and both feed the babies after they hatch. The peregrine especially likes open areas with cliffs for its nest, and as far as it’s concerned, skyscrapers are just a type of cliff. It’s surprisingly common in cities as a result, not to mention that cities are home to another bird, the pigeon, that the peregrine loves to eat. The peregrine mostly eats birds, especially pigeons, gulls, ducks, and various songbirds, but it will also eat bats and sometimes small animals like squirrels and rats. It mostly hunts at dawn and dusk, but it will hunt at night too and sometimes during the day. Even though the peregrine isn’t very big compared to many birds of prey like eagles, owls, and hawks, it is an astounding hunter.

It's our fifth updates and corrections episode, with some fun information about a New Zealand parrot, suggested by Pranav! Thanks also to Llewelly, Zachary, Nicholas, and Simon who sent in corrections. Further reading: Vitiligo Tyrannosaurus remains hint at three possible distinct species Study refutes claim that T. rex was three separate species The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring Impact crater may be dinosaur killer’s baby cousin California mice eat monarch butterflies 'Hobbit' human story gets a twist, thanks to thousands of rat bones Playground aims to distract mischievous kea The kea showing off the bright colors under its wings: A kea jungle gym set up to stop the birds from moving traffic cones around for fun: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This is our fifth annual updates episode, where I catch us up on new studies published about various animals we’ve talked about before. This is mostly just whatever happens to catch my eye and isn’t comprehensive by any means. Also, because things have been so busy for me the last few weeks, I decided to just go with what I’d already finished and not try to add more. We’ll start as usual with corrections, then do some updates, then learn about a parrot from New Zealand, which was a suggestion from Pranav. This part of the episode started as a Patreon episode from 2019, so patrons, I promise your October bonus episode will be brand new and interesting and in-depth! First, both Llewelly and Zachary pointed out that there are lions living in Asia, not just Africa. It’s called the Asiatic lion and these days, it only lives in a few small areas in India. It’s a protected animal but even though their numbers are increasing, there are probably still no more than 700 Asiatic lions living in the wild. Next, Nicholas points out that vitiligo isn’t a genetic condition, it’s an autoimmune disorder that can be caused by a number of different diseases and conditions. You still can’t catch it from other people, though. We talked about vitiligo briefly in episode 241, about squirrels. Nicholas included a link, which I’ll put in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in learning more. For our final correction, Simon questioned whether there really are only six living species of macaw known. This was polite of him, since I was completely wrong about this. In fact, there are six genera of macaws and lots of species, although how many species there are exactly depends on who you ask. Since this mistake made it into the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book, I am very irritated at myself, but thank you to Simon for helping me clear this up. Let’s start our updates with the animal who gets an update every single time, Tyrannosaurus rex. A study published in February 2022 examined the fossilized remains of 37 T. rexes and suggested that there may actually be three distinct species of T. rex instead of just one. The study focused specifically on differences in teeth and leg bones that don’t seem to have anything to do with the individual’s age when it died or whether it was male or female. However, in July 2022, another study found that all the T. rexes found so far do indeed belong to the same species. This is how science works, because new information is always being discovered and that means we have to reassess the things we thought we knew. In other dinosaur news, in episode 240 we talked about the last day of the dinosaurs. Results of a study released in February 2022 suggest that the asteroid struck in early spring in the northern hemisphere. The asteroid hit the earth so hard that it rocked the entire continental plate that it struck, which caused massive waves unlike any other waves, since all the water above the continental plate was pushed upwards at once. This pushed all the sediment lying quietly on the bottom of the ocean up into the water,

We'll have a real episode next week but for now, here are two Patreon episodes smashed together into one! Happy birthday to Speed! Further reading: Yi qi Is Neat But Might Not Have Been the Black Screaming Dino-Dragon of Death Yi qi could probably glide instead of actually flying: The Dayak fruit bat [photo by Chien C. Lee]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’ve finally finished moving, although I’m still in the process of unpacking and finding places for all my stuff. I haven’t had the chance to do any research this week, so this episode is actually two repurposed Patreon episodes, one from June of 2019 and one from May of 2021. They’re both short episodes so I put them together. I apologize to patrons for not getting something new this week, but I think everyone else will find these animals interesting. But first, we have a birthday shout-out! A great big happy birthday to Speed! I hope this next year is the very best one yet for you! Please excuse the varying quality of audio. Listener Simon sent me an article about a recently discovered dinosaur with batlike wings, only the second batwinged dinosaur ever discovered. I thought that would make a really neat episode, so thank you, Simon! These are really recent discoveries, both from the same area of northeastern China. In 2007 a small fossil found by a farmer was bought by a museum. A paleontologist named Xing Xu thought it looked interesting. Once the fossil had been cleaned and prepared for study, Xing saw just how interesting it was. The dinosaur was eventually named Yi qi, which means strange wing. It was found in rocks dated to about 163 million years ago. Yi qi was about the size of a pigeon and was covered with feathers. The feathers were probably fluffy rather than the sleek feathers of modern birds. But most unusual was a long bony rod that grew from each wrist, called a styliform element. Yi qi also had very long third fingers on each hand. The long finger was connected to the wrist rod by a patagium, or skin membrane, and another patagium connected the wrist rod to the body. So even though it had feathers on its body, it probably didn’t have feathered wings. Instead, its forelimbs would have somewhat resembled a bat’s wings. Paleontologists have studied the fossilized feathers with an electron microscope and discovered the structures of pigments that would have given the feathers color. Yi qi was probably mostly black with yellow or brown feathers on the head and arms. It probably also had long tail feathers to help stabilize it in the air. Ambopteryx longibrachium was only discovered in 2017, also in northeastern China. It also lived around 163 million years ago and looked a lot like Yi qi. The fossil is so detailed it shows an impression of fuzzy feathers and even the contents of the animal’s digestive tract. Its body contained tiny gizzard stones to help it digest plants but also some bone fragments from its last meal, so paleontologists think it was an omnivore. Its hands have styliform elements, although not a wrist rod like Yi qi, and there’s a brownish film preserved across one of its arms that researchers think are remains of a wing membrane. Paleontologists think the bat-winged dinosaurs were technically gliders. Careful examination of the wrist rods show no evidence that muscles were attached, so the dinosaurs wouldn’t have been able to adjust the wings well enough to actually fly. Modern bats have lots of tiny muscles in their wing membranes to help them fly. Yi qi’s wrist rod isn’t unique in the animal world. The flying squirrel has styliform rods made of cartilage that project from the wrists, with the patagia attached to them. When a squirrel wants to glide, it extends its arms and legs and also extends the wrist rods, stretching the patagia taut. It can even control its glide to some extent by adjusting the wrist rods. These two bat-winged dinosaurs were related,

This week let's learn about a mystery that was solved by science! Happy birthday to Zoe! Further reading: Let's all do the kunga! The kunga, as depicted in a 4500-year-old mosaic: The Syrian wild ass as depicted in a 1915 photograph (note the size of the animal compared to the man standing behind it): Domestic donkeys: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As this episode goes live, I should be on my way home from Dragon Con, ready to finish moving into my new apartment! It’s been an extremely busy week, so we’re just going to have a short episode about a historical mystery that was recently solved by science. But first, we have another birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Zoe, and I hope you have the most sparkly and exciting birthday ever, unless you’d rather have a chill and low-key birthday, which is just as good depending on your mood. This week we’re going to learn about an animal called the kunga, which I learned about on Dr. Karl Shuker’s blog. There’s a link in the show notes if you’d like to read his original post. The mystery of the kunga goes back thousands of years, to the fertile crescent in the Middle East. We’ve talked about this area before in episode 177, about the sirrush, specifically Mesopotamia. I’ll quote from that episode to give you some background: "These days the countries of Iraq and Kuwait, parts of Turkey and Syria, and a little sliver of Iran are all within what was once called Mesopotamia. It’s part of what’s sometimes referred to as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The known history of this region goes back five thousand years in written history, but people have lived there much, much longer. Some 50,000 years ago humans migrated from Africa into the area, found it a really nice place to live, and settled there. "Parts of it are marshy but it’s overall a semi-arid climate, with desert to the north. People developed agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, including irrigation, but many cultures specialized in fishing or nomadic grazing of animals they domesticated, including sheep, goats, and camels. As the centuries passed, the cultures of the area became more and more sophisticated, with big cities, elaborate trade routes, and stupendous artwork." The domestic horse wasn’t introduced to this area until about 4,000 years ago, although donkeys were common. The domestic donkey is still around today, of course, and is descended from the African wild ass. Researchers estimate it was domesticated 5- or 6,000 years ago by the ancient nomadic peoples of Nubia, and quickly spread throughout the Middle East and into southern Asia and Europe. But although horses weren’t known in the Middle East 4,500 years ago, we have artwork that shows an animal that looks like a really big donkey, much larger than the donkeys known at the time. It was called the kunga and was highly prized as a beast of burden since it was larger and stronger than an ordinary donkey. It was also rare, bred only in Syria and exported at high prices. No one outside of Syria knew what kind of animal the kunga really was, but we have writings that suggest it was a hybrid animal of some kind. This explains why its breeding was such a secret and why it couldn’t be bred elsewhere. Many hybrid animals are infertile and can’t have babies. If the artwork was from later times, we could assume it showed mules, the offspring of a horse and a donkey. But horses definitely weren’t known in the Middle East or nearby areas at this time, so it can’t have been a mule. The kunga was used as a beast of burden to pull plows and wagons, but the largest individuals were used to pull the chariots of kings. Fortunately, the kunga was so highly prized that it was sometimes sacrificed and buried with important people as part of their grave goods. Archaeologists have found a number of kunga skeletons, together with ceremonial harnesses.

This week let's find out what lived before the Cambrian explosion! A very happy birthday to Isaac! Further reading: Some of Earth's first animals--including a mysterious, alien-looking creature--are spilling out of Canadian rocks Say Hello to Dickinsonia, the Animal Kingdom's Newest (and Oldest) Member Charnia looks like a leaf or feather: Kimberella looks like a lost earring: Dickinsonia looks like one of those astronaut footprints on the moon: Spriggina looks like a centipede no a trilobite no a polychaete worm no a Glide reflection is hard to describe unless you look at pictures: Trilobozoans look like the Manx flag or a cloverleaf roll: Cochleatina looked like a snail: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the last week of August 2022, so let’s close out invertebrate August with a whole slew of mystery fossils, all invertebrates. But first, we have a birthday shoutout! A humongous happy birthday to Isaac! Whatever your favorite thing is, I hope it happens on your birthday, unless your favorite thing is a kaiju attack. We’ve talked about the Cambrian explosion before, especially in episode 69 about some of the Burgess shale animals. “Cambrian explosion” is the term for a time starting around 540 million years ago, when diverse and often bizarre-looking animals suddenly appear in the fossil record. But we haven’t talked much about what lived before the Cambrian explosion, so let’s talk specifically about the Ediacaran (eedee-ACK-eron) biota! I was halfway through researching this episode when I remembered I’d done a Patreon episode about it in 2021. Patrons may recognize that I used part of the Patreon episode in this one. You’d think that would save me time but surprise, it did not. The word Ediacara comes from a range of hills in South Australia, where in 1946 a geologist noticed what he thought were fossilized impressions of jellyfish in the rocks. At the time the rocks were dated to the early Cambrian period, and this was long before the Cambrian explosion was recognized as a thing at all, much less such an important thing. But since then, geologists and paleontologists have reevaluated the hills and determined that they’re much older than the Cambrian, dating to between 635 to 539 million years ago. That’s as much as 100 million years before the Cambrian. The Ediacaran period was formally designated in 2004 to mark this entire period of time, although fossils of Ediacaran animals generally start appearing about 580 million years ago. Here’s something interesting, by the way. During the Ediacaran period, every day was only 22 hours long instead of 24, and there were about 400 days in a year instead of 365. The moon was closer to the earth too. And life on earth was still sorting out the details. Fossils from the Ediacaran period have been discovered in other places besides Australia, including Namibia in southern Africa, Newfoundland in eastern Canada, England, northwestern Russia, and southern China. Once the first well-preserved fossils started being found, in Newfoundland in 1967, paleontologists started to really take notice, because they turned out to be extremely weird. The fossils, not the paleontologists. Many organisms that lived during this time lived on, in, or under microbial mats on the sea floor or at the bottoms of rivers. Microbial mats are colonies of microorganisms like bacteria that grow on surfaces that are either submerged or just tend to stay damp. Microbial mats are still around today, usually growing in extreme environments like hot springs and hypersaline lakes. But 580 million years ago, they were everywhere. One problem with the Ediacaran biota, and I should explain that biota just means all the animals and plants that live in a particular place, is that it’s not always clear if a fossil is actually an animal.

Thanks to Pranav for this week's suggestion, lobsters! Happy birthday to Jake!! Visit Dr. Oné R. Pagán's site for links to his podcast and his free book Arrow: The Lucky Planarian! You can also order his other books from your favorite book store. Here's the direct link to his interview with me! Further reading: Don't Listen to the Buzz: Lobsters Aren't Actually Immortal An ordinary lobster: A blue lobster! The scampi looks more like a prawn/shrimp than a lobster, but it's a lobster:   The rosy lobsterette is naturally red because it lives in the deep sea: The deep-sea lobster Dinochelus ausubeli was only discovered in 2007 and described in 2010: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As invertebrate August continues, this week we’re going to talk about lobsters. Thanks to Pranav for the suggestion! But first, we have a birthday shout-out! A great big happy birthday this week to Jake! I hope your birthday is epic fun! I’d also like to let you know that Dr. Oné R Pagán interviewed me recently about my book, Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, and you can hear that interview on his podcast, the Baldscientist Podcast. Baldscientist is all one word. I’ll put a link in the show notes. While you’re at it, you should definitely buy his books, including his latest one, Drunk Flies and Stoned Dolphins: A Trip Through the World of Animal Intoxication, which just came out this year and is a lot of fun, as well as being full of interesting science! He also has a free children’s story called Arrow, the Lucky Planarian that you can download and read. It’s completely charming and you’ll learn a lot about planarians, which are also called flatworms, which are invertebrates, so this is all coming together! This week’s episode isn’t about planarians, though, but about lobsters. I don’t think we’ve ever discussed lobsters on the podcast before, oddly enough, but it’s been on my ideas list for a long time. When Pranav emailed me recently to suggest we do a lobster episode, I realized it was time! Time for lobsters! The lobster is a crustacean, and while there are plenty of different lobsters in the world, we’re going to focus on the clawed lobsters this time. There are lots of them, all grouped in the family Nephropidae. The lobster has eight legs that it walks on, and two more legs with pincers. That’s why it’s in the order Decapoda. Deca means ten and poda means feet. Ten feet. Some of which can pinch you if you’re not careful. The lobster uses its claws to defend itself from potential predators, and uses them to grab and kill small animals. It eats pretty much anything it can find, from fish and squid to sea stars and mollusks, to dead animals and some plant material. But its claws are too big and clumsy to use to eat with, which is why it has much smaller pincers on its next pairs of legs. These pincers are equipped with chemoreceptors that allow the lobster to taste its food before it actually eats it, which is a neat trick. The lobster uses these small claws to pull its food into smaller pieces and convey it to the mouthparts, which are under its head. Some mouthparts have sensory hairs that can taste food, some have sharp spines that act as teeth to tear food into smaller pieces, and others are small and just flutter to help keep pieces of food from floating away. The stomach is only about an inch away from the mouth, or about 2.5 cm, no matter the size of the lobster. The stomach itself, and the short esophagus leading to the stomach, are lined with chitin spines that act like teeth to grind food up while enzymes break it down to fully digest it. This seems like a really complicated way to eat, but it’s actually not all that different from the way we eat, it’s just that instead of mouthparts and stomach teeth, we do all our grinding up of food in the mouth with just one set of teeth.

This week we learn about some weird worms! Further reading: Otherworldly Worms with Three Sexes Discovered in Mono Lake Bizarre sea worm with regenerative butts named after Godzilla's monstrous nemesis Underground giant glows in the dark but is rarely seen Giant Gippsland earthworm (you can listen to one gurgling through its burrow here too) Further watching: A giant Gippsland earthworm Glowing earthworms (photo by Milton Cormier): This sea worm's head is on the left, its many "butts" on the right [photo from article linked to above]: A North Auckland worm [photo from article linked to above]: A giant beach worm: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we continue Invertebrate August with a topic I almost saved for monster month in October. Let’s learn about some weird worms! We’ll start with a newly discovered worm that’s very tiny, and we’ll work our way up to larger worms. Mono Lake in California is a salty inland lake that probably started forming after a massive volcanic eruption about 760,000 years ago. The eruption left behind a crater called a caldera that slowly filled with water from rain and several creeks. But there’s no outlet from the lake—no river or even stream that carries water from the lake down to the ocean. As a result, the water stays where it is and over the centuries a lot of salts and other minerals have dissolved into the lake from the surrounding rocks. The water is three times as salty as the ocean and very alkaline. No fish live in the lake, but some extremophiles do. There’s a type of algae that often turns the water bright green, brine shrimp that eat the algae, some unusual flies that dive into the water encased in bubbles, birds that visit the lake and eat the brine shrimp and flies, and eight species of worms that have only been discovered recently. All the worms are weird, but one of them is really weird. It hasn’t been described yet so at the moment is just going by the name Auanema, since the research team thinks it probably belongs in that genus. Auanema is microscopic and lives throughout the lake, which is unusual because the lake contains high levels of arsenic. You know, a DEADLY POISON. But the arsenic and the salt and the other factors that make the lake inhospitable to most life don’t bother the worms. Auanema produces offspring that can have one of three sexes: hermaphrodites that can self-fertilize, and males and females that need each other to fertilize eggs. Researchers think that the males and females of the species help maintain genetic diversity while the hermaphrodites are able to colonize new environments, since they don’t need a mate to reproduce. When some of the worms were brought to the laboratory for further study, they did just fine in normal lab conditions, without extreme levels of arsenic and so forth. That’s unusual, because generally extremophiles are so well adapted for their extreme environments that they can’t live anywhere else. But Auanema is just fine in a non-harsh environment. Not only that, but the team tested other species in the Auanema genus that aren’t extremophiles and discovered that even though they don’t live in water high in arsenic, they tolerate arsenic just as well as the newly discovered species. The team’s plan is to sequence Auanema’s genome to see if they can determine the genetic factors that confer such high resistance to arsenic. Next, we go up in size from a teensy worm to another newly discovered worm, this one only about 4 inches long at most, or 10 cm. It’s a marine polychaete worm that lives inside sea sponges, although we don’t know yet if it’s parasitizing the sponge or if it confers some benefit to the sponge that makes this a symbiotic relationship. The worm was only discovered in 2019 near Japan and described in early 2022 as Ramisyllis kingghidorahi. Almost all worms known are shaped, well, like worms.

Thanks to Joel for suggesting this week's topic! Happy birthday to Fern this week! Further reading: Small, rare crayfish thought extinct is rediscovered in cave in Huntsville city limits Hundreds of three-eyed 'dinosaur shrimp' emerge after Arizona monsoon An invertebrate mystery track in South Africa The case of the mysterious holes in the sea floor Contemplating the Con Rit The Shelton Cave crayfish, rediscovered: The three-eyed "tadpole shrimp" or "dinosaur shrimp," triops [photo from article linked above]: A leech track in South Africa [photo from article linked above]: A track, or at least a series of holes, discovered in the deep seafloor [photos from article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Thanks to Joel who suggested we do an episode about mystery invertebrates! It took me a while, but I think you’re really going to like this episode. Some of the mysteries are solved and some are not, but they’re all fun. Before we get to the mystery animals, though, we have a birthday shout-out! A great big happy birthday to Fern! I hope you have your favorite type of birthday cake or other treat and get to enjoy it with your loved ones. Our first mystery starts in a cave near Huntsville, Alabama in the southern United States, which is in North America. Shelta Cave is a relatively small cave system, only about 2,500 feet long, or 760 meters. That’s about half a mile. It’s a nature preserve now but in the early 1900s it was used as an underground dance hall with a bar and everything. Biologist John Cooper studied the cave’s aquatic ecosystem in the 1960s when he was doing his dissertation work. His wife Martha helped him since they were both active cavers. At the time, the cave ecosystem was incredibly diverse, including three species of crayfish. One was called the Shelta Cave crayfish, which was only a few inches long, or about 5 cm, mostly translucent or white since it didn’t have any pigment in its body, and with long, thin pincers. It was rarer than the cave’s other two crayfish species, and unlike them it had only ever been found in Shelta Cave. From 1963 to 1975, only 115 individuals had been confirmed in repeated studies of the cave’s ecosystem. Then, in the 1970s, several things happened that caused a serious decline in the diversity of life in the cave. The first was development of the land around the cave into subdivisions, which meant that more pesticides were used on lawns and flower beds, which made its way into the groundwater that entered the cave. It also meant more people discovering the cave and going in to explore, which was disturbing a population of gray bats who also lived in the cave. To help the bats and keep people out, the park service put a gate over the entrance, but the initial gate’s design wasn’t a very good one. It kept people out but it also made it harder for the bats to go in and out, and eventually the bats gave up and moved out of the cave completely. This really impacted the cave’s ecosystem, since bats bring a lot of nutrients into a cave with their droppings and the occasional bat who dies and falls to the cave floor. The gate has since been replaced with a much more bat-friendly one, but studies afterwards showed that a lot of the animals found in the cave had become rare. The Shelta Cave crayfish had disappeared completely. One was spotted in 1988 but after that, nothing, and the biologists studying the cave worried that it had gone extinct. Then, in 2019, a team of scientists and students surveying life in the cave spotted a little white crayfish with long, thin pincers in the water. The team leader dived down and scooped it up with his net to examine more closely. The crayfish turned out to be a female Shelta Cave crayfish with eggs, which made everyone excited, and after taking a tiny tissue sample for DNA testing, and lots of photographs,

Sign up for our mailing list! Even though I hardly ever send an email to it! It's INVERTEBRATE AUGUST! Thanks to Elizabeth, Richard, and Llewelly for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Meet Phylliroe: the sea slug that looks and swims like a fish Hey, so these sea slugs decapitate themselves and grow new bodies Found, Then Lost, Then Found Again: Scientists Have Rediscovered the Sand Octopus A sand crab in the air: Sand crabs in the water, feeding: Phylliroe is a sea slug that looks like a fish (pictures from article linked to above): How I used to draw snails when I was a kid, adding an extra foot because I didn't understand that the "foot" of a snail/slug is the flat part of the body that touches the ground: The mysterious sand octopus in mid-swim: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the first week of invertebrate August and we’re heading to the ocean for our first episode! Let’s jump right in with an episode about sand crabs, a couple of sea slugs, and an octopus mystery that was recently solved. Thanks to Elizabeth, my brother Richard, and Llewelly for their suggestions! We’ll start with Elizabeth’s suggestion. The sand crab is also called the sand bug, the mole crab, or similar names that refer to its habit of burrowing into the sand. It’s common throughout much of the world’s oceans, especially in warm areas, and can be extremely numerous. It’s also sometimes called the sand flea, but it’s not the kind of tiny jumping crustacean that bites, also called the sand flea. This little crustacean is harmless to humans. It doesn’t even have pincers. The sand crab isn’t a true crab although it is closely related to them. It’s gray-brown and has a tough carapace to protect it when it’s washed around by waves and to help protect it from predators. Females are larger than males and can grow up to an inch and a half long in the largest species, or about 35 mm, and an inch wide, or 25 mm. So it’s longer than it is wide, unlike most crabs, and its carapace is domed sort of like a tiny tortoise shell. Overall, it’s shaped sort of like a streamlined barrel. I saw one site that called it the sand cicada and it is actually about the same size and shape as a cicada, which it isn’t related to at all except that they’re both invertebrates. Some species have little spines on the carapace while others are smooth. The sand crab lives in the ocean, specifically in the intertidal zone right at the area where waves wash up on the beach. This is called the swash, by the way, which is a great word. The sand crab burrows into the sand tail-first, using its strong rear legs, and during the time that there’s water over the sand, it unfurls its feathery antennae to filter tiny food particles from the water. When the wave goes out, it retracts its antennae and works on staying buried in the sand as the next wave rolls in. In some species, males are very similar to females, but smaller. In other species, they’re tiny, barely 3 mm long at most, and even as adults they resemble larvae. The male finds a female and grabs hold of her leg, and there he stays. I tried to find out more about this, but it doesn’t look like the humble sand crab gets a lot of attention. If you’re interested in becoming a scientist who studies invertebrates and you want to spend a lot of time on the beach, the sand crab would make a good study buddy. Lots of fish and birds eat sand crabs, and people do too. In many places they’re considered a delicacy and grilled as a snack. This isn’t surprising since they’re related to other crustaceans people like to eat, like crabs and lobsters. Next, let’s learn about two strange sea slugs. We’ve talked about sea slugs a few times before, including in episodes 215 and 129, but there are a lot of species, with more being discovered pretty often. Llewelly sent me a link ages ago about a sea slug that’s related to the sea bunn...

Thanks to Vaughn for suggesting this week's episode topic about Venus the cat and her unusual coat pattern! Further reading: Mystery Cats of the World Revisited by Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker Further listening: Half-siders and sea monkeys Patreon episode from December 2018 (unlocked episode) Venus the cat: "Half-sider" birds can be spectacular: Half-side chimeras are not just restricted to birds: Ranger the "black lion" (photo by Peter Adamson, from this site which you should also read). Note the black patch on his right front leg: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week I had planned to release our updates episode, but I didn’t have time to finish it. The 2022 updates episode will run in September instead, since we’re doing Invertebrate August again this year! Way back at least a year ago and possibly more, Vaughn suggested we do an episode about “rare two-tone animals like Venus the cat.” I put the suggestion on my list and totally forgot about it until today, when I saw it and thought, “hmm, who’s Venus the cat?” If you don’t already know, Venus is a beautiful cat whose coloration is mostly what’s called tortoiseshell, meaning she has a mixture of colors on her body, in her case black and orange. But Venus’s face is completely black on one side with a green eye, but orange tabby on the other side with a blue eye. She also has a white bib and white on her paws. Venus became famous after the family who adopted her as a stray in 2009 posted pictures of her online. Her coloration is so unusual that everyone wondered what caused it. The answer is that we aren’t exactly sure, but veterinarians and experts in cat genetics do have some pretty good ideas. There are probably several things going on genetically with Venus that resulted in her interesting coloration. Her different-colored eyes are one result. When an animal has different-colored eyes, called heterochromia iridis, there are a number of possible causes, from an injury to one eye to various genetic conditions. Sometimes it’s not complete, meaning one eye may be partly a different color. It even happens in people sometimes, although it’s rare. In Venus’s case, researchers think her heterochromia may be due to a gene that produces what’s called piebaldism. A piebald animal has white markings when an ordinary animal of the same species doesn’t have any white markings. Some animals who naturally have a white pattern may have the word pie or pied or just bald hidden in their name, such as the magpie and the bald eagle, because it used to mean just an outfit with different contrasting colors. In the story of the pied piper, the piper had on a suit made of different colors. The white patches of a piebald animal actually don’t have any pigment, and if a white patch is over an eye, the eye may also lack pigment and appear blue. That’s pretty common in piebald or pinto horses or in some dog breeds with white markings. The piebald gene may also affect one or both eyes even if a white patch doesn’t cover the eye, which some researchers think may be the case in Venus. Her left eye is blue even though the left side of her face is orange tabby. Venus’s unusual facial fur coloration may be due to a condition called chimerism. Chimerism happens long before an animal is born—in fact, it happens within a few hours after an egg cell is fertilized. I’ll do my best to explain it. A lot of the next section comes from a Patreon episode from 2018, and if you want to listen to the original I’ve unlocked it for anyone to listen to and put a link in the show notes. As soon as an egg cell is fertilized, it starts to divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, and on and on. After a while, the groups of cells start to differentiate into parts of the body. Some cells become a heart, others become toes, and so on. Eventually there’s a whole finished baby ready to be...

This week we need to thanks a bunch of listeners for their suggestions: Bowie, Eilee, Pranav, and Yuzu! Further reading: Elaborate Komodo dragon armor defends against other dragons Giant killer lizard fossil shines new light on early Australians A New Origin for Dragon Folklore? The Wyvern of Wonderland The Komodo dragon: The beautiful tree goanna: The perentie: Fossilized scale tree bark looks like reptile scales: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic we talked about back in episode 53. That episode was about dragons, including the Komodo dragon. Since then, Bowie has requested to learn more about the Komodo dragon and Eilee and Pranav both suggested an updated dragon episode. We also have a related suggestion from Yuzu, who wants to learn more about goannas in general. We’ll start with the Komodo dragon, which gets its name because it’s a huge and terrifying monitor lizard. It can grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, which means it’s the biggest lizard alive today. It has serrated teeth that can be an inch long, or 2.5 cm, and its skin is covered with bony osteoderms that make it spiky and act as armor. Since the Komodo dragon is the apex predator in its habitat, it only needs armor to protect it from other Komodo dragons. Fortunately for people who like to hike and have picnics in nature, the Komodo dragon only lives on four small islands in Indonesia in southeast Asia, including the island of Komodo. Young Komodo dragons have no armor and spend most of the time in trees, where they eat insects and other small animals. As the dragon gets older and heavier, it spends more and more time on the ground. Its armor develops at that point and is especially strong on the head. The only patches on the head that don’t have osteoderms are around the eyes and nostrils, the edges of the mouth, and over the pineal eye. That’s an organ on the top of the head that can sense light. Yes, it’s technically a third eye! The Komodo dragon is an ambush predator. When an animal happens by, the dragon jumps at it and gives it a big bite from its serrated teeth. Not only are its teeth huge and dangerous, its saliva contains venom. It’s very good at killing even a large animal like a wild pig quickly, but if the animal gets away it often dies from venom, infection, and blood loss. Like a lot of reptiles, the Komodo dragon can swallow food that’s a lot bigger than its mouth. The bones of its jaws are what’s called loosely articulated, meaning the joints can flex to allow the dragon to swallow a goat whole, for instance. Its stomach can also expand to hold a really big meal all at once. After a dragon has swallowed as much as it can hold, it lies around in the sun to digest its food. After its food is digested, which can take days, it horks up a big wad of whatever it can’t digest. This includes hair or feathers, horns, hooves, teeth, and so on, all glued together with mucus. A Komodo dragon eats anything it can catch, and the bigger the dragon is, the bigger the animals it can catch. One thing Komodo dragons are just fine with eating are other Komodo dragons. As we mentioned a few minutes ago, the Komodo dragon is a type of monitor lizard, and there are lots of monitor lizards that live throughout much of the warmest parts of the earth, including Australia. Yuzu suggested we talk about the goanna, which is the term for monitor lizards in the genus Varanus, although it’s also a term sometimes used for all monitor lizards. Goannas are more closely related to snakes than to other types of lizard. Like the Komodo dragon, the goanna will eat pretty much any animal it can catch, and will also scavenge already dead animals. Smaller goannas mostly eat insects, especially the tiny goanna often called the short-tailed pygmy monitor or just the pygmy monitor.

This week we have a mystery animal from South America, the hueque! Further reading: Llamas are having a moment in the U.S., but they've been icons in South America for millennia Whatever happened to the hueque? Seeking the lost llama of Chile First complete mitochondrial genome data from ancient South American camelids – The mystery of the chilihueques from Isla Mocha (Chile) A dressed up person and her dressed up llama (picture from llama article linked above): The noble guanaco: Cuddly alpacas! The noble vicuña: A 1646 picture of a hueque: A 1776 engraving of four camelids of South America, including the hueque. The "guemul" in the upper left is actually a llama (the huemul is a type of deer found in a small part of southern Patagonia): A 1716 engraving supposedly depicting a hueque (central figure) alongside a llama (on the left with the carry-bags over its back): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’ve done a lot of listener suggestions lately and I still have lots more, but this week let’s look at a mystery animal that I really want to learn more about. It’s a South American animal, specifically from central Chile, called the chilihueque or hueque. Whether the heuque turns out to be an animal unknown to science or not, it’s definitely a camelid of some kind. Camelids include camels, llamas, and their relations, four of which are native to South America. Those four are the guanaco, the llama, the vicuña, and the alpaca, which are all closely related. The vicuña lives in high elevations in the Andes Mountains while the guanaco lives in lower elevations. The vicuña is smaller and more delicate than the guanaco. It grows not quite three feet tall at the shoulder, or about 85 cm, with a long, slender neck and small head, and a short fuzzy tail. Its legs are long and slender too. It’s white and light brown with thick, incredibly soft fur that keeps it warm in its mountain home. It eats grass and other plants. The vicuña lives in small groups, usually consisting of a male, several females, and their babies. When the babies are about a year old or a little older, males leave and initially form small bachelor groups while females leave and form small groups too, called sororities. Eventually both males and females of various bachelor groups and sororities will seek each other out during mating season. Vicuña wool is extremely soft and fine, and in the days of the Inca Empire, around 500 to 600 years ago, only royalty were allowed to wear clothes made of it. It’s actually not wool like sheep wool but a fiber similar to cashmere from goats or angora from bunnies. Because the vicuña is a wild animal, it has to be captured and its fur cut off, or shorn, but it’s hard to catch. Not only that, since the vicuña is small, it doesn’t give very much fiber so you need to shear a whole lot of the animals to get enough to make a single piece of clothing. In the olden days, the Inca people constructed traps and worked together to herd vicuña into the traps. Then they would shear the animals and release them again, but only once every four years. These days the practice has been re-instituted by the Peruvian government, although the capture and shearing is done every three years. The fiber is only supposed to be sold outside of Peru after it has been certified by the government as being gathered lawfully and humanely, and most of the money remains with the villagers who gather it. It’s extremely expensive to buy, but unfortunately that means that poachers will sometimes kill the animals to shear and sell the fiber illegally, even though it’s a protected species. I don’t remember if I’ve ever mentioned this on the podcast, but one of my hobbies is spinning. I can take raw wool from a sheep or fiber from some other animal and turn it into yarn or thread using my spinning wheel or hand spindle, and yes,

Thanks to Pranav and Zachary for their suggestions this week, where we learn the story behind two cuddly toys and the animals that inspired them! The cartoon that inspired the toy: My own teddy bear: An American black bear (not William Taft although yes, there is a resemblance, including a willingness to eat entire possums in one sitting): William Taft: A Virginia opossum: A possum with babies! Stop trying to make Billy Possum a thing: Admittedly it was pretty cute: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about two cuddly animals, one of which you’ve definitely heard of, the other you might not have. Oh wait, you’ve heard of both animals for sure—but you might not have heard about the toys based on the animals. Thanks to Pranav and Zachary for their suggestions. The president of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century was Theodore Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909. He was sometimes called Teddy instead of Theodore, although he didn’t actually like the nickname. Roosevelt is widely considered to have been a very good president, as well as an interesting and sometimes eccentric man, but his main contribution to history as far as most people are concerned is the teddy bear. Roosevelt was an active man who spent a lot of time horseback riding, playing tennis, hiking, swimming, boxing, and lots of other things. He also liked to read, spoke several languages, and wrote poetry—and he was an avid hunter and would travel the world to kill things. That’s what he was doing in November 1902, when the governor of Mississippi invited him on a bear hunting trip. The hunting party killed several bears that day, but Roosevelt hadn’t shot anything. Some of the president’s attendants decided to help things along, and they chased a bear down with hounds until it was exhausted, beat it until it was almost dead, and tied it to a tree. I know, this is awful. I’m sorry. Then they said, “Hey, Mr. President, we found you a bear to shoot.” Not only did Roosevelt refuse to kill the bear, he was angry at the people who had treated it so badly. He requested that the poor animal be shot to put it out of its misery, since by that point it was already dying from its treatment. Because Roosevelt was the president, everything he did made its way into the newspapers, including this event. A political cartoonist used the bear hunt in a cartoon, only instead of an adult bear he made the bear a cute little cub. This inspired an inventor named Morris Michtom and his wife Rose to make a little bear cub doll to sell at their candy shop in Brooklyn, New York. They labeled it “Teddy’s bear” and the rest is history. Most teddy bears don’t look much like an actual American black bear. The black bear lives in forested areas throughout much of North America and used to be even more widespread, but was hunted to extinction in many areas. It’s more closely related to the Asian black bear than it is to other bears found in North America, including the grizzly and polar bears. Its fur is usually black although some black bears are gray, various shades of brown, or sometimes even a rare cream color. The biggest American black bear ever measured was just barely under 8 feet long, or 2.41 meters, and probably weighed 1,100 pounds, or 500 kg. Most black bears are a lot smaller than that, though. Black bears mate in summer but the fertilized egg cells don’t start developing until November. This gives the female plenty of time to gain lots of healthy weight before she finds a safe place to spend the winter. Black bears hibernate in cold weather, although scientists are still debating whether its metabolic changes constitute true hibernation. A bear will use a hollow tree or small cave as a den, or will dig a den. It gets comfortable in its den and soon its heart rate starts to drop until it only beats abou...

Thanks to Max and Pranav for their suggestions this week! We're going to learn about some crocodylomorphs and a few other ancient non-dinosaur reptiles. Further reading: Mammal-like crocodile fossil found in East Africa, scientists report Ancient crocodiles walked on two legs like dinosaurs Fossil Footprints Help Uncover the Mysteries of Bipedal Crocodiles Fossil mystery solved: super-long-necked reptiles lived in the ocean, not on land Kaprosuchus had TEETH: Anatosuchus earned its name "duck crocodile": Ancient bipedal croc footprints (picture taken from link above): Tanystropheus had a super long neck: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going back in time to learn about some prehistoric reptiles that aren’t dinosaurs. Most are crocodylomorphs, which Pranav suggested a while back, but not all. Thanks to Pranav and Max for their suggestions this week! Max even made some clay models of two of these animals and sent me pictures, which was amazing! I have some really talented listeners. Pranav and Max both wanted to know about kaprosuchus, also called the boar crocodile. The boar croc lived around 95 million years ago and probably grew nearly 20 feet long, or 6 meters, although all we know about it right now comes from a single nearly complete fossilized skull. The skull was found in Niger, a country in West Africa, and only described in 2009. The boar croc gets its name from its teeth. It had lots of teeth, because it was a crocodyliform, although not actually an ancestral crocodile. It was related to modern crocs, though. Three sets of its teeth were especially long and large and projected out of its mouth much farther than ever found in any croc or croc relative, with one pair of teeth so big the upper jaw had little grooves for them to fit into so it could actually close its mouth. The teeth look like boar tusks, especially warthog tusks. The boar croc also had some other differences from other croc relatives. The tip of its snout is unusually heavy, and some researchers think it might have had a keratin sheath over it. It might have used its heavy snout as a battering ram, possibly to stun prey before grabbing it with its huge teeth. It most likely hunted on land instead of in the water, since its eyes were lower on its head than crocs that hunt in water. Modern crocodiles and their relations mostly have eyes at the top of the head, which allows them to stay submerged except for their eyes. Whether it hunted in water or on land, though, the boar croc definitely killed and ate small dinosaurs, or maybe not so small dinosaurs. The boar croc also had some horn-like projections on the back of its head. I don’t want to alarm you, because this animal went extinct millions and millions of years ago, but this thing was basically a dragon. Anatosuchus was another crocodylomorph whose fossils have been found in Niger, but it’s much smaller and weirder than you’d expect. It was a tiny little thing, estimated to grow only a little more than 2 feet long, or 70 cm, and it was lightly built with relatively long legs for a croc relation, although it was still smaller than a cat. Its small teeth curve backwards but its snout has a little pointy projection at the front, although its head is broad and flat so that from above, its snout looks kind of like a duck’s bill. That’s why it’s sometimes called the duck crocodile. It lived around 145 million to 100 million years ago. Researchers think it may have waded in shallow water to catch small animals like fish and frogs, something like a heron. Around 105 million years ago, another small croc relation lived in what is now Tanzania in East Africa. It was first discovered in 2008 and has been named Pakasuchus, which means cat crocodile. It was even smaller than the duck crocodile, only 20 inches long, or 50 cm, with long legs and a delicate build.

Sign up for our mailing list! Thanks to Elaine for suggesting one of our long-tailed birds this week! Happy birthday to Jasper!! Have a great birthday! Further reading: Fossil of Ancient Long-Tailed Bird Found in China All adult scissor-tailed flycatchers have long tails: The long-tailed sylph male is the one with the long tail: The long-tailed widowbird male has a long tail: The long-tailed widowbird female has a short tail: The pin-tailed whydah male has a long tail: A pin-tailed whydah baby (left) next to a common waxbill baby (right): Kompsornis longicaudus had a really long tail: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is a short episode all about little birds with really long tails. The tails are longer than the episode. Thanks to Elaine for suggesting one of the birds we talk about today! But before we start learning about birds, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Jasper, who has the best name and who will hopefully have the best birthday to go along with it! Let’s start with Elaine’s suggestion, the scissor-tailed flycatcher. I’m embarrassed to admit that Elaine suggested this bird way back in 2020, so it’s about time we talked about it. The scissor-tailed flycatcher lives in south-central North America during the summer, especially Texas and Oklahoma, and migrates to parts of Mexico and Central America in winter. It’s pale gray with black and white wings and tail, and salmon pink markings on its sides and under its wings. It also has a really long tail. It gets the name scissor-tail because its tail is so long and forked that it’s sort of the shape of an open pair of scissors. The male’s tail is typically longer than the female’s, longer than the rest of its body. The bird is about the size of an average songbird, with a body length of about 5 inches, or 13 centimeters, but with a tail that can increase its overall length to over 14 inches, or 36 cm. The scissor-tailed flycatcher prefers open areas like pastures and fields, where there’s lots of space but some brush, trees, or fences nearby to perch in. It mostly eats insects, but it will also eat berries, especially in winter. It’s related to kingbirds and pewees and will even hybridize with the western kingbird where their ranges overlap. Its long tail is partly for display, but mostly it helps the bird maneuver in midair as it chases insects, or hover in midair as it looks around for an insect to catch. It especially likes grasshoppers, and when it catches one, it will usually kill it before eating it by smashing it against a tree limb or other perch. Another little bird with a long tail is the long-tailed sylph, which is a type of hummingbird! It lives on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in northwestern South America, mostly along forest edges, in gardens, grasslands, and other mostly open areas. It migrates to different parts of the mountains at different times of year to follow the flowering of its favorite plants. It’s larger than many species of hummingbird even if you don’t count the tail. It eats nectar like other hummingbirds do, but also eats tiny insects and spiders. Its bill is black and not very long compared to most of its relations. Sometimes it will jab the tip of its bill straight through the base of a flower to get at the nectar, instead of inserting it into the flower like other hummingbirds do, and while it can hover, sometimes it perches to feed instead. Both the male and female long-tailed sylph are a beautiful metallic blue and green in color, although the male is brighter and has purplish-brown wings. The female is about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, including her tail, and while the male is about the same size as the female, his tail is really long—up to 4.5 inches long, or 12 cm. His tail is forked like the scissor-tailed flycatcher’s, but unlike the flycatcher,

Thanks to Clay for suggesting the topic of this week's episode, the humpback whale! Happy birthday to Emry! Further reading: How humpback whales catch prey with bubble nets Study: Humpback whales aren't learning their songs from one another Stanford researchers observe unexpected flipper flapping in humpback whales Ancient baleen whales had a mouthful The humpback's long, thin flippers help it maneuver: Humpbacks are active, jumpy whales: A humpback whale's big mouth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Thanks to Clay for suggesting this week’s topic, the humpback whale! But first, we have a birthday shout-out! A great big happy birthday to Emry! I hope your birthday is so epic that in the future, when people look up birthday in the dictionary, your name is listed there. I’m amazed we haven’t talked about the humpback whale before because when I was little, it was my favorite whale until I learned about the narwhal. Sorry, humpback, you’re now my second favorite whale. The humpback is a baleen whale, specifically a rorqual, which is a group of related baleen whales. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the term rorqual before because I find it really hard to pronounce. Rorquals are long, slender whales with throat pleats that allow them to expand their mouths when they gulp water in. We talked about this in episode 211 about the fin whale, which is another rorqual. I’ll quote from that episode to explain again what the throat pleats are. A baleen whale eats tiny animals that it filters out of the water through its baleen plates, which are keratin structures in its mouth that take the place of teeth. The baleen is tough but thin and hangs down from the upper jaw. It’s white and looks sort of like a bunch of bristles at the end of a broom. The whale opens its mouth wide while lunging forward or downward, which fills its huge mouth with astounding amounts of water. As water enters the mouth, the skin stretches to hold even more, until the grooves completely flatten out. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushing its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It can then swallow all that food and open its mouth to do it again. This whole operation, from opening its mouth to swallowing its food, only takes six to ten seconds. The humpback mostly eats tiny crustaceans called krill, and little fish. Since gulp feeding takes a lot of energy, finding a lot of food in a relatively small space is important to the whale. Many little fish that live in schools will form what are called bait balls when they feel threatened, where the fish swim closer together and keep moving around. Any given individual fish has a good chance of avoiding being eaten when behaving this way. Think about last week’s episode, where the spinner shark swims straight up through a bait ball, biting biting biting. It eats some fish, but most are fine. But a big filter feeder like the humpback can gulp a whole lot of fish at once, so it really likes bait balls. To help maneuver prey animals into a small area, groups of humpbacks sometimes employ a strategy called bubble-net feeding. The whales will dive below the fish or krill and swim in a ring, blowing bubbles the whole time. The bubbles startle the animals, who move away from them. But since the bubbles are all around them, and the whales swim closer and closer together so that the ring of bubbles shrinks, eventually the fish or krill are all clustered in a small space as though they’re caught in a net. Then the whales open their mouths and gulp in lots of food. This is actually a simplified explanation of how bubble-net feeding works, which requires several different types of bubbles and various actions by the whales to make it work right.

Thanks to Tobey and Janice this week for their suggestions of lesser-known sharks! Further reading/watching: CREATURE FEATURE: The Spinner Shark [this site has a great video of spinner sharks spinning up out of the water!] Acanthorhachis, a new genus of shark from the Carboniferous (Westfalian) of Yorkshire, England 150 Year Old Fossil Mystery Solved [note: it is not actually solved] The cartoon-eyed spurdog shark: The spinner shark spinning out of the water: The spinner shark not spinning (photo by Andy Murch): A Listracanthus spine: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about three sharks you may have never heard of before! The first was suggested by my aunt Janice and the second by listener Tobey. The third is a mystery from the fossil record. You may have heard about the findings of a study published in November of 2021, with headlines like “Venomous sharks invade the Thames!” My aunt Janice sent me a link to an article like this. Nobody is invading anything, though. The sharks belong where they are. It was their absence for decades that was a problem, and the study discovered that they’re back. The Thames is a big river in southern England that empties into the North Sea near London. Because it flows through such a huge city, it’s pretty badly polluted despite attempts in the last few decades to clean it up. It was so polluted by the 1950s, in fact, that it was declared biologically dead. But after a lot of effort by conservationists, fish and other animals have moved back into the river and lots of birds now visit it too. It also doesn’t smell as bad as it used to. One of the fish now found again in the Thames is a small shark called the spurdog, or spiny dogfish. The spurdog lives in many parts of the world, mostly in shallow water just off the coast, although it’s been found in deep water too. A big female can grow almost three feet long, or 85 cm, while males are smaller. It’s a bottom dweller that eats whatever animals it finds on the sea floor, including crabs, sea cucumbers, and shrimp, and it will also eat jellyfish, squid, and fish when it can catch them. It’s even been known to hunt in packs. It’s gray-brown in color with little white spots, and it has large eyes that kind of look like the eyes of a cartoon shark. It also has a spine in front of each of its two dorsal fins, which can inject venom into potential predators. The venom isn’t deadly to humans but would definitely hurt, so please don’t try to pet a spurdog shark. If the shark feels threatened, it curls its body around into a sort of shark donut shape, which allows it to jab its spines into whatever is trying to grab it. The spurdog used to be really common, and was an important food for many people. But so many of them were and are caught to be ground into fertilizer or used in pet food that they’re now considered vulnerable worldwide and critically endangered around Europe, where their numbers have dropped by 95% in the last few decades. It’s now a protected species in many areas. The female spurdog retains her fertilized eggs in her body like a lot of sharks do. The eggs hatch inside her and the babies develop further before she gives birth to them and they swim off on their own. It takes up to two years before a pup is ready to be born, and females don’t reach maturity until they’re around 16 years old, so it’s going to take a long time for the species to bounce back from nearly being wiped out. Fortunately, the spurdog can live almost 70 years and possibly longer, if it’s not killed and ground up to fertilize someone’s lawn. The sharks like to give birth in shallow water around the mouths of rivers, where the water is well oxygenated and there’s lots of small food for their babies to eat, which is why they’ve moved back into the Thames. Next, Tobey suggested we talk about the spinner shark.

Thanks to Molly for suggesting andrewsarchus and entelodont, our mean "piggies" we learn about this week! Further reading: Andrewsarchus, "Superb Skull of a Gigantic Beast" Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman Further listening: The Folklore Podcast Andrewsarchus (taken from article linked above): Andrewsarchus's skull. I'm not sure who the guy holding it is, but I like to think his name is Andrew: Entelodont: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’m getting really backed up on listener suggestions, so over the next few months I plan to cover as many of them as possible. We’ll start with two suggestions by Molly, who wanted to learn about Andrewsarchus and the related Entelodont. We talked about entelodonts briefly back in episode 116, and if you remember that episode, you may remember that entelodonts are sometimes referred to as the terminator pig or the hell pig. So yes, we are going to learn about some mean piggies this week, with a bonus fun mystery piggy at the end. Andrewsarchus mongoliensis lived in what is now central Asia about 42 million years ago. It’s only known from a single skull found in 1923 in Inner Mongolia, which is part of China these days. The skull has a long snout and is big and wide, over 2.5 feet long, or 83 cm. It has huge, strong teeth that look ferocious. When the skull was first found, some paleontologists on the team thought it was from a huge wolf-like carnivore. But others weren’t so sure. They thought it was the skull of a pig relative, and pigs are omnivores. Without more fossil remains, we can’t know for sure what Andrewsarchus’s body looked like, but these days scientists mostly think it was closely related to entelodonts. Despite being called the terminator pig, entelodonts weren’t very closely related to pigs, although they and Andrewsarchus are in the order Artiodactyla. That’s the order that includes all even-toed hoofed mammals and their close relations, including pigs, but also including hippos and whales. Hippos and whales are actually pretty closely related, and entelodonts and Andrewsarchus were more closely related to hippos than to pigs. Daeodon [DIE-oh-don] was the biggest entelodont known, and it may have stood up to 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or just over 2 meters. It lived in North America, but there was another species from Eurasia, Paraentelodon intermedium, that was probably close to the same size. Both lived about 22 million years ago. Entelodonts had big, wide skulls with flared cheekbones and knob-like bony protrusions, so its head may have looked something like a warthog’s head. It also had cloven hooves. We don’t know if Andrewsarchus had hooves since we haven’t found anything but that one huge skull. The larger species of Entelodont had a humped shoulder something like a bison for the attachment of strong neck muscles to support the head’s weight, and Andrewsarchus probably had this too. The rest of the body was much more lightly built, with short, slender legs and a skinny little tail. Even though Entelodont teeth are fearsome-looking, and at least some species of Entelodont were probably active hunters, they’re considered omnivores and Andrewsarchus probably was too. In fact, because Andrewsarchus was found on what was once a beach along the ocean, some researchers think it might have used its big forward-pointing front teeth to dig shellfish out of the sand. Most likely it ate pretty much anything it could find or catch, including shellfish, turtles, and other small animals, carrion, and plant material like fruit, nuts, and roots. The teeth of some entelodont species show wear marks that indicate it probably bit through bones pretty frequently, possibly while scavenging already dead animals but possibly also when killing prey. One fossil skull of a herbivorous artiodactyl that lived in North America was found with an entelodont incisor embedded in it.

This week is Connor's episode, and we're going to learn about some animals that don't conform to "typical" gender roles, one way or another. I'll be at ConCarolinas this week, from June 3 through 5, including recording a live crossover episode with Arcane Carolinas! Further reading: Species of algae with three sexes that all mate in pairs identified in Japanese river How a microbe chooses among seven sexes Facultative Parthenogenesis in California Condors The sparrow with four sexes Chinstrap penguins make good dads: Laysan albatrosses make good moms: Black swans make good dads: Some rams really like other rams (photo by Henry Holdsworth): New Mexico whiptail lizards are all females: California condor females don't always need a male to produce fertilized eggs: Clownfish change sex under some circumstances: The white-throated sparrow essentially has four sexes: You are awesome (photo by By Eric Rolph)! Show transcript: “Hey y’all, this is Connor. Welcome to a very special Pride Month edition of the Strange Animals Podcast.” This week we have Connor’s episode! We decided to make it the very last episode in our Kickstarter month so that it’s as close to the month of June as possible, because June is Pride Month and our episode is about gender-diverse animals! Don’t worry, parents of very young children, we won’t be discussing mating practices except in very general terms. Pride month celebrates people’s differences when it comes to gender expression and sexuality. That’s why its symbol is the rainbow, because a rainbow is made up of all different colors the same way there are different kinds of people. Sometimes people get angry when they hear about Pride month because they think there are only two genders, and that those two genders should only behave in certain ways. Pffft. That’s not even true when it comes to animals, and humans are a lot more socially complicated. For instance, let’s start by talking about a humble creature called algae. If you remember episode 129, about the blurry line between animals and plants, you may remember that algae isn’t actually a plant or an animal. Some species resemble plants more than animals, like kelp, but they’re not actually plants. In July of 2021, scientists in Japan announced that a species of freshwater algae has three sexes: male, female, and bisexual. All three sexes can pair up with any of the others to reproduce and their offspring may be male, female, or bisexual at random. Even though the algae has been known to science for a long time, no one realized it has three sexes because most of the time, algae reproduces by cloning itself. The research team thinks that a lot of algae species may have three sexes but researchers just haven’t been looking for it. Yes, I realize that was a weird place to start, but it’s also fascinating! It’s also not even nearly as complicated as a protozoan called Tetrahymena thermophila, which has seven sexes. Let’s look at a bird next, the penguin. You’ve probably heard of the book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who adopt an egg and raise the baby chick together. For some reason some people get so angry at those penguins! Never trust someone who doesn’t like baby penguins, and never trust someone who thinks animals should act like humans. The events in the book are based on a true story, where two male chinstrap penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo formed a pair bond and tried to hatch a rock, although they also tried to steal eggs from the other penguins. A zookeeper gave the pair an extra penguin egg to hatch instead. The most interesting thing about the story is that same-sex couples are common among penguins, in both captivity and in the wild, among both males and females. Since penguins sometimes lay two eggs but most species can only take care of one chick properly, zookeepers often give the extra eggs to same-sex penguin pairs.

This week is Caitie Sith and Dave's episode! They want to learn about animals reintroduced to Scotland, especially the Highland wildcat! The Scottish (or Highland) wildcat: The Eurasian lynx: The Eurasian beaver (with babies!): The white-tailed eagle: Reindeer in Scotland: The pine marten: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is Caitie Sith and Dave’s episode, where we’ll learn about the re-wilding of Scotland! Re-wilding is the process of restoring an ecosystem to its natural state, basically reversing habitat loss. Most of the time there’s a lot more to it than just reintroducing native animals, but sometimes that’s all that’s required. Scotland is a part of the island of Great Britain, north of England. People have lived there since the last glaciers melted at the end of the Pleistocene, around 12,000 years ago. During the Pleistocene and a few thousand years after the glaciers melted, Scotland was connected to Europe by a lot of marshy land where today there’s ocean, and naturally many animals lived in Scotland that were also found in Europe at the time. Some of the ice age megafauna that lived in Scotland included the woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, bison, aurochs, wild boar, saiga antelope, giant deer, red deer, reindeer, moose, wild horse, beaver, walrus, Polar bear, brown bear, lynx, wolf, Arctic fox, and cave lion. Many fossil and subfossil remains of Pleistocene animals were destroyed by the formation and movement of thick glacier ice, which scoured the land down to bedrock in many places, so those are only the animals we know for sure lived in Scotland. But Scotland wasn’t covered by glaciers all the time. The Pleistocene wasn’t a single ice age but a series of cold events interspersed with warming trends. During these interglacial periods, which lasted some 10- to 15,000 years at a time, animals would move to Scotland from other places or become more numerous than before. Then the climate would start cooling again, glaciers would slowly form over many years, and animals would move to areas where there was more food. This happened repeatedly over a period of more than 2.5 million years. In other words, while we have some fossils of Pleistocene animals that once lived in Scotland, we don’t have nearly as many as have been found in England, Ireland, and Wales. But what we do know is that Scotland was once teeming with all kinds of animals we’d never associate with the country today, like cave lions and Polar bears! Much of the ice age megafauna went extinct around 12,000 years ago when the last glaciers melted and the climate started warming. Cold-adapted animals couldn’t always survive in a warmer climate, not to mention that as the climate changed, the types of plants available to eat changed too. Some animals migrated away or went extinct, while some were able to stay in Scotland successfully. This included the red deer, reindeer, wild boar, walrus, brown bear, and lynx. If you’re wondering why that list is full of animals that don’t actually live in Scotland these days, like the brown bear and lynx, it’s because humans hunted many of the native Scottish animals to extinction. Others went extinct due to habitat loss or competition with introduced animals. Many surviving species are endangered today for the same reasons. For example, the Scottish wildcat, also called the Highland wildcat. We talked about it briefly in episode 52 way back in early 2018. One of the animals that migrated to Scotland after the Pleistocene, but before sea levels rose and cut the British Isles off from Europe, was the European wildcat. The Scottish population has been separated from the European population for at least 7,000 years, and some researchers think it should be classified as a subspecies of European wildcat. The Scottish wildcat is a little larger than a domestic cat and is always tabby striped.

It's Nicholas's episode this week, and Nicholas wants to learn more about hominins, the ancestors and cousins of modern humans! Happy birthday to Autumn! I hope you have a great birthday! Further listening: Humans Part One Further reading: Were Neanderthals the Earliest Cave Artists? Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles DNA reveals first look at enigmatic human relative What does it mean to have Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA? Hand and footprint art dates to mid-Ice Age Risky food-finding strategy could be the key to human success A stone circle in a cave was probably built by Neandertals: A deer bone with carving on it probably made by Neandertals: Some cave paintings probably made by Neandertals: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast! I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is Nicholas’s episode! Nicholas wanted an updated episode about hominins, our ancient ancestors or species closely related to modern humans. The last time we talked about hominins was way back in episodes 25 and 26, so it’s definitely time to revisit the topic. But first, a big birthday shout-out to Autumn! Happy birthday, Autumn, and I hope you have the best birthday so far! If you haven’t listened to episode 25 in a while, or ever, I recommend you go back and give it a listen if you want background information about how humans evolved and our closest extinct relatives, Neandertals and Denisovans. I’ve transcribed that episode finally, so you can read the episode instead of listen to it if you prefer. There’s a link in the show notes. Results of a study published in January 2022 in the journal Nature has finally dated the oldest known Homo sapiens remains found so far. The remains were found in Ethiopia in the 1960s but the volcanic ash found over them was too fine-grained to date with any certainty. Finally, though, the eruption has been determined to come from a volcano almost 250 miles, or 400 km, away from the remains. The Shala eruption was enormous and took place 230,000 years ago, so since the remains were found below the ash, the person had to have lived at least 230,000 years ago too. We’re still learning more about humans and our closest relations because new hominin fossils are being found and studied all the time. But the fossil record doesn’t tell the whole story. Only a small percentage of bones ever fossilize, and of those, only a tiny fraction are ever found by scientists. But technological advances in genetic testing means that scientists can now extract DNA from the soil. All animals shed fragments of DNA all the time, from skin cells and hairs to poop. A study published in 2021 was able to isolate Neandertal DNA from sediments in three different caves. The DNA matched the known fossils found at the sites and gave more information besides. Instead of being restricted to a single individual whose bones were found and tested, genetic testing of sediments gives genetic information about lots of individuals. In the case of a cave in northern Spain, where lots of stone tools have been found but only a single Neandertal toe bone, it turns out that two different populations of Neandertal had lived in the cave over 100,000 years ago. In episode 25, I mentioned that Neandertals didn’t seem to make things the way humans do, especially art. Some researchers even suggest that they couldn’t think symbolically the way humans do. But in the five years or so since that episode, we’ve learned a lot more about Neandertals--and they seem to have been pretty artistic after all. The main problem is that historically, whenever scientists found rock art or carvings from prehistoric times, they assumed humans made it. We might be a little biased. Some art originally thought to be made by humans is now thought to have been made by Neandertals. Most of it is found in caves. Remains of animals are often found in caves because the cave protects them from weather and other factors that ...

Thanks to Catherine and arilloyd for suggesting the marsupial mole! Further reading: Northern marsupial mole: Rare blind creature photographed in Australian outback The marsupial mole, adorable little not-mole from Australia [photo from article above]: Grant's golden mole, adorable little not-mole from Africa: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a little short episode about a very small Australian animal suggested by two listeners: Catherine, who has the best name ever, and someone called arilloyd who left us a nice review and suggested this animal in the review. I’m not sure I’m pronouncing their name right, so apologies if not. The animal is the unusual but very cute marsupial mole. There are two closely related species of marsupial mole, one that lives farther north than the other. They look very similar, with silky golden fur, strong, short legs with strong claws for digging, a very short tail, no external ears, and no eyes. The marsupial mole doesn’t have eyes at all. It doesn’t need eyes because it spends almost its entire life underground. All this sounds similar to other moles, but the marsupial mole isn’t related to other moles. Other moles are placental mammals while the marsupial mole is a (guess, you have to guess), right, it’s a marsupial! That means its babies are born very early and crawl into the mother’s pouch to finish developing. The marsupial mole has two teats, so it can raise two babies at a time. The marsupial mole grows around 6 inches long, or about 16 cm, and is a little chonky animal with a pouch that faces backwards so sand won’t get in it. It has a leathery nose and small teeth, and its front feet are large with two big claws. We actually don’t know very much about the marsupial mole because it’s so seldom seen. Not only does it live underground, it lives in the dry interior of Australia, the Great Sandy Desert. It probably also lives in other desert areas of Australia. Scientists think the marsupial mole originally evolved to dig not in desert sand but in the soft, wet ground in rainforests. Over millions of years Australia became more and more dry, until the rainforests eventually gave way to the current desert conditions. The marsupial mole had time to adapt as its environment changed, and now it’s extremely well adapted to living in sand. It sort of swims through the sand using its big paddle-shaped front feet, kicking the sand behind it with its back legs. Unlike other moles, the marsupial mole doesn’t dig permanent tunnels and the sand just collapses behind it. While the marsupial mole can’t see, and probably doesn’t have great hearing by our standards, it does have a good sense of smell in order to sniff out insect eggs and larvae, worms, and other small, soft food. It probably searches mainly for insect nests where it can find lots of food at one time, like ant nests. There are also reports of it eating adult insects, seeds, and even small lizards. The reason the marsupial mole looks and acts so much like placental moles is due to convergent evolution. The mole’s body shape and habits just work really well for an animal that wants to dig around and eat grubs. Like other moles, it has trouble regulating its body temperature since most of the time it doesn’t need to do so. If it gets too hot, it can dig deeper into the sand where it’s cooler. The marsupial mole is most similar to a completely unrelated placental mammal, Grant’s golden mole, which lives in a few parts of coastal South Africa and Namibia in Africa. Grant’s golden mole lives in sandy areas and swims through the sand like the marsupial mole does. It mainly eats termites and other insects, but it will also eat small reptiles. Its fur is a sandy golden color and it has no external ears, no eyes, and three big claws on its front feet. It only grows about 3 and a half inches long, or 9 cm, which makes it the smallest golden mole.

This week it's Zoe and Dillon's episode! They wanted to learn about some really interesting salamanders, including the axolotl and the hellbender! A big birthday shout-out to Heather R. too. The very happiest of birthdays to you! Further reading: Mexico City’s endangered axolotl has found fame—is that enough to save it? How Do Salamanders Breathe? Most wild axolotls are brown: Most captive-bred axolotls are leucistic: The hellbender doesn't have external gills as an adult: The red eft, the juvenile stage of the red-spotted newt: Adult mudpuppies have external gills just like axolotls do: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. We’re your cohosts, Zoe and Dillon. And I’m your third cohost, Kate Shaw. This week we have Zoe and Dillon’s episode, and they want to learn about the axolotl, the hellbender, and some other salamanders. It’ll be the greatest amphibian episode ever! But first, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Heather R.! I hope the weather is perfect for your birthday and you get to go out and appreciate it. So, let’s start with the axolotl, because everyone loves it! “Axolotl” isn’t the way it’s pronounced in its native country of Mexico, since it comes from the name of an Aztec god of fire and lightning, but it’s the common pronunciation in English so I’m going to stick with that one. In addition to Zoe and Dillon, at least one other listener has suggested we cover the axolotl. That would be Rosy, and I apologize to anyone else who suggested it but whose name didn’t make it onto the suggestions list. Way back in episode 104, about tiger salamanders, we learned that the tiger salamander is closely related to the axolotl. But the two species look very different most of the time because the axolotl exhibits a trait called neoteny. In most salamanders, the egg hatches into a larval salamander that lives in water, which means it has external gills so it can breathe underwater. It grows and ultimately metamorphoses into a juvenile salamander that spends most of its time on land, so it loses its external gills in the metamorphosis. Eventually it takes on its adult coloration and pattern. But the axolotl doesn’t metamorphose. Even when it matures, it still looks kind of like a big larva, complete with external gills, and it lives underwater its whole life. Very rarely, an axolotl metamorphoses into an adult form, at which point it looks a whole lot like a tiger salamander. This generally happens if the individual is exposed to excess iodine in its diet, and metamorphosing like this may actually lead to the axolotl’s death. Axolotls exhibit neoteny because it gives them an advantage in their natural range, so even though it seems strange to us compared to all those other salamanders, it’s what the axolotl is supposed to do. The axolotl’s natural range is very specific. Originally it lived in two large, cold lakes in the Valley of Mexico. This is where Mexico City is and it’s been a hub of civilization for thousands of years. A million people lived there in 1521 when the Spanish invaded and destroyed the Aztec Empire with introduced diseases and war. The axolotl was an important food of the Aztecs and the civilizations that preceded them, and if you’ve only ever seen pictures of axolotls you may wonder why. Salamanders are usually small, but a full-grown axolotl can grow up to 18 inches long, or 45 cm, although most are about half that length. Also if you’ve only ever seen pictures of axolotls you may think they’re all white or pink. That’s actually rare in the wild. Most wild axolotls are brown, greenish-brown, or gray, often with lighter speckles. They can even change color somewhat to blend in with their surroundings better. It’s captive axolotls that are so often white or pink, or sometimes other colors or patterns. That’s because they’re bred for the pet trade and for medical research, because not only are they cute and relatively easy...

Thanks to Kristie and Jason, we're going to learn about some mystery big cats reported in Australia, in particular Victoria. Further reading: Official big cat hunt declared a bust, so why do people keep seeing them? Further watching: Thylacine video from 1933, colorized You'll probably need to enlarge this but it's a still from a 2018 video purportedly showing a mystery big cat, but in this frame you can see the ears are pointy, which is a sure sign of a domestic cat: A melanistic (black) leopard and regular leopards (picture from this site). If you zoom in you can see the spot pattern on the black leopard: A puma/cougar/mountain lion. Note the lack of spots: A thylacine. Note the lack of spots but presence of stripes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is Kristie and Jason’s episode. They want everyone to learn about mysterious big cats in Australia! Australia, of course, is home to many wonderful animals, but almost all of the native mammals are marsupials. There are no native felids of any kind in Australia, even in the fossil record. This is because Australia split off from the rest of the world’s landmasses when the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart. Marsupials actually first arose in South America and spread to Australia when the two landmasses were connected. Then, around 180 million years ago, South America and Africa split off from the rest of Gondwana, including Australia. Most of South America’s marsupials went extinct as placental mammals arose and became more and more numerous, but Australia was on its own starting about 30 to 50 million years ago. Marsupials never had to compete with placental mammals during most of that time, except for bats, and the marsupials thrived. Humans first populated Australia at least 41,000 years ago and probably more like 65,000 years ago. The first dingoes, a type of dog, were introduced around 5,000 years ago. The first European sighting of Australia was in 1606, and less than 200 years later the British colonized the continent, bringing with them invasive species like cats, rats, cattle, sheep, foxes, rabbits, deer, and lots more, which have driven many indigenous animals to extinction. But while domestic cats are common in Australia, as far as we know no one has ever deliberately released enough big cats to form a breeding population. In that case, though, why are there so many reports of big cats in parts of Australia? If you remember way back in episode 52, where we talked about big cats in Britain, there were lots of stories and a certain amount of evidence that individual big cats were occasionally found in the country. Ultimately, though, there’s no proof of a breeding population of big cats. The same is more or less true in Australia, but Australia is so much bigger and so much less populated than Britain, it would be easy for a small population of big cats to hide. And maybe they’re not actually big cats but some other animal, something that is native to Australia. Kristie and Jason have lots of experience searching for big cats in central Victoria, Australia. They even helped with the research of a book about big cat sightings. Victoria is in southeastern Australia and is the smallest state. If you walked south from central Victoria to the coast, and then got on a boat and kept going south, you’d run into Tasmania. If you walked north instead, eventually you’d come to New South Wales but that is going to be a long walk. Victoria is mostly temperate and rainy but has tall mountains, semi-arid plains, and lots of rivers. As Kristie pointed out, different parts of Australia have different stories about mystery big cats, but I’m mostly going to talk about sightings in Victoria, just to narrow it down. To start us off, now that we have some background information, here’s a clip from the conversation I had with Kristie. The audio isn’t great, unfortunately,

Thanks to Isaac, Joel, Ethan, and Richard E. for their suggestions this week! Don't forget to check out our crowdfunding campaign for some cute enamel pins! Further reading: Snapping Shrimp Drown Out Sonar with Bubble-Popping Trick One example of a pistol shrimp--there are many, many species (photo from this site): A walnut sphinx moth sitting on someone's hand (photo by John Lindsey, found on this page): A caterpillar (photo by Ashley Bosarge, found on this page): The Asian longhorned beetle (from this site): The white-spotted sawyer pine beetle is another type of longhorned beetle: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s been too long since we’ve had an invertebrates episode, so this week let’s learn about some invertebrates that make noise. Thanks to Isaac, Joel, Ethan, and Richard E. for their suggestions! We don’t have a birthday shout-out this week, but we do have a reminder that the next five episodes, the ones releasing in May, are our Kickstarter episodes! Those are from the Kickstarter level where the backer got to choose the topic and work with me to craft the episode. I’ve been amazed at how fantastic those episodes turned out, and I think you’ll like them. Speaking of crowdfunding campaigns, a quick reminder that the Tiny Pin Friends Indiegogo is still going on. It’s sort of stuck halfway to our goal, probably because I got busy with the book release and haven’t been telling people about the pins, so if you want to take a look at the pin designs, there’s a link in the show notes. Thanks! Now, on to the invertebrates! Both Isaac and Joel suggested the same topic at different times, pistol shrimp. This is a group of shrimps also called snapping shrimps. Most species live in warm, shallow coastal habitats like coral reefs, but some live in colder water and at least one lives in freshwater caves. The pistol shrimp only grows a few inches long at most, or about 5 cm. It gets its name from its big claw, which functions in a similar way to the workings of a pistol (sort of). But instead of shooting bullets, the claw shoots bubbles—but so incredibly fast, they might as well be bullets. A pistol shrimp has two claws, but one is small and used for picking stuff up and grabbing food. The other claw is the pistol claw that’s much bigger and stronger. Which claw is which depends on the individual, and if a shrimp’s pistol claw gets damaged or bitten off, its other claw will develop into a pistol claw. The damaged or lost claw eventually regenerates into a little claw for manipulating food. The pistol shrimp is mostly an ambush hunter. It will hide in a burrow or rock crevice with its antennae sticking out, and when a small animal like a fish happens by, the shrimp will emerge from its hiding place just far enough to get a good shot at the animal. It opens its big claw and snaps it shut so fast and so forcefully that it shoots tiny bubbles out at speeds of over 60mph, or 100 km/hour. Obviously the bubbles don’t travel very far at that speed, really only a few millimeters, but it’s powerful enough at this short range to stun or outright kill a small animal. The shrimp then grabs its stunned or dead prey and drags it back into its hiding spot to eat. The process is way more complicated than it sounds. When the claw opens, water rushes into a tiny chamber in the claw. When it snaps closed, a tiny point on the claw pushes into the chamber, which leaves no room for the water. The water is therefore forced out of the chamber at such incredibly high pressure that it leaves vapor-filled cavities in the water, the bubbles, which collapse with a loud snapping sound. The pressure wave from the collapsing bubble is what actually kills or stuns an animal. Physics! I don’t understand it! Check the show notes for an article that goes into more detail about this process, which I’ve hopefully described correctly.

Thanks to Sarah L. for buying the podcast two books off our wishlist! This episode was inspired by an entry in one of those books! A very happy birthday this week to Matthew! Don't forget that you can still contribute to our Indiegogo "Tiny Pin Friends" campaign to get a small hard enamel pin of a narwhal, a capybara with a tangerine on its head, and/or a thylacine! On April 19, 2022, the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World goes officially on sale in paperback everywhere! (The ebook is already available.) Bookstores in the U.S. can order fully returnable copies at a standard bookstore discount; bookstores outside of the U.S. still get a discount but the copies are non-returnable. The book should be available to order anywhere you usually order books, including Amazon and Bookshop.org! Further reading: Rakali/Water-rat--Australia's "otter" Additional Sources (because this episode turned out to be really hard to research): Conway, J., Koseman, C.M., Naish, D. (2013). Cryptozoologicon vol. I, 37-38. Irregular Books. Ley, Willy. (1987). Exotic Zoology, 291-295. Bonanza. (Original work published 1959) Pollock, G. A. (1970). The South Island otter: A reassessment. Proceedings (New Zealand Ecological Society), 17, 129–135. Pollock, G. A. (1974). The South Island otter: An addendum. Proceedings (New Zealand Ecological Society), 21, 57-61. Worthy, T. H., et al. (2006). Miocene mammal reveals a Mesozoic ghost lineage on insular New Zealand, southwest Pacific. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(51), 19419–19423. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605684103 An otter with its telltale bubble chain (Photo by Linda Tanner): A rakali swimming (photo by Con Boekel, from website linked to above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a fascinating mystery animal from New Zealand! Many thanks to Sarah L., who very generously bought me a couple of books off my podcast wishlist, which I tend to forget is even a thing that exists! One of the books is Cryptozoologicon, Volume 1 by John Conway, C.M. Koseman, and Darren Naish, and that’s where I got this week’s topic, the mysterious waitoreke. [why-tore-EH-kee] This week is also special because the paperback version of our own book, Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, officially goes on sale on April 19, 2022. That’s tomorrow, if you’re listening to this the day the episode goes live. It should be available to order everywhere you ordinarily buy books, throughout the world. The ebook is available too. I’ve mailed all Kickstarter copies so if you haven’t received your copy yet, let me know. There were a few people who never returned the backer survey so I don’t have those addresses to mail books to. If you want a signed copy of the book at this point, or a hardback copy, you’ll need to catch me in person. I’ll be at ConCarolinas over the first weekend of June and I’d love to meet up with you. I’m working on the audiobook now, for those of you waiting for that one. (It’s a slow process, so don’t expect it for at least another month, sorry.) You know what else is happening this week? A birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Matthew! I hope your birthday is everything you ever hoped for in a birthday, or maybe even more! New Zealand has almost no native mammal species except for a few bats, some seals and sea lions that live along the coast, and some whales and dolphins that live off the coast. Lots of mammals have been introduced, from dogs to rats, cattle to cats, but there are reports of a small mammal in New Zealand called some version of waitoreke, supposedly a Maori word meaning something like swift-moving water animal. Even the animal’s name is confusing, though. No one’s sure whether the word is genuinely Maori.

Pre-order your tiny pin friend via our Indiegogo campaign! This week we talk about some springtime animals! Sort of! Thanks to Derek and Nikita for their suggestions! Happy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! What a busy birthday week! Everybody gets cake! Further reading: Tales from Tennessee There's more than one way to grow a beak A male river chub. "It's not funny guys, put me down guys" (photo by Bill Hubick): Busy busy busy building a big big nest (photo from site linked to above): Got a rock (photo from site linked to above): One bilby: Two bilbies: Easter bilbies not bunnies: Egg tooth: The red jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken: Modern domestic chickens: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, with spring festivals like Easter coming up fast. This week let’s look at three animals that represent springtime, sort of. Thanks to Derek and Nikita for suggesting two of the animals we’ll learn about this week! Before we start, though, two things! One, I’m running a little crowdfunding campaign to have some enamel pins made. I won’t spam you about it like our big Kickstarter for the book last fall, but there will be a link in the show notes if you want to take a look. There are three designs, a narwhal, a capybara with a tangerine on its head, and a not-terribly-accurate thylacine. The campaign is called Tiny Pin Friends and it’s on Indiegogo. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tiny-pin-friends/x/2964999#/ Two, it’s birthday shout-out time! This week we have not one, not two, but THREE birthday shout-outs! You know what that means, of course. It means we all need to be celebrating all week! A great big happy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! And yes, birthday Derek is the same Derek who suggested one of the animals this week! In fact, let’s start with his suggestion, a fish called the river chub. It’s a little fish that only grows a little over a foot long at most, or 33 cm, although it’s usually much smaller than that. It’s common in fast-moving streams and rivers throughout North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and surrounding areas. The river chub isn’t all that exciting to look at, unless of course you’re a fish enthusiast or a river chub yourself. It’s greenish-silver above and pale underneath with orange fins. Males are larger than females and during breeding season, in late spring, the male turns purplish-red, his head enlarges, and he develops tubercles on the front part of his head that look sort of like white rhinestones. His physical changes aren’t just to attract a mate. The male river chub builds a pebble nest by picking up little stones and moving them to just the right spots, so by having a more robust head and broad mouth, he can pick up bigger stones. And he picks up a LOT of stones, as many as 10,000 of them, which he arranges and rearranges. Females are attracted to well-made nests. After a female lays her eggs in the nest, the male fertilizes the eggs and then spends the next week or so defending them by head-butting other males and potential predators, until the eggs hatch into larvae. The pebble nests help other animals too. Over 30 species of fish use the nests as spawning sites once the river chub’s eggs hatch. Good job, river chub, helping out all those other fish! Next, a while back Nikita suggested we learn about the bilby. It’s not springtime right now in Australia where the bilby lives, but the Christian holiday of Easter is still celebrated at the same time as it is in the northern hemisphere. Instead of chocolate Easter bunnies, in Australia they also have chocolate Easter bilbies. In 1968, a nine-year-old girl named Rose-Marie Dusting wrote a story called “Billy the Aussie Easter Bilby.” When she grew up, Rose-Marie published the story as a picture book,

New frog just dropped. Happy birthday to Finn and Oran this week! Have a great birthday, both of you! Further reading: Frog with tapir-like nose found in Amazon rainforest, thanks to its "beeping" call Meet the tapir frog: Looks kind of like the South American tapir, but frog: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a short episode about the recent discovery of a mystery frog in Peru--but first, we have TWO birthday shout-outs! That’s twice the fun! Happy birthday to both Finn and Oran! I hope your birthdays are amazing! Maybe you should each have two birthday parties, one for yourself and one for the other, even though you don’t know each other and your birthdays are actually on different days. Peru is a country in western South America, and it’s home to the Amazon Basin rainforest and many other habitats. Frogs are common throughout the Amazon, naturally, since there’s a whole lot of water and rain, and it’s warm all the time. One particular genus of frog, Synapturanus, is especially widespread but is hard to find because it spends most of its time underground. A team of scientists researching the Amazon’s diversity of animals and plants, especially those organisms that are mostly hidden for various reasons, heard about a particular Synapturanus frog known to the people of the area. The frog is nocturnal and lives underground in burrows it digs in the Amazon peatlands. Peat is wet soil made up mostly of partially decayed vegetation. It’s the first step in the formation of coal beds, but the coal takes millions of years to form whereas peat only take thousands of years to form. Peatlands are really important to the ecological health of the entire earth, because they store so much carbon and absorb so much water. The scientists knew from locals that this particular frog existed. The next step was to actually find it so they could learn more about it. A small team of scientists from Peru and other countries traveled to the area, and local guides took them to sites where the frog was supposed to live. Because the frog is nocturnal, they had to go at night to find it. But because the frog also spends most of its time underground, they couldn’t just walk around shining flashlights on frog-shaped things in hopes of finding a new species of frog. Instead, they had to listen. Many new frog species are only discovered after a frog expert hears a call they don’t recognize. That was the case for this frog. The male makes a loud beeping noise, especially after rain. Whenever one of the scientists heard one, they’d immediately drop to the ground and start digging with their hands. I can’t even imagine how muddy they must have gotten. It was around 2am on the last night of the search when their digging paid off. A little brown frog hopped out of its disturbed burrow and all the scientists scrambled around in an excited panic to catch it carefully before it got away. This is what the frog sounds like: [tapir frog beeping] The locals call the frog rana danta, which means tapir frog. The tapir, as you may remember from episodes 18 and 245, among others, is a sort of pig-shaped animal with a short trunk-like snoot called a proboscis. It’s distantly related to rhinoceroses and horses. It uses its proboscis to gather plants and spends a lot of time underwater, and will even sink to the bottom of a pond or stream and walk across it on the bottom instead of swimming. The tapir most common around the Amazon in Peru is the South American tapir. It’s dark brown in color with a tiny little stub of a tail and a shorter proboscis than other tapir species. Its proboscis looks less like a little trunk and more like a long pointy nose. The tapir frog is chocolate brown in color, has no tail of course because it’s a frog, and while it has a chonky body sort of life a tapir, its nose draws out to a blunt point.

Thanks to Zachary, Enzo, and Oran for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about some interesting reptiles! Happy birthday to Vale! Have a fantastic birthday!! The magnificent Gila monster: The Gila monster's tongue is forked, but not like a snake's: The remarkable green basilisk (photo by Ryan Chermel, found at this site): A striped basilisk has a racing stripe: I took this photo of a basilisk myself! That's why it's a terrible photo! The basilisk is sitting on a branch just above the water, its long tail hanging down: The desert sand boa: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about three weird and interesting reptiles, with suggestions from Zachary, Enzo, and Oran, including a possible solution to a mystery animal we’ve talked about before! But first, we have a birthday shoutout! A very happy birthday to Vale! You should probably get anything you want on your birthday, you know? Want a puppy? Sure, it’s your birthday! Want 12 puppies? Okay, birthday! Want to take your 12 puppies on a roadtrip in a fancy racecar? Birthday! Our first suggestion is from Enzo and Zachary, who both wrote me at different times suggesting an episode about the Gila monster. How I haven’t already covered an animal that has monster right there in its name, I just don’t know. The Gila monster is a lizard that lives in parts of southwestern North America, in both the United States and Mexico. It can grow up to two feet long, or 60 cm, including its tail. It’s a chonky, slow-moving lizard with osteoderms embedded in its skin that look like little pearls. Only its belly doesn’t have osteoderms. This gives it a beaded appearance, and in fact the four other species in its genus are called beaded lizards. Its tongue is dark blue-black and forks at the tip, but not like a snake’s tongue. It’s more like a long lizard tongue that’s divided at the very end. The Gila monster varies in color with an attractive pattern of light-colored blotches on a darker background. The background color is dark brown or black, while the lighter color varies from individual to individual, from pink to yellow to orange to red. You may remember what it means when an animal has bright markings that make it stand out. It warns other animals away. That’s right: the Gila monster is venomous! The Gila monster has modified salivary glands in its lower jaw that contain toxins. Its lower teeth have grooves, and when the lizard needs to inject venom, the venom flows upward through the grooves by capillary force. Since it mostly eats eggs and small animals, scientists think it only uses its venom as a defense. Its venom is surprisingly toxic, although its bite isn’t deadly to healthy adult humans. It is incredibly painful, though. Some people think the Gila monster can spit venom like some species of cobra can, but while this isn’t the case, one thing the Gila monster does do is bite and hold on. It can be really hard to get it to let go. The fossilized remains of a Gila monster relative were discovered in 2007 in Germany, dating to 47 million years ago. The fossils are well preserved and the lizard’s teeth already show evidence of venom canals. The Gila monster is related to monitor lizards, although not closely, and for a long time people thought it was almost the only venomous reptile in the world. These days we know that a whole lot of lizards produce venom, including the Komodo dragon, which is a type of huge monitor lizard. In 2005, a drug based on a protein found in Gila monster venom was approved for use in humans. It helps manage type 2 diabetes, and while the drug itself is synthetic and not an exact match for the toxin protein, if researchers hadn’t started by studying the toxin, they wouldn’t have come up with the drug. The Gila monster lives in dry areas with lots of brush and rocks where it can hide.

My little cat Gracie got lost but she's home! Let's learn about some other rediscovered animals this week! A very happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever! Further listening: The Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!) Further reading: Bornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead Rediscovery of the 'extinct' Pinatubo volcano mouse Gracie, home at last! She's so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she's eating lots now: The Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above): The djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould's mouse (photo from article linked above): The Pinatubo volcano mouse: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. While I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again! A couple of quick things before we get started, though. First, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three. Next, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great podcast that I really recommend if you’re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff. Finally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I’m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn’t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn’t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home! So I’ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She’s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she’s very happy to be home. The person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we’ll start with a rediscovered bird. There are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia, Borneo and Sumatra. The subspecies that lives in Sumatra is fairly common throughout the mountains on that island, where it lives in the lower branches of trees in higher elevations. It’s a tiny owl that only weighs about 4 ounces, or 100 grams. As the article I link to in the show notes points out, that’s about the weight of four AA batteries. The subspecies that lives on Borneo, though, was always much rarer and had a much smaller range. In fact, no one had seen one since 1892 and researchers thought it was probably extinct. There’s another owl that lives in the mountains of Borneo, the mountain scops owl, that’s fairly common. In May of 2016,

Show transcript: Hi. If you’re hearing this, it means I’m sick or something else has happened that has kept me from making a new episode this week. This was a Patreon bonus episode from mid-August 2019. I think it’s a good one. If you’re a Patreon subscriber, I’m sorry you don’t have a new episode to listen to this time. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better soon and we can get back to learning about lots of strange animals. Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for mid-August, 2019! While I was doing research for the paleontology mistakes and frauds episodes, I came across the discovery of what might have been the biggest land animal that ever lived. But while I wanted to include it in one episode or the other, it wasn’t clear that it was either a mistake or a fraud. It might in fact have been a real discovery, now lost. In late 1877 or early 1878, a man named Oramel Lucas was digging up dinosaur bones for the famous paleontologist Edward Cope. Cope was one of the men we talked about in the paleontological mistakes episode, the bitter enemy of Othniel Marsh. Lucas directed a team of workers digging for fossils in a number of sites near Garden Park in Colorado, and around the summer of 1878 he shipped the fossils he’d found to Marsh. Among them was a partial neural arch of a sauropod. The neural arch is the top part of a vertebra, in this case probably one near the hip. Sauropods, of course, are the biggest land animals known. Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus are all sauropods. Sauropods had long necks that were probably mostly held horizontally as the animal cropped low-growing plants and shrubs, and extremely long tails held off the ground. Their legs were column-like, something like enormous elephant legs, to support the massively heavy body. We know what Diplodocus looked like because we have lots of Diplodocus fossils and can reconstruct the entire skeleton, but for most other sauropods we still only have partial skeletons. The body size and shape of other sauropods are conjecture based on what we know about Diplodocus. In some cases we only have a few bones, or in the case of Cope’s 1878 sauropod, a single partial bone. Cope examined the neural arch, sketched it and made notes, and published a formal description of it later in 1878. He named it Amphicoelias [Am-fi-sil-i-as] fragillimus. The largest species of Diplodocus, D. hallorum, was about 108 feet long, or 33 meters, measuring from its stretched-out head to the tip of its tail. Estimates of fragillimus from Cope’s measurement of the single neural arch suggest that its tail alone might be longer than Diplodocus’s whole body. Cope measured fragillimus’s partial neural arch as 1.5 meters tall, or almost five feet. That’s only the part that remained. It was broken and weathered, but the entire vertebra may have been as large as 2.7 meters high, or 8.85 feet. From that measurement, and considering that fragillimus was seemingly related to Diplodocus, even the most conservative estimate of fragillimus’s overall size is 40 meters long, or 131 feet, and could be as long as 60 meters, or 197 feet. This is far larger than even Seismosaurus, which is estimated to have grown 33.5 meters long, or 110 feet, and which is considered the largest land animal known. So why isn’t fragillimus considered the largest land animal known? Mainly because we no longer have the fossil to study. It’s completely gone with no indication of where it might be or what happened to it. And that has led to some people thinking that it either never existed in the first place, or that Cope measured it wrong. One argument is that Cope wrote down the measurements wrong and that the neural arch wasn’t nearly as large as Cope’s notes indicate. But Lucas, who collected the fossil, always made his own measurements and these match up with what Cope reported. Lucas and Cope both remarked on the size of the fossil,

Thanks to Pranav for this week's suggestion! Happy birthday to MaxOrangutan! Have a great birthday! Further reading: Scarlet macaw DNA points to ancient breeding operation in Southwest The glorious hyacinth macaw: Roelant Savery's dodo painting with not one but TWO separate mystery macaws featured: The blue-and-gold macaw: Eleazar Albin's mystery macaw: Detail from Jan Steen's painting of a mystery macaw: The scarlet macaw: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Recently, Pranav suggested the topic of mystery macaws. As it happens, that’s a topic I researched for the book, which by the way is now FORMATTED! And hopefully by the time you hear this I’ll have been able to order a test copy to make sure it looks good before I order enough copies for everyone who backed the Kickstarter at that level. Whew! I’ve used the mystery macaw chapter from the book as a basis for this episode, but it’s not identical by any means—I’ve added some stuff. Before we learn about some mystery macaws, though, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to MaxOrangutan! Max! I bet you like bananas and climb around a lot! I hope you have a fantastic birthday, maybe with a banana cake or a cake banana, which I think is a thing I just made up but it sounds good, doesn’t it? Macaws are a type of parrot native to the Americas. They have longer tails and larger bills than true parrots and have face patches that are mostly white or yellow. There are six genera [original incorrectly stated six species] of macaw with lots of living species, but many other species that are extinct or probably extinct. The largest living species is the hyacinth macaw, which is a beautiful blue all over except for yellow face markings. It can grow over 3 feet long, or about 92 centimeters, including its long tail. It mostly eats nuts, even coconuts and macadamia nuts that are too tough for most other animals to crack open, but it also likes fruit, seeds, and some other plant material. Like other parrots, macaws are intelligent birds that have been observed using tools. For instance, the hyacinth macaw will use pieces of sticks and other items to keep a nut from rolling away while it works on biting it open. The story of a mystery bird sometimes called the Martinique macaw starts almost 400 years ago, when Jacques Bouton, a French priest, visited the Caribbean in 1639 and specifically Martinique in 1642. Bouton wrote an account of the people and animals he saw, including several macaws that don’t quite match any birds known today. One of these is the so-called Martinique macaw, which he said was blue and saffron in color. Saffron is a rich orangey yellow. We have some paintings that might be depictions of the mystery macaws. An artist named Eleazar Albin painted a blue and yellow parrot with a white face patch in 1740 that’s supposedly the Martinique macaw, although Albin would have seen the bird in Jamaica when he visited in 1701, not Martinique. The two islands are about 1,100 miles apart, or almost 1,800 kilometers. A similar blue and yellow macaw appears in Roelant Savery’s 1626 painting of a dodo. The dodo lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, nowhere near the Americas. Savery just liked to paint dodos and included them in a lot of his art. In another 1626 painting, called “Landscape with Birds,” he included a dodo, an ostrich, a chicken, a turkey, a peacock, ducks, swans, cranes of various kinds, and lots of other birds that don’t live anywhere near each other. On the far left edge of the painting there’s a blue macaw with yellow underparts. In the early 20th century, a zoologist named Walter Rothschild read Bouton’s account and decided those birds needed to be described as new species, even though there were no type specimens and no way of knowing if the birds were actually new to science. He described the Martinique macaw in 1905 but reclassified it ...

Thanks to Luke for suggesting this week's topic: Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat, AKA the sabertooth tiger! Further reading: Did sabertooth tigers purr or roar? The double-fanged adolescence of saber-toothed cats We don't know for sure what Smilodon looked like, but it might have been something like this: An artist's rendition of an adolescent Smilodon with doubled fangs [picture from second link above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an animal suggested by Luke, the sabertooth tiger, also called the sabertooth cat since it wasn’t actually a tiger, also called smilodon after its scientific name. We’ve talked about it before, way back in episode 34, but a lot of new studies have been published since then and we know a lot more about this terrifying-looking animal! The genus of the saber-toothed cat is Smilodon, so that’s mostly what I’m going to call it in this episode. It’s classified as a member of the family Felidae, which is the same family where you find domestic cats, wildcats, big cats, and lots of extinct animals like the cave lion, but Smilodon wasn’t closely related to what we think of as cats. There were at least three species of saber-tooth cats in the genus Smilodon that we know of, but it had many other similar-looking relatives. Smilodon is best known from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California, where the remains of hundreds of individuals have been discovered. That’s a big reason why we know so much about Smilodon, especially the species Smilodon fatalis that lived in North America and parts of South America. An even bigger species lived exclusively in South America, while both were probably descended from a smaller species that also lived in South America. S. fatalis is estimated to have grown up to 39 inches tall at the shoulder, or 99 cm, while S. populator stood at an estimated 47 inches tall, or 119 cm. That’s almost four feet tall. Some full-grown humans are that height! Smilodon was so stocky and heavily muscled that it probably looked more like a bear than a cat. Its had a broad head and jaws that could open much wider than most modern animals, which allowed it to deploy its most deadly weapon, its saber teeth, without its jaw getting in the way. Smilodon’s saber teeth were as much as 11 inches long, or 28 cm, although S. fatalis typically had teeth around 8 inches long, or 20 cm. Big as they were, the saber teeth were also relatively delicate. A young Smilodon didn’t start growing its big teeth until it was about a year old, and even then it had to learn how to use them so they wouldn’t break. Luckily for adolescent smilodons, they didn’t lose their baby fangs until they were fully grown. Most mammals only grow two sets of teeth in our lifetimes. The first set is usually called baby teeth or milk teeth. As the baby grows up, its adult teeth start growing in one at a time. The adult tooth pushes at the baby tooth until it gets loose and either comes out on its own or, in the case of me in second grade, I asked to go to the bathroom and then spent half an hour twisting at a loose baby tooth until it finally came out, along with some blood. But I got a quarter that night from the tooth fairy. (Kids, maybe don’t do that.) In the case of a young smilodon’s saber teeth, they grew in just next to the baby fangs. Instead of pushing the baby fangs out, the new teeth grew alongside them and even had a groove for the baby teeth to fit into. When scientists first discovered preserved jaws with these double fangs, they thought it was a fluke, that sometimes the new teeth came in wrong and didn’t push the old teeth out. That happens in humans sometimes too and then you have to go to the dentist to get the old baby teeth taken out. But paleontologists kept finding these double toothed jaws, and only in adolescent smilodons. Finally a team of scientists studied the teeth carefully and made...

Thanks to Page for suggesting we talk about penguins this week! A big birthday shout-out to EllieHorseLover this week too! Further reading: March of the penguins (in Norway) Rare Yellow Penguin Bewilders Scientists Giant Waikato penguin: school kids discover new species An ordinary king penguin with the rare "yellow" king penguin spotted in early 2021 (photo by Yves Adams, taken from article linked above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I was looking over the ideas list recently and noticed that Page had suggested we cover a specific bird way back in 2020! It’s about time we get to it, so thanks to Page we’re going to learn about penguins this week, including a penguin mystery. But first, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to EllieHorseLover, whose birthday comes right before next week’s episode comes out. Have a fantastic birthday, Ellie, and I agree with you about horses. They are awesome and so are you. Also, a quick correction from last week’s episode about Dolly the dinosaur. If you listened to episode 264 the day it came out, you heard the incorrect version, but I was able to correct it and upload the new version late that day. Many thanks to Llewelly, who pointed out that Dolly hasn’t actually been identified as a Diplodocus, just as a sauropod in the family Diplodocidae. Paleontologists are still studying the fossil and probably will be for some time. Also, I said that sauropods aren’t related to birds but that’s not the case. Sauropods share a common ancestor with birds and that’s why they both have the same kind of unusual respiratory system. So, speaking of birds, it’s time to learn about penguins! We’ve talked about penguins twice before, but not recently at all. It’s about time we really dug into the topic. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere, including Antarctica. The only exception is the Galapagos penguin, which we talked about in episode 99, which lives just north of the equator. Penguins are considered aquatic birds because they’re so well adapted to swimming and they spend most of their time in the ocean finding food. Instead of wings, their front limbs are flippers that they use to maneuver in the water. They’re incredibly streamlined too, with a smooth, dense coat of feathers to help keep them warm in cold water without slowing them down. One of the ways a penguin keeps from freezing in the bitterly cold winters of Antarctica and in cold water is by a trick of anatomy that most other animals don’t have. The artery that supplies blood to the flippers crosses over the veins that return blood from the flippers deeper into the body. The arterial blood is warm since it’s been through the body’s core, but the blood that has just traveled through the flippers has lost a lot of heat. Because the veins and the arteries cross several times, the cold venal blood is warmed by the warm arterial blood where the blood vessels touch, which means the blood returning into the body’s core is warm enough that it doesn’t chill the body. Penguins groom their feathers carefully to keep them clean and spread oil over them. The oil and the feathers’ nanostructures keep them from icing over when a penguin gets out of the water in sub-zero temperatures. The feathers are not only super-hydrophobic, meaning they repel water, their structure acts as an anti-adhesive. That means ice can’t stick to the feathers no matter how cold it is. In 2016 researchers created a nanofiber membrane that repels water and ice with the same nanostructures found in penguin feathers. It could eventually be used to ice-proof electrical wires and airplane wings. Penguin feathers also trap a thin layer of air, which helps the penguin stay buoyant in the water and helps keep its skin warm and dry. While a penguin is awkward on land, it’s fast and agile in the water. It mostly eats small fish, squid and other cephalopods, krill and other crustaceans,

This week we answer a question you probably didn't ask, did dinosaurs ever get sick? The answer is yes (or else it would be a super short episode). (Thanks to Llewelly for some corrections!) A big birthday shout-out to Gwendolyn! Have a great birthday! The unlocked Patreon episode about green puppies Further reading: Researchers discover first evidence indicating dinosaur respiratory infection Sauro-throat, Part 3: what does Dolly's disease tell us about sauropods? Dinosaurs got cancer Giant Dinosaur Had 2 Tumors on Its Tailbone Dinosaurs got sick, too--but from what? cough cough: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a dinosaur episode, but not one you may expect. We’re going to learn about some dinosaur fossils found with evidence of sickness to answer the question, did dinosaurs get sick? Yes, they did. Otherwise this episode would be about two minutes long. I know some people get squicked when they hear about illness and disease, so I’ve also unlocked a Patreon episode about puppies that are born green. Don’t worry, the puppies are fine! There’s a link in the show notes so you can click through and listen to the episode on your browser, no login needed. Before we get to the dinosaurs, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Gwendolyn, who is turning two years old this week! Oh my gosh, Gwendolyn, you’re going to learn so many new things this year! I hope you have a wonderful birthday. And now, the dinosaurs. Just a few days ago as this episode goes live, researchers announced that they’d found the fossilized remains of a young sauropod dinosaur. It lived around 150 million years ago in what is now the United States, specifically in southwestern Montana. The fossil was nicknamed Dolly by the paleontologists who studied it. Dolly was a sauropod in the family Diplodocidae, and like other sauropods the Diplodocids all had huge neck vertebrae because their necks were so long. The bones weren’t solid, though, but contained air sacs that made the bones lighter and also connected to the respiratory system. This is the case in birds too. Technically the air sacs in the bones are called pneumatic diverticula, but that’s hard to say so I’m just going to call them air sacs. When a bird breathes, instead of its lungs inflating and deflating, the air sacs throughout its body and bones inflate and deflate. This pumps fresh air through the lungs and allows the bird to absorb a lot more oxygen with every breath than most mammals can. The bones of Dolly’s neck had unusual bony protrusions around the spaces where the air sacs once were. When the paleontologists made a CT scan of the protrusions they discovered they were abnormal bone growths that probably resulted from an infection. Sauropods share a common ancestor with birds and researchers think they might have sometimes caught a respiratory illness similar to aspergillosis [asper-jill-OH-sus], a disease common in birds and reptiles today. Dolly would have had a fever, difficulty breathing, coughing, a sore throat, and other symptoms familiar to us as flu-like or pneumonia-like. Aspergillosis can be fatal in birds, so this respiratory infection might have actually been what killed Dolly. I think we can all agree that the worst symptom to have as a sauropod, whose necks were as much as 30 feet long, or 9 meters, is a sore throat. That’s not the only indication of illness in a dinosaur fossil, of course. A 2003 paper published in Nature detailed the results of a study where paleontologists scanned 10,000 dinosaur vertebrae from over 700 animals to see if any of them showed tumors. They found 97 individuals that did, all of them from around 70 million years ago and all of them hadrosaurs. Those are the duck-billed dinosaurs that were common in the late Cretaceous in many parts of the world, especially in what is now North America and Asia.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Ella and Jack for this week's topic suggestion, animals that mate for life or develop pair bonds! Happy Valentine's Day! Further reading: Wisdom the albatross, now 70, hatches yet another chick The prairie vole mates for life: Swans mate for life: The black vulture also mates for life: The Laysan albatross: Wisdom the Laysan albatross with her 2021 chick (pic from the link listed above). I hope I look that good at 70: Dik-diks! The dik-dik nose is somewhat prehensile: The pileated gibbon (and other gibbons) forms pair bonds: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Last February Ella and her son Jack suggested a Valentine’s Day topic. I already had the February episodes finished last year, but this year Valentine’s Day falls on a Monday and that just seems too perfect to pass up. So thanks to Ella and Jack, we’re going to learn about some animals that are monogamous. Valentine’s Day falls on February 14th and in many European cultures is a day celebrating love and romance. It also falls at the very beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, when many animals start finding mates. Different species of animal have different relationships. Some animals are social, some are solitary. Every species is different because every species has slightly different requirements for reproducing due to different habitats, foods, how much care the babies need, and so forth. There are different types of monogamy among animals and it can get complicated, just as it’s often complicated in people, so I’m going to simplify it for this episode into two categories: animals that mate for life and animals that form pair bonds. Animals that mate for life, meaning the male and female seek each other out every mating season to have babies together, don’t necessarily spend all their time together outside of mating season. Animals in pair bonds spend a lot of their time together, but they don’t always exclusively mate with each other. But some animals do both. For instance, the prairie vole. This is a little rodent that lives in dry grasslands in central North America, in parts of the United States and Canada. It’s about the size of a mouse with a short tail although it’s more chonky than a mouse, like a small dark brown hamster. It spends most of its time either in a shallow burrow it digs among grass roots or out finding the plant material and insects it eats by traveling through aboveground tunnels it makes through densely packed plant stems. It lives in colonies and is a social animal most of the time, and the male in particular is devoted to his mate. He’s so devoted that once he’s found a mate, he will even drive away other females who approach him. The only time the prairie vole isn’t social is during mating season, which is usually twice a year, in fall and in spring. At that time, mated pairs leave the colony and find a small territory to have their babies. The pair spends almost all their time together, grooming each other, finding and sharing food, and building a nest for the babies. When the babies are born, both parents help care for them. The male prairie vole mates for life. Most of the time “mating for life” means that if one of a pair dies, the other will then find a new mate. But for the male prairie vole, if his mate dies, he stays single for the rest of his life. He also shows behaviors that are similar to grief in humans. The female prairie vole is a little more practical and although she also grieves if her mate dies, she’ll eventually find another mate. Researchers who study prairie voles have discovered that the hormones found in mated pairs are the same as those in humans who are in love. That’s so sweet, and I wish I didn’t have to talk about the voles dying. I think the opposite of love isn’t hate; the opposite of love is grie...

It's the second annual discoveries episode! Lots of animals new to science were described in 2021 so let's find out about some of them. Further reading: First description of a new octopus species without using a scalpel Marine Biologists Discover New Species of Octopus Bleating or screaming? Two new, very loud, frog species described in eastern Australia Meet the freaky fanged frog from the Philippines New alpine moth solves a 180-year-old mystery Meet the latest member of Hokie Nation, a newly discovered millipede that lives at Virginia Tech Fourteen new species of shrew found on Indonesian island New beautiful, dragon-like species of lizard discovered in the Tropical Andes Newly discovered whale species—introducing Ramari’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon eueu)! Scientists describe a new Himalayan snake species found via Instagram The emperor dumbo octopus (deceased): The star octopus: New frog just dropped (that's actually the robust bleating tree frog, already known): The slender bleating tree frog: The screaming tree frog: The Mindoro fanged frog: Some frogs do have lil bitty fangs: The hidden Alpine moth, mystery solver: The Hokie twisted-claw millipede: One of 14 new species of shrew: The snake picture that led to a discovery: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This episode marks our 5th year anniversary! I also finally got the ebook download codes sent to everyone who backed the Kickstarter at that level. The paperback and hardback books will hopefully be ready for me to order by the end of February and I can get them mailed out to backers as soon as humanly possible. Then I’ll focus on the audiobook! A few Kickstarter backers still haven’t responded to the survey, either with their mailing address for a physical book or for names and birthdays for the birthday shout-outs, so if that’s you, please get that information to me! Anyway, happy birthday to Strange Animals Podcast and let’s learn about some animals new to science in 2021! It’s easy to think that with all the animals already known, and all the people in the world, surely there aren’t very many new animals that haven’t been discovered yet. But the world is a really big place and parts of it, especially the oceans, have hardly been explored by scientists. It can be confusing to talk about when an animal was discovered because there are multiple parts to a scientific discovery. The first part is actually finding an animal that the field scientists think might be new to science. Then they have to study the animal and compare it to known animals to determine whether it can be considered a new species or subspecies. Then they ultimately need to publish an official scientific description and give the new animal a scientific name. This process often takes years. That’s what happened with the emperor dumbo octopus, which was first discovered in 2016. Only one individual was captured by a deep-sea rover and unfortunately it didn’t survive being brought to the surface. Instead of dissecting the body to study the internal organs, because it’s so rare, the research team decided to make a detailed 3D scan of the octopus’s body instead and see if that gave them enough information. They approached a German medical center that specializes in brain and neurological issues, who agreed to make a scan of the octopus. It turned out that the scan was so detailed and clear that it actually worked better than dissection, plus it was non-invasive so the preserved octopus body is still intact and can be studied by other scientists. Not only that, the scan is available online for other scientists to study without them having to travel to Germany. The emperor dumbo octopus grows around a foot long, or 30 cm, and has large fins on the sides of its mantle that look like elephant ears. There are 45 species of dumbo octopus known and ...

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to my brother Richard for suggesting one of the fish we talk about this week--fish that can walk! (Sort of.) Further watching: Video of a gurnard walking Further reading: Walking shark moves with ping-pong paddle fins Walking sharks discovered in the tropics The Hawaiian seamoth (the yellowy one is a larval seamoth, the brighter one with the snoot the same fish as a juvenile, both pictures by Frank Baensch from this site):   The slender seamoth (an adult, photo from this site): A flying gurnard with its "wings" extended: A flying gurnard with its "wings" folded, standing on its walking rays: An eastern spiny gurnard standing on its walking rays: A mudskipper's frog-like face: Mudskippers on land: Walking sharks: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at some weird fish, specifically fish that use their fins to walk. Well, sort of walk. Thanks to my brother Richard for suggesting one of these fish. Before we get started, let’s learn the terms for a fish’s two main pairs of fins. Different types of fish have different numbers and locations of fins, of course, but in this episode we’re focusing on the pectoral fins and the pelvic fins. Pectoral fins are the main fins in most fish, the ones near the front on each side. If a fish had arms, that’s roughly where its arms would be. The pelvic fins are near the tail on either side, roughly where its legs would be if fish had legs. If you remember that people lift weights with their arms to develop their pectoral muscles in the chest, you can remember where pectoral fins are, and if you remember that Elvis Presley was sometimes called Elvis the Pelvis because he danced by shaking his hips, you can remember where the pelvic fins are. So, let’s start with the seamoth, which lives in shallow tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific Ocean and the Red Sea, including around Australia. We don’t know enough about it to know if it’s endangered or not, but since it’s considered a medicine in some parts of Asia, it’s caught to sell as an aquarium fish, and its habitat is increasingly impacted by bottom trawling and coastal development, it probably isn’t doing great. It’s never been especially common and doesn’t reproduce very quickly. Researchers think it may even be a social fish that forms a pair bond with its mate, since pairs are often found together. The seamoth doesn’t even look that much like a fish at first glance. It’s covered with bony plates that act as armor, including bony rings around its tail. It even has to shed its skin as it grows larger. The seamoth has a long, pointed snout with a tiny mouth underneath, but it can protrude its mouth out of its…mouth--okay that doesn’t make sense. Basically it’s able to extend its mouth into a tube that it uses like a straw to slurp up worms and other small animals from the sea floor. It can change colors to match its surroundings too. If all this makes you think of seahorses and pipefish, the seamoth is related to both, but it looks very different because of its fins. The seamoth’s pectoral fins are so large they resemble wings, and its modified pelvic fins are stiff and more fingerlike than fin-like so that it can walk across the sea floor with them. It spends most of its time walking on the sea floor, only swimming when it feels threatened and has to move faster. Sometimes a seamoth will cover itself with sand to hide from a predator. During breeding season, males develop brightly colored patterns on their pectoral fins. The seamoth is a small fish, with the largest species growing about five inches long, or 13 cm. One species of seamoth, the little dragonfish, sheds its armor in one big piece—not just once or twice a year, but as often as every five days or so when it needs to rid i...

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Enzo for suggesting this week's topic, newts from least dangerous to most dangerous! Further reading: One snake's prey is another's poison The Corsican brook salamander is not toxic (photo by Paola Mazzei, from iNaturalist): The smooth newt is a little bit toxic (photo by Fred Holmes and taken from this site) - this is a male during breeding season: The Hong Kong warty newt has an orange-spotted belly and is toxic: The chonky Spanish ribbed newt will stab you with its own toxin-covered bones (photo by Eduardo José Rodríguez Rodríguez, taken from this site): Yeah maybe don't touch the Japanese fire belly newt if you don't need to: Warning! Do not eat the California newt: The safest newt to handle is this toy newt. I really want one: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s topic is a suggestion from Enzo, who wants to learn about newts “from least dangerous to most dangerous.” There are at least 60 species of newt known with more being discovered every year, but I’ll do my best to hit the highlights. A newt is a type of salamander, specifically a semi-aquatic salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae. All newts are salamanders but not all salamanders are newts. Newts live throughout much of the northern hemisphere, including northern Africa and the Middle East, Eurasia, and North America. Female newts lay their eggs in freshwater, usually attaching them to vegetation or in little crevices in rocks. A few weeks later, the eggs hatch into larvae with external gills. The larvae are called tadpoles like frog larvae, and they mostly eat algae and tiny insects. They metamorphose over several months just like frogs do when they develop from tadpoles, but where frogs develop their hind legs first, newt tadpoles develop front legs first. The newt tadpole finally absorbs its gills and grows lungs instead, at which point it emerges from the water as an immature newt called an eft. Efts are juvenile newts and live exclusively on land, although like other amphibians they have to keep their skin damp so you’ll usually find them in leaf litter and under rotting logs. Efts that live in North America return to the water when they become full adults, but most newts in other parts of the world stay on land the rest of their lives except during breeding season. Efts and adult newts eat worms, insects and insect larvae, slugs, frog tadpoles, and any other small animals they can catch. The Corsican brook salamander is a type of newt that lives on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. It grows about five inches long at most, or 13 cm, and is brown or olive-green, sometimes with a mottled pattern of orange or red on its back. It’s an exception to the rule that newts outside of North America usually live their adult lives on land. Not only does the Corsican brook salamander live in freshwater most of the time as an adult, it doesn’t even have working lungs. It spends most of its time in fast-moving streams and rivers in higher elevations, where it absorbs oxygen from the water through its skin. As Enzo undoubtedly knows, many newts produce toxins. This is why it’s not a good idea to handle a newt, or any other amphibian for that matter, unless you’re absolutely certain it’s a species that’s not toxic. In most cases, a newt’s toxin won’t hurt you if it just touches your skin, but if it gets in a cut or if you have some of the toxin on your finger and then rub your eye or put your finger in your mouth, the toxin can make you really sick. Some newts are even deadly. The Corsican brook salamander we just talked about is not toxic, so we’ll call it the least dangerous newt. The smooth newt, on the other hand, produces a relatively mild toxin. You’d have to actually eat a bunch of smooth newts to get sick from its toxins,

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Nicholas and Emma for their suggestions this week as we learn about some (nearly) indestructible animals! Further listening: Patreon episode about Metal Animals (unlocked, no login required) Further reading: Even a car can't kill this beetle. Here's why The scaly-foot snail's shell is made of actual iron - and it's magnetic The scaly-foot gastropod (pictures from article linked above): The diabolical ironclad beetle is virtually unsquishable: Limpet shells: The business side of a limpet: Highly magnified limpet teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some indestructible animals, or at least animals that are incredibly tough. You may be surprised to learn that they’re all invertebrates. It’s a suggestion by Nicholas, and one of the animals Nicholas suggested was also suggested by Emma. We’ll start with that one, the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. We actually covered this one a few years ago but only in a Patreon episode. I went ahead and unlocked that episode so that anyone can listen to it, since I haven’t done that in a while, so the first part of this episode will sound familiar if you just listened to that one. The scaly-foot gastropod lives around three hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2,800 meters. The water around these vents, referred to as black smokers, can be more than 350 degrees Celsius. That’s 660 degrees F, if you even need to know that that’s too hot to live. The scaly-foot gastropod was discovered in 2001 but not formally described until 2015. The color of its shell varies from almost black to golden to white, depending on which population it’s from, and it grows to almost 2 inches long, or nearly 5 cm. It doesn’t have eyes, and while it does have a small mouth, it doesn’t use it for eating. Instead, the snail contains symbiotic bacteria in a gland in its esophagus. The bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide from the water around the hydrothermal vents into energy the snail uses to live. It’s a process called chemosynthesis. In return, the bacteria get a safe place to live. The snail’s shell contains an outer layer made of iron sulfides. Not only that, the bottom of the snail’s foot is covered with sclerites, or spiky scales, that are also mineralized with iron sulfides. While the snail can’t pull itself entirely into its shell, if something attacks it, the bottom of its foot is heavily armored and its shell is similarly tough. Researchers are studying the scaly-foot gastropod’s shell to possibly make a similar composite material for protective gear and other items. The inner layer of the shell is made of a type of calcium carbonate, common in mollusk shells and some corals. The middle layer of the shell is regular snail shell material, organic periostracum, [perry-OSS-trickum] which helps dissipate heat as well as pressure from squeezing attacks, like from crab claws. And the outer layer, of course, is iron sulfides like pyrite and greigite. Oh, and since greigite is magnetic, the snails stick to magnets. Unfortunately, the scaly-foot gastropod is endangered due to deep-sea mining around its small, fragile habitat. Hopefully conservationists can get laws passed to protect the thermal vents and all the animals that live around them. The scaly-foot gastropod is the only animal known that incorporates iron sulfide into its skeleton or exoskeleton, although our next indestructible animal, the diabolical ironclad beetle, has iron in its name. The diabolical ironclad beetle lives in western North America, especially in dry areas. It grows up to an inch long, or 25 mm, and is a dull black or dark gray in color with bumps and ridges that make it look like a piece of tree bark. Since it lives on trees,

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! A big birthday shout-out to Penelope this week! Thanks to Isaac for this week's topic suggestion. We're learning all about the sable and sable antelope! Further reading (mostly for the pictures since there's not much content otherwise): Woman Rescues This Sable from Becoming Someone's Coat Further watching: Kruger Park, Season 15 - this one is about some sable antelope bulls fighting Fuzzy sable face: Sable: Sable antelopes: A sable antelope growth chart. I find this really interesting. NERD: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’ve got an interesting theme, with both the theme and the animals suggested by Isaac. But first, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday this week to Penelope, whose birthday is on January 15th! I hope you have the best birthday ever! Isaac suggested the sable, which is a type of mustelid, or weasel and ferret relation, and also suggested the sable antelope! It’s the sable episode. The word sable means black or a rich dark brown, but most of the time it’s used to refer to the fur of an animal called the sable. The fur was so highly prized in Europe and Asia that the color of the animal’s fur was used as the name of the animal itself, and has been borrowed to refer to a specific coloration of other animals like cats and dogs. The animal called the sable is common throughout parts of Asia, especially Siberia, China, and northern Mongolia. It lives in forests and mostly hunts by sound, and will eat just about anything it can find. This includes small animals like hares, rodents, birds, and even other species of mustelid, but it will also eat carrion, berries, fish, insects, snails and slugs, and occasionally it will even manage to kill a small bovid called a musk deer. The musk deer isn’t actually a deer but is more closely related to goats and antelopes. It can stand over two feet tall at the shoulder, or 70 cm, and the male has fang-like tusks instead of antlers or horns. For an animal that sometimes kills and eats musk deer, the sable isn’t very big. It’s long and slender like other mustelids and measures nearly 2 feet long, or 56 cm, not counting its tail, which can add another 5 inches, or 12 cm. Females are a little smaller. It’s brown all over, usually dark brown but sometimes lighter depending on where it lives, with a pale patch on its throat. It has large fox-like ears and a somewhat fox-like or cat-like face but with smaller eyes. Its legs are short but that doesn’t stop it from covering long distances every day to find enough food, more than seven miles in some cases, or 12 km. The sable is crepuscular, meaning it’s most active during dawn and dusk. When it’s not out hunting, it sleeps in a burrow it digs among tree roots, often lined with leaves and dry grass so it’s more comfortable and warmer. The exception is during mating season when the sable is more likely to be out during the daytime. Males fight each other during this time, and when a female is deciding whether she likes a male, she and the male will play-fight and chase each other. One unusual thing about the sable is that even though mating season is usually in summertime, and even though it only takes about a month for the babies to develop inside the mother before they’re born, the babies are born in spring. Since the sable doesn’t have access to a time machine, something else is going on. It’s called delayed implantation or embryonic diapause, where the mother’s egg is fertilized but then stays dormant for a time before it attaches to the uterine wall and starts developing into an embryo and ultimately a baby ready to be born. This allows babies to be born at a time of year when there’s plenty of food. In the sable’s case, the fertilized eggs don’t implant for 8 months. Sables aren’t the only mammals that practice delayed implantation.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! A big birthday shout-out this week to Yori!!! I was fortunate enough to visit the country of Belize in December and saw lots of amazing animals! I've chosen four to highlight in this week's episode. Further reading: There may be more bird species in the tropics than we know The adorable proboscis bat, my favorite: Proboscis bats all in a row (photograph by me!): The black howler monkey has a massive hyoid bone that allows it to make big loud calls: The white-crowned manakin is impossibly cute: The mealy parrot is cheerful and loud: A morning view and night view from our villa balcony, photos by me! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s start the new year off right with an episode about some animals I saw in person recently during my vacation to Belize! But first, we have our first birthday shout-out of the year! A very happy birthday to Yori, whose birthday is on the 8th of January! I hope you have a great day! Belize is a country on the eastern coast of Central America on the Caribbean Ocean, just south of Mexico and north of Guatemala. It used to be called British Honduras but has been an independent country since 1981. The coast is protected by a series of coral reefs that are so little studied that there are probably dozens if not hundreds of animals and plants waiting to be discovered around them. Belize is serious about protecting the reefs and about conservation in general, which is great because it has some of the highest animal and plant life diversity in the Americas. My brother and his family had made vacation plans for Belize in spring of 2021, about the time the Covid-19 vaccine was rolling out and things were looking up. They rented a big villa with more bedrooms than they needed so they generously invited me and one of my cousins to join them. I didn’t mention the trip on the podcast because I was worried it would end up canceled. But we were able to visit in mid-December, with negative Covid tests coming and going, and wearing our masks appropriately in all public areas. Belize is absolutely gorgeous. We stayed right on the coast in an upstairs flat with a big balcony that overlooked the ocean. We spent most of the time relaxing on the beach or the balcony and eating amazing food, but we did go on two excursions. We all went on a riverboat wildlife tour of the Monkey River, and a few days later my brother and cousin and I went on a birdwatching expedition to the nearby Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. We had to get up at 5am for that one but it was worth it. In both excursions we saw lots of animals of all kinds, so many that it was hard for me to choose which ones to highlight in this episode. One animal that I fell in love with on the Monkey River is the proboscis bat. Belize has a lot of bat species but I didn’t expect to see any, much less up close. The proboscis bat lives throughout Central America and the northern half of South America. It’s only about 2.5 inches long, or 6 cm, and gets its name from its pointed nose. It lives near water, especially wetlands, because it eats insects that live around water like mosquitoes and caddisflies. It’s so small that it sometimes gets caught in spiderwebs, especially of the big spider Argiope submaronica, [ar-JY-opee] a species of orbweaver spider that holds its legs in an X pattern while it’s on its web. Different species live throughout the world, especially in warm places. It does actually eat the bats it catches, which is hard on the bat but a nice big meal for the spider. There’s two sides to every story. How, you may ask, did I manage to see a bat up close during broad daylight while on a boat? The proboscis bat spends the day on a tree trunk or branch or log near the water, especially in shady areas, and our guide was able to ease the boat up to not one but two diff...

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Further reading: Million-year-old mammoth genomes shatter record for oldest ancient DNA Mammoth Genome Project (with pictures of cave art and ancient carvings of mammoths) The most famous cave painting of a mammoth, from a cave in France: Sivatherium: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the last Monday of 2021, which means the very last extinction event episode. There’ve been way more extinction events in earth’s long history than the five we’ve covered this year, and not all of the extinction events I chose to highlight were even necessarily the biggest. This one, for instance. You may have noticed a pattern when I talk about ice age megafauna. So many animals went extinct about 11,000 years ago. That’s this week’s topic, the end-Pleistocene extinction event. The Pleistocene is often called the ice age, or ice ages since it consisted of multiple glaciation periods separated by warmer times when the glaciers would retreat for a while. It started roughly 2.6 million years ago and is considered to have ended 11,700 years ago. Keep in mind, as always, that these dates are just a shorthand to help scientists refer to changes in earth’s history. There was no one day where the sun rose and everything had abruptly changed from one era to another. The changes took place over a long time, hundreds of thousands of years, with different parts of the world changing more quickly or slowly than others depending on local conditions. At the beginning of the Pleistocene, the world’s continents were roughly in their present positions. Two continental plates in what is now Central America collided very slowly over millions of years, which caused the land to buckle up and magma to erupt through the earth’s crust as volcanoes. The volcanoes created islands in the Central American Seaway, a section of ocean between North and South America that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. By around 5 to 10 million years ago, the volcanoes and land continued to be pushed up, and sediment from rivers filled in between them, until finally instead of islands there was actual land that connected North and South America. That land is called the Isthmus of Panama and it allowed the great American interchange where animals from North America could cross into South America, and vice versa, but that’s a topic for another episode. Another result of the Isthmus of Panama’s formation is that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were more separated. Instead of ocean currents circulating between North and South America, they were cut off and new currents formed. Ocean currents help distribute warm water to colder areas and cold water to warmer areas, which affects air and land temperatures too. Around 2.5 million years ago, the ocean current changes had changed the entire overall temperature of the earth, making it much cooler overall. That wasn’t the only cause of the ice ages, but it was a major factor. The earth gradually became cooler and dryer, a process that had already started due to other causes and was accelerated by the ocean current changes. As the global temperature dropped, more and more water was locked up in huge glaciers called ice sheets, at first around the poles and then farther south. This meant sea levels dropped a lot. North America was connected to Asia by a stretch of grassland steppe called Beringia that had formerly been submerged. As the temperatures dropped and the climate changed, animals and plants had to adapt. The ancestors of modern elephants had lived in Africa for millions of years, but they started migrating to other parts of the world around 3 million years ago. Because they were already big, they were good at retaining heat in their bodies and became quite successful as the climate grew cooler and cooler. They evolved long hair to stay even warmer and spread throughout much o...

Thanks to Richard from NC, Pranav, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week! Further reading: ABA Rare Bird Alert One Reason Migrating Birds Get Lost Is Out of This World Inside the Amazing Cross-Continent Saga of the Steller's Sea-Eagle A Vagrant European Robin Is Drawing Huge Crowds in China Bird migration: When vagrants become pioneers A red-cockaded woodpecker: Steller's Sea Eagle making a couple of bald eagles look small: Steller's sea eagle: A whole lot of birders showed up to see a European robin that showed up in the Beijing Zoo [photo from the fourth article linked above]: A robin: Mandarin ducks: Richard's pipit [photo by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23214345]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re talking about some birds again this week, with a slightly mysterious twist. These are birds that have shown up in places where they shouldn’t be, sometimes way way far from home! Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode and suggesting one of the birds we’re going to talk about, and thanks to Pranav for suggesting we cover more out of place animals. Last week we talked about some woodpeckers, and I said I thought there was another listener who had suggested the topic. Well, that was Alexandra! Let’s start today’s episode talking about the red-cockaded woodpecker, another bird Alexandra suggested. The red-cockaded woodpecker is native to the coastal southeastern United States, where it lives in pine forests. It’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss since the pine forests get smaller every year, and not only does it need old-growth pine forests to survive, it also needs some of the trees to be affected by red heart fungus. The fungus softens the interior wood, which is otherwise very hard, and allows a woodpecker to excavate nesting holes in various trees that can be quite large. The female lays her eggs in the best nesting hole and she and her mate raise the babies together, helped by any of their children from previous nests who don’t have a mate of their own yet. When they don’t have babies, during the day the birds forage together, but at night they each hide in their own little nesting hole to sleep. It’s a small bird that doesn’t migrate, which is why Beth Miller, a birder in Muskegon, Michigan, couldn’t identify it when she spotted it on July 1, 2022 in some pine trees near a golf course. She took lots of photos and a recording of its calls, which she posted in a birding group to ask for help. She knew the bird had to be a rare visitor of some kind, but when it was identified as a red-cockaded woodpecker, she and nine birder friends went back to the golf course to look for it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the bird again. It was the first time a red-cockaded woodpecker had ever been identified in Michigan, although individual birds do sometimes wander widely. While bird migration isn’t fully understood, many birds use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way to new territories and back again later in the year. Humans can’t sense magnetic fields but birds can, and being able to sense Earth’s magnetic field helps birds navigate even at night or during weather that keeps them from being able to see landmarks. But sometimes birds get lost, especially young birds who have never migrated before or a bird that gets caught in storm winds that blow it far off course. If a bird shows up somewhere far outside of its normal range, birdwatchers refer to it as a vagrant, and some birders will travel great distances to see vagrant birds. One interesting note is that birds navigating by the earth’s magnetic field can get confused if the magnetic field is disrupted by geomagnetic storms, including solar flares, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! Thanks to Ethan and Simon this week for their suggestions! This week we're looking at some extinct reptiles that each have a little something extra (and unexpected). Further reading: Two Extinct Flying Reptiles Compared Cretaceous 'Four-Limbed Snake' Turns Out To Be Long-Bodied Lizard Kuehneosaurids may have resembled big Draco lizards although they weren't related: Big turtle: Purussaurus was big enough to eat even really big turtles (from Prehistoric Wildlife): Meiolania had a pointy head and a pointy tail: Not a snake with legs after all: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’ll learn about an extinct reptile suggested by Ethan, some extinct turtles suggested by Simon, and an extinct snake that might not be a snake at all. All these animals had physical details you wouldn’t expect, as we’ll see. First, though, a reminder that I have five Kickstarter backers who haven’t sent me their birthday shout-out names and birthdays yet! I sent messages to them last month and haven’t heard back, so if you backed the Kickstarter and added on the birthday shout-out, but never got the opportunity to send me your names and birthdays, please message me as soon as possible! The shout-outs start in January! So, on to the extinct reptiles that each have something a little extra. Let’s start with Ethan’s suggestion, the kuehneosaurids. Kuehneosaurus, kuehneosuchus, and their relations lived around 225 million years ago in what is now England. The first dinosaurs lived around the same time but kuehneosaurids weren’t dinosaurs. They were lizard-like reptiles that grew about two feet long, or 70 cm, including a long tail, and probably lived in trees and ate insects. Oh, and they had wings. They weren’t technically wings but extended ribs. Kuehneosaurus’s wings weren’t all that big, although they were big enough that they could act as a parachute if the animal fell or jumped from a branch. Kuehneosuchus’s wings were much longer. In a study published in 2008, a team of scientists built models of kuehneosuchus and tested them in a wind tunnel used for aerospace engineering. It turned out to be quite stable in the air and could probably glide very well. We don’t know a whole lot about the kuehneosaurids because we haven’t found all that many fossils. We’re not even sure if the two species are closely related or not. We’re not even sure they’re not the same species. Individuals of both were uncovered in caves near Bristol in the 1950s, and some researchers speculate they were males and females of the same species. Despite the difference in wings, otherwise they’re extremely similar in a lot of ways. Generally, researchers compare the kuehneosaurids to modern Draco lizards, which we talked about in episode 237, even though they’re not related. Draco lizards are much smaller, only about 8 inches long including the tail, or 20 cm, and live throughout much of southeastern Asia. They have elongated ribs that they use to glide efficiently from tree to tree, and they eat insects. Draco lizards can fold their wings down and extend them, which isn’t something the kuehneosaurids appear to have been able to do. Next, let’s look at Simon’s turtles. Stupendemys geographicus lived a lot more recently than the kuehneosaurids, only about 6 million years ago in northern South America. It was a freshwater turtle the size of a car: 13 feet long, or 4 meters. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the males also had horns—but not on their heads. The male Stupendemys had projections on its shell, one on either side of its neck, that pointed forward and were probably covered with keratin sheaths to make them sharper and stronger. Males used these horns to fight each other, and we know because some of Stupendemys’s living relations do the same thing, although no living species actually have horns ...

Thanks to Elaine for suggesting the saola this week! Further reading: The saola: rushing to save the most 'spectacular zoological discovery' of the 20th century Striped rabbit revealed in Laos forest Saola horns: A saola from a 1999 camera trap (photo taken from link above): A female saola (named Martha) who unfortunately only survived in captivity a few weeks (photo taken from link above): A striped bunny!! The Annamite striped rabbit: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s topic is a remarkable hoofed animal suggested last year by Elaine, the saola, and another remarkable animal I learned about while researching the saola. Both animals are newly discovered by science. The scientific story of the saola starts in May of 1992. The Southeast Asian country of Vietnam had established a new nature reserve a few years before and wanted to learn more about the kinds of animals and plants living there. A team of scientists surveyed the area and one of the things they found was a skull with horns they didn’t recognize. The horns were long and straight and very close together. They knew the skull came from an animal new to science, so they tried to find one to see what it looked like alive. But they couldn’t find one. It wasn’t until 1998 that a scientist saw a live saola, a female captured by hunters and kept in captivity until it died a few weeks later. The saola is an antelope-like bovid that looks a lot like an oryx. We talked about the Arabian oryx in episode 218 and there are other species of oryx that live in parts of Africa. Oryx have long, straight horns that grow side by side too. But genetic analysis of saola remains indicates that the saola is much more closely related to cattle than to oryxes. The saola was described formally in 1993 and placed in its own genus, Pseudoryx, meaning false oryx. The saola stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder, or 92 centimeters, and is mostly chocolate brown with white markings on the head and a black stripe down its spine. Both males and females have horns, although males grow longer horns. The horns grow side by side, usually only a few inches apart, or about 8 or 9 centimeters, and are dark brown or black. They grow up to about 20 inches long, or 50 centimeters, and are often about the same distance apart at their tips as they are at the base of the skull. People sometimes call the saola the Asian unicorn because it’s so rare and its horns look sort of like unicorn horns, although they grow back from the skull instead of forward and aren’t spiral shaped. So, not actually very much like unicorn horns. The saola also has a short tail, slender legs, and a short muzzle, but its tongue is over 6 inches long, or 15 centimeters. It’s rough like a cat’s tongue and it uses it to groom itself, just like a cat, and to help it gather the plants it eats, unlike a cat. It lives in forested mountains and migrates to lower elevations in winter, although its fur is thick and soft to keep it warm in higher elevations. It also has special pores around its eyes that secrete a special fluid it uses to mark plants and rocks the way many antelopes do. Because the saola hasn’t been observed in the wild, we don’t know if it’s marking its territory or just letting other saola know where it is. The saola is critically endangered, mostly due to poaching. A team of forest guards patrols the park looking for traps that hunters set. Poachers often hunt animals in the park not because the hunters are hungry but because they can make a lot of money selling exotic animals to other countries as so-called medicine. The saola isn't considered to have any medicinal uses, though, so while a hunter will sometimes kill one to eat, mostly it just gets caught in traps set for other animals. Since it’s so rare to start with, every saola killed in this way could ultimately cause the entire species to go extinct.

Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo! This week let's learn about a weird marine worm and its extinct ancestor! Further reading: Eunice aphroditois is a rainbow, terrifying The 20-million-year-old lair of an ambush-predatory worm preserved in northeast Taiwan Here's the money shot of the sand striker with its jaws open, waiting for an animal to get too close. The stripy things are antennae: The fossilized burrow with notes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going back in time 20 million years to learn about an animal that lived on the sea floor, although we’ll start with its modern relation. It’s called the sand striker and new discoveries about it were released in January 2021. Ichnology is the study of a certain type of trace fossil. We talked about trace fossils in episode 103, but basically a trace fossil is something associated with an organism that isn’t actually a fossilized organism itself, like fossilized footprints and other tracks. Ichnology is specifically the study of trace fossils caused by animals that disturbed the ground in some way, or if you want to get more technical about it, sedimentary disruption. That includes tracks that were preserved but it also includes a lot of burrows. It’s a burrow we’re talking about today. Because we often don’t know what animal made a burrow, different types of burrows are given their own scientific names. This helps scientists keep them organized and refer to a specific burrow in a way that other scientists can immediately understand. The sand striker’s fossilized burrow is named Pennichnus formosae, but in this case we knew about the animal itself before the burrow. The sand striker is a type of polychaete worm, and polychaete worms are incredibly successful animals. They’re found in the fossil record since at least the Cambrian Period half a billion years ago and are still common today. They’re also called bristle worms because most species have little bristles made of chitin. Almost all known species live in the oceans but some species are extremophiles. This includes species that live near hydrothermal vents where the water is heated to extreme temperatures by volcanic activity and at least one species found in the deepest part of the ocean that’s ever been explored, Challenger Deep. A polychaete worm doesn’t look like an earthworm. It has segments with a hard exoskeleton and bristles, and a distinct head with antennae. Some species don’t have eyes at all but some have sophisticated vision and up to eight eyes. Some can swim, some just float around, some crawl along the seafloor, and some burrow in sand and mud. Some eat small animals while others eat algae or plant material, and some have plume-like appendages they use to filter tiny pieces of food from the water. Basically, there are so many species known—over 10,000, with more being discovered almost every year, alive and extinct—that it’s hard to make generalizations about polychaete worms. Most species of polychaete worm are small. The living species of sand striker generally grows around 4 inches long, or 10 centimeters, and longer. We’ll come back to its size in a minute. Its exoskeleton, or cuticle, is a beautifully iridescent purple. It doesn’t have eyes, instead sensing prey with five antennae. These aren’t like insect antennae but look more like tiny tentacles, packed with chemical receptors that help it find prey. The sand striker lives in warm coastal waters and spends most of its time hidden in a burrow in the sand. It’s especially common around coral reefs. While it will eat plant material like seaweed, it’s mostly an ambush hunter. At night the sand striker remains in its burrow but pokes its head out with its scissor-like mandibles open. When the chemical receptors in its antennae detect a fish or other animal approaching,