Strange Animals Podcast

It’s another spooky episode (three out of five bats on this year’s spookiness scale), with suggestions from Will and Pranav! Further reading: Tracking the Swamp Monsters Further watching: The Harlan Ford Footage (Honey Island Swamp Monster) A crab-eating macaque: A plaster cast purportedly from the Honey Island Swamp Monster’s footprints [photo from article linked above]: Alligator tracks in the mud [photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week as monster month continues, we’ll learn about three more strange bipedal monsters suggested by Will and Pranav. This is another episode that I’ll give three out of five bats for spookiness. We’ve definitely got some spooky monsters this year (also you may be sensing a theme). We’ll start with Will’s suggestion, the yara-ma-yha-who. We talked about it once before back in episode 219, but it’s such a strange monster that it definitely deserves more attention. According to a 1932 book called Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, the yara-ma-yha-who is a little red goblin creature that stands about four feet tall, or 1.2 meters. It’s skinny all over except for its head and belly, and its mouth is especially big, like a frog’s mouth. It doesn’t have any teeth, but it can open its jaws incredibly wide like a snake, which allows it to swallow its food whole. And what is its food? People! The yara-ma-yha-who was supposed to live in trees, especially the wild fig tree that has thick branches. In the summer when someone would stop under the tree for shade, or in the winter when it was rainy and someone would stop for shelter, the yara-ma-yha-who would drop down and grab the person. The ends of the yara-ma-yha-who’s fingers were said to be cup-shaped suckers, and when the suckers fastened onto a person’s arm, they were able to suck blood right through the person’s skin. After the person became weak from blood loss and fainted, the yara-ma-yha-who was able to swallow them whole. After that, the yara-ma-yha-who would drink a lot of water and fall asleep, and when it woke up it would vomit up its meal. If the person was still alive, they were supposed to lie still and pretend to be dead even while the yara-ma-yha-who poked at them to see if they responded. If the person moved, the yara-ma-yha-who would swallow them again and the whole thing would start over. But every time a person was swallowed by the little red goblin, when they were vomited up again they were shorter and redder, until after three or four times if they couldn’t get away, the person was transformed into another yara-ma-yha-who. Some cryptozoologists speculate that the yara-ma-yha-who may be based on the tarsier, which is the subject of episode 219 and why we talked about this particular monster in that episode. The tarsier has never lived in Australia, although it does live in relatively nearby islands. Most tarsier species have toe pads that help them cling to branches, but so do many frogs that do live in Australia. It’s much more likely that the legend of the yara-ma-yha-who was inspired by frogs, snakes, monitor lizards, and other Australian animals. More importantly, the monster was used as a cautionary tale to warn children not to go off by themselves into the bush. Unfortunately, the only information about the yara-ma-yha-who comes from this 1932 book. We don’t know which Aboriginal peoples this story was collected from, and we don’t know how much it was changed in translation to English. It’s still a fun story, though. Next, we’ll talk about Pranav’s suggestions. Last week we talked about the monkey-man of New Delhi, and one of the monsters we’ll cover today is also a monkey-man from Asia, this time from Singapore. It’s the Bukit Timah Monkey-Man, said to mainly live in the Bukit Timah rainforest nature reserve but occasionally seen in the city surrounding the nature reserve. The Bukit Timah Monkey-Man is supposed to look like a monkey the size of a human. It walks like a human on two legs and otherwise looks like a person, but is covered in gray hair and has a monkey-like face. It’s only ever seen at night and although people are scared when they see it, the monster has never attacked anyone and doesn’t seem to be interested in people at all. The oldest report possibly dates back to 1805, or to the 1940s according to other accounts, but sightings are rare. One very common monkey that lives in Bukit Timah is the crab-eating macaque, also called the long-tailed macaque and I bet you can guess why. Its tail is longer than its body, although its arms and legs are shorter than in most monkeys. It mostly lives on the ground and eats pretty much anything, although most of its diet is fruit and other plant materials. It does sometimes eat crabs, and is good at swimming and diving to find them, but it also eats bird eggs and nestlings, lizards, frogs, insects, and other small animals. It even has a cheek pouch where it

Thanks to Pranav for suggesting one of the monsters we’re talking about this week! This episode is rated three out of five bats on our spookiness scale. Further reading: The Return of Spring-Heeled Jack Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As monster month continues, this week we have a really spooky episode on a topic Pranav suggested a long time ago. I’m rating it three out of five bats, meaning that if you’re one of our younger listeners, you might want to skip this one or make sure to listen to it in the daytime with your favorite grown-ups around you. It’s about the monkey-man of New Delhi, but we’re also going to talk about one of my favorite monsters too as part of it. In May of 2001, several families made a strange complaint to the police in the city of Ghaziabad in India, near the capital city of New Delhi. A masked man had sneaked into their homes and pushed and scratched people before running away into the darkness. No one was badly injured, but they were definitely scared. Then other people started reporting something similar in parts of East Delhi. People were left with scratches and bruises caused by a masked man, according to some witnesses. But others said they were attacked by a monkey. As the reports flooded in over the next few days, the reports got stranger and stranger. The attacker was said to be a man with a monkey-like face, a big monkey wearing skin-tight clothes and a helmet, a creature with black fur and glowing cat eyes, even a robot with metal claws. It could reportedly jump incredibly high and even disappear. No one could agree on what the attacker looked like, but before long everyone was jumpy and ready to run if they even thought the strange creature was nearby. This sadly led to at least two people dying on different occasions when they panicked and tripped down stairs. The police tried their best to find the culprit, but it was always gone before they arrived. Meanwhile, the news media exaggerated the reports and whipped people into a frenzy of fear. But despite all the sightings, no one ever got even a blurry photo of the so-called monkey-man. When the police questioned people who were supposedly attacked, most of them admitted that they hadn’t really seen anything. Often they only felt the presence of the monkey-man, and later noticed bruises or scratches that might have been caused by ordinary events during the day. Weird as all this sounds, it isn’t the first time such a strange situation has happened in a big city. In 1837, in London, England, a very similar creature caused a very similar panic. The main difference is that instead of a monkey-man, the London monster was more like a devil, sometimes said to have horns and bat wings. He was called spring-heeled Jack. Spring-heeled Jack got his nickname because he was supposed to be able to jump incredibly high, as though he had springs in his boots. Some reports said the creature had claws, possibly metal ones, that he could shoot sparks or blue fire from his mouth, that he had glowing red eyes, and that his hands felt cold and clammy like a corpse. Some people even referred to him as a ghost. The monster was supposed to have attacked young women in particular, scratching them with his claws. In the most famous case, a teenaged girl named Jane Alsop was at home in February 1838 when someone knocked on the door and shouted that he was a police officer who had caught spring-heeled Jack! The officer asked for a light, since it was a dark evening, but when Jane brought a candle outside, instead of meeting a valiant police officer who had caught a monster, she only encountered the monster himself. Spring-heeled Jack grabbed her by the neck! With the help of her sisters, who heard her screams, Jane was able to tear herself away from the monster with only some scratches on her arms and neck. Spring-heeled Jack bounded away into the night. Another encounter only nine days later happened to eighteen-year-old Lucy Scales, who was returning home with her sister in the evening. As they passed an alley, a man wearing a large black cloak jumped out at Lucy, spat blue flame into her face, and hurried away when she collapsed in shock. As in India over 150 years later, the newspapers printed sensationalized reports of the attacks that made things even worse. The police arrested various men at different times, but there was no evidence that any of them had attacked the women or had dressed up as spring-heeled Jack. The scratches and bruises reported by victims weren’t actually that bad, and might have been caused by anything. In the end, the reports gradually stopped, although there was a brief revival of reports in the 1870s, over 30 years later. So what’s going on here? Could spring-heeled Jack and the monkey-man of New Delhi be reports of the same creature or entity, with details differing between the two monsters because of the cultural differences of people reporting those details? Whe

Thanks to Anbo for suggesting Australopithecus! We’ll also learn about Gigantopithecus and Bigfoot! Further reading: Ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, ‘walked like a human, but climbed like an ape’ Human shoulders and elbows first evolved as brakes for climbing apes You Won’t Believe What Porcupines Eat Past tropical forest changes drove megafauna and hominin extinctions An Australopithecus skeleton [photo by Emőke Dénes – kindly granted by the author, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78612761]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s officially monster month, also known as October, so let’s jump right in with a topic suggested by Anbo! Anbo wanted to learn about Australopithecus, and while we’re at it we’re going to talk about Gigantopithecus and Bigfoot. On our spookiness rating scale of one to five bats, where one bat means it’s not a very spooky episode and five bats means it’s really spooky, this one is going to fall at about two bats, and only because we talk a little bit about the Yeti and Bigfoot at the end. In 1924 in South Africa, the partial skull of a young primate was discovered. Primates include monkeys and apes along with humans, our very own family tree. This particular fossil was over a million years old and had features that suggested it was an early human ancestor, or otherwise very closely related to humans. The fossil was named Australopithecus, which means “southern ape.” Since 1924 we’ve discovered more remains, enough that currently, seven species of Australopithecus are recognized. The oldest dates to a bit over 4 million years old and was discovered in eastern Africa. Australopithecus was probably pretty short compared to most modern humans, although they were probably about the size of modern chimpanzees. A big male might have stood about 4 ½ feet tall, or 1.5 meters. They were bipedal, meaning they would have stood and walked upright all the time. That’s the biggest hint that they were closely related to humans. Other great apes can walk upright if they want, but only humans and our closest ancestors are fully bipedal. In 2008 a palaeoanthropologist named Lee Rogers Berger took his nine-year-old son Matthew to Malapa Cave in South Africa. Dr. Berger was leading an excavation of the cave and Matthew wanted to see it. While he was there, Matthew noticed something that even his father had overlooked. It turned out to be a collarbone belonging to an Australopithecus boy who lived almost 2 million years ago. Later, Dr Berger’s team uncovered more of the skeleton and determined that the remains belonged to a new species of Australopithecus, which they named Australopithecus sediba. More remains of this species were discovered later, including a beautifully preserved lower back. That discovery was important because it allowed scientists to determine that this species of Australopithecus had already evolved the inward curve in the lower back that humans still have, which helps us walk on two legs more easily. That was a surprise, since A. sediba also still shows features that indicate they could still climb trees like a great ape. It’s possible that Australopithecus, along with other species of early humans, climbed trees at night to stay safe from predators. In the morning, they climbed down to spend the day mostly on the ground. One study published only a few weeks ago as this episode goes live suggests that the flexible shoulders and elbows that humans share with our great ape cousins originally evolved to help apes climb down from trees safely. Monkeys don’t share our flexible shoulder and elbow joints because they’re much lighter weight than a human or ape, and don’t need as much flexibility to keep from falling while climbing down. Apes and hominins like humans can raise our arms straight up over our heads, and we can straighten our arms out completely flat. Australopithecus could do the same. The study suggests that when another human ancestor, Homo erectus, figured out how to use fire, they stopped needing to climb trees so often. They evolved broader shoulders that allowed them to throw spears and other weapons much more accurately. Australopithecus probably mostly ate fruit and other plant materials like vegetables and nuts, along with small animals that they could catch fairly easily. This is similar to the diet of many great apes today. The big controversy, though, is whether Australopithecus made and used tools. Their hands would have been more like the hands of a bonobo or chimpanzee, which have a lot of dexterity, but not the really high-level dexterity of modern humans and our closest ancestors. Stone tools have been found in the same areas where Australopithecus fossils have been found, but we don’t have any definitive proof that they made or used the tools. There were other early hominins living in the area who might have made the tools instead. We also

Thanks to Max for suggesting one of our slightly spooky amphibians this week! Further reading: New crocodile newt discovered in Vietnam Further watching: Brave Wilderness Giant Screaming Frog! The new Halloween-y crocodile newt discovered in Vietnam [photo by Phung My Trung and taken from the article linked above]: A smoky jungle frog: A screenshot from the video linked above: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the end of September and you know what that means: we’re about to start Monster Month! This year I have so many awesome ideas for episodes that we’re starting monster month early, with a non-spooky episode about two sort of spooky-looking amphibians. Thanks to Max for suggesting one of the animals we’re about to talk about! Instead of rating the monster month episodes on a spookiness scale from one to five ghosts, this year we’re rating them on a spookiness scale of one to five bats, which seems more appropriate. This episode is only one bat, meaning even our younger listeners shouldn’t find it scary. But first, a quick correction. Thanks very much to Mary for catching a mistake I made in last week’s rhinoceros episode. I said that black rhinos can weigh 18 kilograms, when I should have said 1800 kilograms. 18 kg is about 40 pounds, so I think you can agree that I made a BIG mistake. Now, on to the “spooky” amphibians. Lots of amphibians live in southeast Asia, many of them never seen by scientists. In 2018, a team of scientists were studying crocodile newts in Vietnam when they discovered one that didn’t look like any of the many other crocodile newts that live in Asia. Since there are over 30 species known, with new ones being discovered all the time, including seven others from Vietnam alone, they suspected this might be a species new to science. The new newt lives in high elevations in the central highlands in Vietnam, much farther south and in much higher elevations than the other known crocodile newt species. After the initial finding in 2018, the lead scientist, an amphibian and reptile expert named Phung My Trung (apologies because I probably pronounced his name wrong) spent four years searching for more specimens and learning about them before he described it as a new species. One thing I love is that he was quoted as saying that the adult newts “were so beautiful that I was shaking and could hardly believe I was holding a live specimen in my hand.” And it is absolutely a gorgeous animal. It’s black with orangey-red markings on its back, lovely Halloween colors, and in fact the markings sort of look like the skull, backbone, and ribs of a cartoon skeleton. Females are bigger than males, and a big female can grow as much as 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm, from snout to vent, not counting its tail that’s almost as long as its body. That’s pretty much all we know so far about this newt. Because it appears to have such a restricted range, it’s most likely endangered due to habitat loss and climate change, but now that we know it’s there, scientists and conservationists can work to keep it and its habitat safe. Our other amphibian this week is one suggested by Max. Max, by the way, is an incredible artist who specializes in making reptiles and amphibians out of clay. Max asked specifically about the giant screaming frog, which definitely sounds like a Halloween-themed animal. The giant screaming frog isn’t the actual name of the frog, or at least I couldn’t find a frog with that specific name. I think it’s from an awesome video posted in 2017. I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to watch the video, which is a YouTube channel called Brave Wilderness. In the video, a man called Coyote Peterson catches a giant frog called the Smoky Jungle Frog. When he does, the frog makes this sound: [screaming frog!] That doesn’t actually sound all that spooky. But it is a warning call so I bet other smoky jungle frogs think it’s terrifying! The smoky jungle frog lives in tropical and subtropical areas of Central and northern South America, where it lives in swamps, ponds, and even rivers, especially in rainforest environments. It’s a bit unusual in that males are larger than females, although only slightly. Both males and females grow about 7 inches long from snout to vent, or 18 cm, and are a mottled brown with darker spots and stripes that help them blend in with dead leaves on the forest floor. The smoky jungle frog is nocturnal, and during the day it stays hidden in a burrow or buries itself in fallen leaves. At night it comes out to find food, and because it’s such a big, strong frog, it eats animals much larger than insects. It’s been observed eating small birds, especially baby birds, bats, snakes up to 19 inches long, or 50 cm, lizards, and sometimes even other frogs, including poison dart frogs. How embarrassing would that be if you were a bat, with strong wings and the amazing ability to echolocate, and you got eaten by a frog. When a frog feels threa

Thanks to Mia for suggesting the black rhino this week! We’ll also learn about other rhinos and their relations, including a mystery rhino. Further reading: Photos suggest rhino horns have shrunk over past century The Blue Rhinoceros – In Quest of the Keitloa A rhino with a very small third horn: Some rhinos have really big second horns [photo by David Clode and taken from this site]: The “blue rhinoceros,” or keitloa, as illustrated in the mid-19th century: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about an animal I can’t believe we haven’t covered before. Thanks to Mia for suggesting the rhinoceros, specifically the black rhino! We’ll also learn about a mystery rhino. We’ve talked about elephants lots of times, hippos quite a few times, and giraffes a couple of times, but pretty much the only episodes where we discussed a rhinoceros were 5 and 256. Episode 256 was mostly about mammoths, although we talked very briefly about the woolly rhinoceros, while episode 5 was about the unicorn and didn’t actually specifically talk about the rhino. So after almost 350 episodes of this podcast, one of the most amazing animals alive is one we literally haven’t learned about! Let’s fix that now. Most people are pretty familiar with what a rhinoceros looks like. Basically, it’s a big, heavy animal with relatively short legs, a big head that it carries low to the ground like a bison, and at least one horn that grows on its nose. It’s usually gray or gray-brown in color with very little hair, and its skin is tough. It eats plants. The rhinoceros isn’t related to the elephant or the hippopotamus. It’s actually most closely related to the horse and the tapir, which are odd-toed ungulates. The rhino has three toes on each foot, with a little hoof-like nail covering the front of each toe, but the bottom of the rhino’s foot is a big pad similar to the bottom of an elephant’s foot. The rhino’s nose horn isn’t technically a horn because it doesn’t have a bony core. It’s made of long fibers of keratin all stuck together, and keratin is the same protein that forms fingernails and hair. That makes it even weirder that some people think a rhinoceros horn is medicine. It’s literally the same protein as fingernails, and no one thinks of fingernails are medicine. The use of rhinoceros horn as medicine isn’t even all that old. Ancient people didn’t think it was medicine, but some modern people do, and they’ll pay a whole lot of money for part of a rhino horn to grind up and eat. Seriously, they might as well be eating ground-up fingernails. (That’s gross.) Because rhino horns are so valuable, people will kill rhinos just to saw their horns off to sell. That’s the main reason why most species of rhino are so critically endangered, even though they’re protected animals. Sometimes conservationists will sedate a wild rhino and saw its horn off, so that poachers won’t bother to kill it. A 2022 study determined that the overall size of rhino horns has shrunk over the last century, probably for the same reason that many elephants now have overall smaller tusks. Poachers are more likely to kill animals with big horns, which means animals with smaller horns are more likely to survive long enough to breed. The species of rhinoceros alive today are native to Africa and Asia, but it used to be an animal found throughout Eurasia and North America. It’s one of the biggest animals alive today, but in the past, some rhinos were even bigger. We’ve talked about Elasmotherium before, which lived in parts of Eurasia as recently as 39,000 years ago. It had long legs and could probably gallop like a horse, but it was the size of a mammoth. It also probably had a single horn that grew in the middle of its forehead, which is why it’s sometimes called the Siberian unicorn. We’ve also talked about Paraceratherium before. It was one of the biggest land mammals that ever lived, and while it didn’t have a horn, it was a type of rhinoceros. It lived in Eurasia between about 34 and 23 million years ago, and it probably stood about 16 feet tall at the shoulder, or 5 meters. The tallest giraffe ever measured was 19 feet tall, or 5.88 meters, at the top of its head. Paraceratherium had a long neck, possibly as much as eight feet long, or 2.5 meters, but it would have held its neck more or less horizontal most of the time. It spent its time eating leaves off of trees that most animals couldn’t reach, and when it raised its head to grab a particularly tasty leaf, it was definitely taller than the tallest giraffe, and taller than any other mammal known. While rhinos are famous for their horns, not every rhinoceros ancestor had a horn. But because rhino horns are made of keratin and not bone, we don’t always know if an extinct species had a horn. Most of the time the horns rotted away without being preserved. We do know that some ancient rhinos had a pair of nose horns that grew side

This week let’s learn about some astonishing giraffes and zebras that don’t look like you’d expect! Further reading: See the Rare, Spotless Giraffe Born at a Tennessee Zoo Giraffe Conservation Foundation Brights Zoo A tale of two zebras: South African photos used in misleading posts about Kenya’s polka-dot foal Zebra News: Spotted Tira, Zonkeys and Zorses Further viewing: The Mysterious Return of Tira the Spotted Dark Zebra in Masai Mara Kipekee the spotless giraffe [pic is from the first link posted above]: The picture posted on Facebook by Giraffe Conservation Foundation on Sept. 10, 2023: Tira the spotted zebra as a baby in 2019: Tira the spotted zebra is getting so grown up (or was in 2021)! A DIFFERENT spotted zebra from South Africa: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’m back from Dragon Con, where I had a great time as usual! I was careful and wore a mask while I was around other people, but masking works best when everyone wears a mask, which as we all know doesn’t happen very often right now. Luckily I didn’t get covid, but I did come down with an ordinary cold. I’m just about over it now, though, so hopefully I don’t sound too bad. I live in Tennessee, and before I left for Dragon Con I kept seeing news reports about an unusual baby giraffe born in a Tennessee zoo. You may have heard about the giraffe calf too. As you probably know, giraffes have an elaborate pattern of markings called spots, although they’re not spots like a leopard’s spots. They look a lot like the cracks in a dried-up mudpuddle, where the muddy parts are dark brown or orangey-brown, and the cracks in between are tan or white. It’s sometimes called a web pattern, where the lighter design looks like a web overlaid on a darker coat. Whatever you call it, all giraffes have these markings. But on July 31, 2023, a calf was born that didn’t have any spots at all. She’s completely brown. Also, very beautiful and cute as a little button. The calf was born at Brights Zoo, which is near a community called Limestone in Tennessee. I’d never heard of the zoo, so I assumed it was in middle or west Tennessee, and I live in east Tennessee. But when I looked it up, it’s actually quite close to me. I will definitely be visiting as soon as I get a chance! (Its website says Google Maps has its address wrong, by the way, in case you plan to visit it too.) It’s a private zoo dedicated to education and conservation, and among the animals they care for are giraffes. The calf in question is an endangered reticulated giraffe. Conservationists estimate that fewer than 9,000 reticulated giraffes remain in the wild these days, but it does well in captivity and is a popular animal in zoos. The reticulated giraffe was once common throughout northeast Africa, although its range is fractured into little areas now. It’s happy in a number of habitats, including rainforests and savannas. The zoo came up with four name choices for their calf and invited people to vote for which name they liked best. The winning name was announced just a few days ago as this episode goes live, Kipekee. It means “unique” in Swahili, the official language of Kenya. Kipekee is healthy and active, and the zoo reports she was immediately accepted by her mother and all the other giraffes as just a regular baby. I guess giraffes understand that what you look like isn’t nearly as important as how you act, and Kipekee acts like a curious little baby giraffe. In a lot of news reports, you’ll hear that Kipekee is the only unspotted giraffe seen since 1972, when one was born in a zoo in Japan, and that she’s likely the only unspotted giraffe alive in the entire world right now. But then, only a matter of hours before this episode goes live, because I took forever to start working on it, the Giraffe Conservation Foundation dropped a post on their Facebook page. It has a photo of a giraffe mama and baby running along in the wild in Namibia in Africa. And the baby giraffe HAS NO SPOTS! As of right now, that’s all we know about the other spotless giraffe calf, but I’ll definitely keep you posted in future episodes. Speaking of updates, reading about the giraffe without spots reminded me of an episode we released at the end of 2019, about Tira the zebra. Instead of stripes like ordinary zebras, Tira had spots! Tira was first observed by a tour guide in Kenya in September of 2019. The guide’s name is Antony Tira and the foal was named after him. Little Tira was just a baby back then, living with her herd on a national reserve. But then, according to internet rumor, something awful happened. Little Tira and her mom were captured, put on a truck to smuggle them out of the reserve, and sold to a private collector! There were even pictures of the pair in a truck. And sure enough, Tira was nowhere to be found in the wild. But things aren’t always what they seem, especially on the internet. Because amazingly, just like little Kipekee bein

Thanks to Clay for suggesting this week’s topic, psittacosaurus! Thanks to Will for a correction about kangaroos too. Don’t forget to check out the great podcast I Know Dino for all the best big dinosaur info! Further reading: What dinosaurs’ colour patterns say about their habitat Unusual fossil shows rare evidence of a mammal attacking a dinosaur A countershaded psittacosaurus model [photo by Jakob Vinther, from first article linked above]: Repenomamus and psittacosaurus, fighting forever [photo from second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at a dinosaur suggested by Clay, who has been very patient waiting for this one. In a huge coincidence, the podcast I Know Dino is trading promos with us, so if you haven’t heard about I Know Dino yet, make sure to listen until the very end of this episode for some more information about it. It’s a great podcast that I love to pieces, and I think you’ll love it too. We also have a quick correction, and I feel really bad because this one should have gone in the updates episode last month. Will emailed me back in April to point out that in episode 73, about phantom kangaroos, I said that kangaroos and wallabies were native to Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea. In fact, they’re not native to New Zealand, although they’ve been introduced there. So yikes, that was a big oversight on my part, and thanks very much to Will! Now, on to Clay’s suggestion, psittacosaurus! Psittacosaurus was a type of ceratopsian that lived during the early Cretaceous, between about 125 and 100 million years ago. We’ve talked about ceratopsians before back in episode 125, so if you remember that episode you’ll know that ceratopsians were big herbivorous dinosaurs famous for their head frills and horns. Triceratops is the most famous example, although it had lots of relations. But Psittacosaurus was a very early ceratopsian, and it’s nothing like Triceratops. If you had a time machine and went back to look at Psittacosaurus, you might not even think it was related to Triceratops at all. It didn’t have real horns or frills, most species were only about six and a half feet long at most, or two meters, but most importantly, it walked on its hind legs. We have hundreds of Psittacosaurus fossils, so we know quite a bit about it. Young individuals apparently walked on all four legs, but as it grew up, Psittacosaurus became bipedal. It still ate plants, though, and may have specialized in eating seeds and other tough plant materials. It couldn’t chew its food the way later ceratopsians could, but it did swallow little stones to help it grind up hard plant parts. These gastroliths have been found preserved with Psittacosaurus fossils. Psittacosaurus lived in what is now Asia, especially eastern and central Asia, and probably spent most of its time in forested areas. Because it lived only in the early Cretaceous, and because it was such a common animal with so many fossils found, if a paleontologist finds a Psittacosaurus fossil at a dig site, they can be pretty confident that the site dates to the early Cretaceous. Paleontologists have identified about twelve species of Psittacosaurus so far, although there’s still debate about the actual number of species, and at least some of them had feathers. We know because we have some well-preserved fossils with feather and skin impressions. Psittacosaurus wasn’t completely covered with feathers, though. Its feathers were bristle-like and have only been found sticking up along the top of the tail. Scientists think they were probably used for display. That means they were probably brightly colored, so if you go back in that time machine I mentioned earlier, please make sure to take lots of pictures. In fact, Clay said that Psittacosaurus looks like it’s “half parrot, half porcupine and half dinosaur” (that is actually one and a half animals, Clay, but we know what you mean and that actually is a really good description of it). Psittacosaurus’s bristles stuck up kind of like porcupine quills, although they weren’t sharp. Careful study of the quills shows that they were probably more like highly modified scales instead of feathers like you’d find on a modern bird, and that they grew around 6 inches long, or 15 cm. Some modern birds do actually have bristles like this, including the turkey. Most male turkeys, and some females, have a bundle of hair-like bristles on the breast that’s called a beard. Psittacosaurus’s name means “parrot lizard” because of the shape of its beak, which may have helped it crack seeds and nuts. Its head kind of resembled that of a turtle, although unlike a turtle it also had teeth. Its head was broad with cheekbones that jutted out sideways, sometimes so far that it looked like it had horns on the sides of its face just above the jaw. At least one species had prominances behind the eye that again, kind of look like little horns bu

This week we finish out Invertebrate August with some mysterious jellyfish, including a suggestion by Siya! Further reading: Mystery giant jellyfish washes up in Australia New jellyfish named after curious Australian schoolboy Mysterious jellyfish found off the coast of Papua New Guinea intrigues researchers Newly discovered jellyfish is a 24-eyed weirdo related to the world’s most venomous marine creature Rare jellyfish with three tentacles spotted in Pacific Ocean The Immortal Jellyfish A mystery jellyfish washed up on an Australian beach [photo by Josie Lim]: The tiny box jellyfish found in a pond in Hong Kong: The very rare Chirodectes: The mystery jelly that may be Chirodectes or a close relation: A mystery deep-sea jelly with only three tentacles: Bathykorus, a possible relation of the three-tentacled mystery jelly: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s hard to believe Invertebrate August is already ending, so let’s finish the month out with some mystery jellyfish, including a recent suggestion from Siya! When you visit the beach, it’s pretty common to find jellyfish washed ashore. They’re usually pretty small and obviously you don’t want to touch them, because many jellies can sting and the stings can activate even if the jelly is dead. Well, in February 2014, a family visiting the beach in Tasmania found a jelly washed ashore that was a little bit larger than normal. Okay, a lot larger than normal. The jellyfish they found measured almost five feet across, or 1.5 meters. It had flattened out under its own weight but it was still impressive. The family was so surprised at how big it was that they sent pictures to the state’s wildlife organization, who sent scientists to look at it. The scientists had heard reports of a big pink and white jellyfish for years, and now they had one to examine. Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin thought it might even be a new species of lion’s mane jelly. New species of jellyfish are discovered all the time. Dr. Gershwin has described over 200 new species herself. One example is a jellyfish discovered by a nine-year-old. In 2013, a nine-year-old boy in Queensland, Australia was fishing in a canal with his dad and a friend, when he noticed a jellyfish and scooped it up with a net. Its bell was only about an inch long, or 2.5 cm, and the boy thought it was really cute and interesting. He wanted to know what kind of jellyfish it was, so after some pestering on his part, his dad helped him send it to the Queensland Museum for identification. Dr. Gershwin was the jellyfish expert at the museum at the time, and she was as surprised as the boy’s dad to discover that the jellyfish was new to science! The boy’s name was Saxon Thomas, and to thank him for being so persistent about getting his jellyfish looked at by a scientist, the jellyfish was named Chiropsella saxoni. It’s a type of box jellyfish, which can be deadly, but this one is so small that it’s probably not that dangerous to humans. You still wouldn’t want to be stung by one, though, I bet. In 2022, a diver visiting Papua New Guinea got video of several really pretty jellyfish. He sent the video to Dr. Gershwin, who realized the jelly was either a very rare jelly called Chirodectes, or it was new to science. Chirodectes was only discovered in 1997 and described in 2005. It’s a type of box jellyfish and only one specimen has ever been collected, caught off the coast of Queensland, Australia near the Great Barrier Reef after a cyclone. Its bell was about 6 inches long, or 15 cm, but if you include the tentacles it was almost 4 feet long, or 1.2 meters. It’s pale in color with darker rings and speckles on its bell. The 2022 video appears to show a jellyfish without speckles or other markings, and it’s also larger than the single known Chirodectes specimen. Its bell appears to be about the size of a soccer ball, or a football if you live in most of the world. However, Dr. Gershwin and other experts who have studied the video say that it’s similar in many ways to Chirodectes and may be a close relation. Since all we have is the video, there’s no way to tell for sure if it’s a species new to science. Most box jellies live around Australia and New Guinea, but in 2020 scientists in Hong Kong studying organisms living in an intertidal shrimp pond noticed a jellyfish they didn’t recognize. It was tiny, even smaller than Saxon’s little box jelly, with a bell barely half an inch long, or about 15 mm. There were hundreds of the little jellies in the pond, which connects to the ocean with a narrow tidal channel, and they appeared to be eating the tiny shrimp living in the pond. Close study of the jelly determined that it was indeed a new species. The box jelly gets its name from its bell shape, which is shaped sort of like a cube. Most species are transparent to some degree, with tentacles that hang down from the corners of its cube-shaped bell. Most box jellies are fast swimmers, able to use jet prop

Thanks to Tobey and Anbo for their suggestions this week! We’re going to learn about some giant invertebrates! Further reading: The Invasive Giant African Land Snail Has Been Spotted in Florida A very big shell: The giant African snail is pretty darn giant [photo from article linked above]: The largest giant spider crab ever measured, and a person: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some giant invertebrates, suggested by Tobey and Anbo. Maybe they’re not as big as dinosaurs or whales, but they’re surprisingly big compared to most invertebrates. Let’s start with Tobey’s suggestion, about a big gastropod. Gastropods include slugs and snails, and while Tobey suggested the African trumpet snail specifically, I couldn’t figure out which species of snail it is. But it did lead me to learning a lot about some really big snails. The very biggest snail known to be alive today is called the Australian trumpet snail, Syrinx aruanus. This isn’t the kind of snail you’d find in your garden, though. It’s a sea snail that lives in shallow water off the coast of northern Australia, around Papua New Guinea, and other nearby areas. It has a coiled shell that’s referred to as spindle-shaped, because the coils form a point like the spindle of a tower. It’s a pretty common shape for sea snails and you’ve undoubtedly seen this kind of seashell before if you’ve spent any time on the beach. But unless you live in the places where the Australian trumpet lives, you probably haven’t seen a seashell this size. The Australian trumpet’s shell can grow up to three feet long, or 91 cm. Not only is this a huge shell, the snail itself is really heavy. It can weigh as much as 31 lbs, or 14 kg, which is as heavy as a good-sized dog. The snail eats worms, but not just any old worms. If you remember episode 289, you might remember that Australia is home to the giant beach worm, a polychaete worm that burrows in the sand between high and low tide marks. It can grow as much as 8 feet long, or 2.4 meters, and probably longer. Well, that’s the type of worm the Australian trumpet likes to eat, along with other worms. The snail extends a proboscis into the worm’s burrow to reach the worm, but although I’ve tried to find out how it actually captures the worm in order to eat it, this seems to be a mystery. Like other gastropods, the Australian trumpet eats by scraping pieces of food into its mouth using a radula. That’s a tongue-like structure studded with tiny sharp teeth, and the Australian trumpet has a formidable radula. Some other sea snails, especially cone snails, are able to paralyze or outright kill prey by injecting it with venom via a proboscis, so it’s possible the Australian trumpet does too. The Australian trumpet is related to cone snails, although not very closely. Obviously, we know very little about the Australian trumpet, even though it’s not hard to find. The trouble is that its an edible snail to humans and humans also really like those big shells and will pay a lot for them. In some areas people have hunted the snail to extinction, but we don’t even know how common it is overall to know if it’s endangered or not. Tobey may have been referring to the giant African snail, which is probably the largest living land snail known. There are several snails that share the name “giant African snail,” and they’re all big, but the biggest is Lissachatina fulica. It can grow more than 8 inches long, or 20 cm, and its conical shell is usually brown and white with pretty banding in some of the whorls. It looks more like the shell of a sea snail than a land snail, but the shell is incredibly tough. The giant African snail is an invasive species in many areas. Not only will it eat plants down to nothing, it will also eat stucco and concrete for the minerals they contain. It even eats sand, cardboard, certain rocks, bones, and sometimes other African giant snails, presumably when it runs out of trees and houses to eat. It can spread diseases to plants, animals, and humans, which is a problem since it’s also edible. Like many snails, the African giant snail is a simultaneous hermaphrodite, meaning it can produce both sperm and eggs. It can’t self-fertilize its own eggs, but after mating a snail can keep any unused sperm alive in its body for up to two years, using it to fertilize eggs during that whole time, and it can lay up to 200 eggs five or six times a year. In other words, it only takes a single snail to produce a wasteland of invasive snails in a very short amount of time. In June 2023, some African giant snails were found near Miami, Florida and officials placed the whole area under agricultural quarantine. That means no one can move any soil or plants out of the area without permission, since that could cause the snails to spread to other places. Meanwhile, officials are working to eradicate the snails. Other parts of Florida are also under the same quaran

Thanks to Murilo and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week! Further reading: The ‘sheep’ that can photosynthesize Meet the ‘mold pigs,’ a new group of invertebrates from 30 million years ago A leaf sheep: Shaun the sheep: A mold pig: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week let’s learn about two animals that sound like you’d find them on a farm, but they’re much different than their names imply. Thanks to Murilo for suggesting the leaf sheep, which is where we’ll start. The leaf sheep isn’t a sheep or a leaf. It’s actually a type of sea slug that lives in tropical waters near Japan and throughout much of coastal south Asia. The reason it’s called a leaf sheep is because it actually looks a lot like a tiny cartoon sheep covered with green leaves instead of wool. Back in episode 215 we talked about the sea bunny, which is another type of sea slug although it’s not closely related to the leaf sheep. The leaf sheep is even smaller than the sea bunny, which can grow up to an inch long, or about 25 mm. The leaf sheep only grows about 10 mm long at most, which explains why it wasn’t discovered until 1993. No one noticed it. The leaf sheep’s face is white or pale yellow with two tiny black dots for eyes set close together, which kind of makes it look like Shaun the Sheep. It also has two black-tipped protuberances that look like ears, although they’re actually chemoreceptors called rhinophores. The rest of its body is covered with leaf-shaped spines called cerata, which are green and often tipped with pink, white, or black. This helps disguise it as a plant, but there’s another reason why it’s green. The leaf sheep eats a particular kind of algae called Avrainvillea, which looks like moss or fuzzy carpet. While algae aren’t exactly plants or animals, many do photosynthesize like plants. In other words, they transform sunlight into energy to keep them alive. In order to photosynthesize, a plant or algae uses a special pigment called chlorophyll that makes up part of a chloroplast in its cells, which happens to be green. The leaf sheep eats the algae, but it doesn’t digest the chloroplasts. Instead, it absorbs them into its own body and uses them for photosynthesis. That way it gets nutrients from eating and digesting algae and it gets extra energy from sunlight. This is a trait shared by other sea slugs in the superorder Sacoglossa. Because they need sunlight for photosynthesis, they live in shallow water, often near coral reefs. When the leaf sheep’s eggs hatch, the larvae have shells, but as they mature they shed their shells. This is a good place to talk about cyanobacteria, which was requested ages ago by an anonymous listener. Cyanobacteria mostly live in water and are also called blue-green algae, even though they’re not actually classified as algae. They’re considered bacteria, although not every scientist agrees. Some are unicellular, meaning they just consist of one cell, while others are multicellular like plants and animals, which means they have multiple cells specialized for different functions. Some other cyanobacteria group together in colonies. So basically, cyanobacteria looked at the chart of possible life forms and said, “yes, thanks, we’ll take some of everything.” That’s why it’s so hard to classify them. Cyanobacteria photosynthesize, and they’ve been doing so for far longer than plants–possibly as much as 2.7 billion years, although scientists think cyanobacteria originally evolved around 3.5 billion years ago. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old and plants didn’t evolve until about 700 million years ago. Like most plants also do, cyanobacteria produce oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process, and when they started doing so around 2.7 billion years ago, they changed the entire world. Before then, earth’s atmosphere hardly contained any oxygen. If you had a time machine and went back to more than two billion years ago, and you forgot to bring an oxygen tank, you’d instantly suffocate trying to breathe the air. But back then, even though animals and plants didn’t yet exist, the world contained a whole lot of microbial life, and none of it wanted anything to do with oxygen. Oxygen was toxic to the lifeforms that lived then, but cyanobacteria just kept producing it. Cyanobacteria are tiny, but there were a lot of them. Over the course of about 700 million years, the oxygen added up until other lifeforms started to go extinct, poisoned by all that oxygen in the oceans and air. By two billion years ago, pretty much every lifeform that couldn’t evolve to use or at least tolerate oxygen had gone extinct. So take a deep breath of life-giving oxygen and thank cyanobacteria, which by the way are still around and still producing oxygen. However, they’re still up to their old tricks because they also produce what are called cyanotoxins, which can be deadly. That brings us to another animal in our imaginary farm, the mold pig. It

Thanks to Eilee for suggesting the sea louse this week! Further reading: Secrets of the Whale Riders: Crablike ‘Whale Lice’ Show How Endangered Cetaceans Evolved Parasite of the Day: Neocyamus physeteris A whale louse [By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19259257]: The salmon sea louse [By Thomas Bjørkan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7524020]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s now officially August, so we’re officially kicking off Invertebrate August with two invertebrates with the word louse in their names, even though neither of them are technically lice. Thanks to Eilee for suggesting sea lice, and thanks to our patrons because I used some information from an old Patreon episode for the first part of this episode. That would be the whale louse. The whale louse isn’t actually a louse, although it is a parasite. Lice are insects adapted for a parasitic lifestyle on the bodies of their hosts, but whale lice are crustaceans—specifically, amphipods specialized to live on whales, dolphins, and porpoises. There are many species of whale louse, with some only living on a particular species of whale. In the case of the sperm whale, one species of whale louse lives on the male sperm whale while a totally different species of whale louse lives on the female sperm whale and on calves. This was a fact I found on Wikipedia and included in the Patreon episode, but at the time I couldn’t find out more. It’s puzzled me ever since, which is one of the reasons I wanted to revisit this topic. I couldn’t figure out how the male calves ended up with male sperm whale lice, and I couldn’t figure out why males and females would have different species of lice. I’m happy to report that I now know the answers to both questions, or at least I can report what experts hypothesize. Male sperm whales spend more time in polar waters while females spend more time in warmer waters to raise their calves. Sperm whales are actually host to three different whale lice species, but one species prefers colder water and is much more likely to live on males, while another species prefers warmer water and is much more likely to live on females and calves. Any sperm whale might have lice from any of the three species, though, and whale lice are spread when whales rub against each other. This happens when the whales mate, but it also happens when males fight or when whales are just being friendly. The whale louse has a flattened body and legs that end in claws that help it cling to the whale. Different species are different sizes, from only five millimeters up to an inch long, or about 25 mm. Typically the lice cling to areas where water currents won’t sweep them away, including around the eyes and genital folds, ventral pleats, blowholes, and in wounds. Barnacles also grow on some whales and the lice live around the barnacles. But even though all that sounds horrible, the lice don’t actually harm the whales. They eat dead skin cells and algae, which helps keep wounds clean and reduces the risk of infection. The right whale is a baleen whale that can grow up to 65 feet long, or almost 20 meters. Right whales have callosities on their heads, which are raised patches of thickened, bumpy skin. Every whale has a different pattern of callosities. Right whales are dark in color, but while the callosities are generally paler than the surrounding skin, they appear white because that’s where the whale lice live, and the lice are white. This allows whales to identify other whales by sight. It’s gross but it works for the whales. Right whales also usually host one or two other species of louse that don’t live on the callosities. Dolphins typically have very few lice, since most dolphins are much faster and more streamlined than whales and the lice have a harder time not getting washed off. Some dolphins studied have no lice at all, and others have less than a dozen. Almost all whales have lice. Scientists study whale lice to learn more about whales, including how populations of whales overlap during migration. Studies of the lice on right whales helped researchers determine when the whales split into three species. But sometimes what researchers learn from the lice is puzzling. In 2004 researchers found a dead southern right whale calf and examined it, and were surprised to find it had humpback whale lice, not southern right whale lice. Researchers hypothesize that something had happened to the calf’s birth mother and it was adopted by a humpback whale mother. Another study determined that a single southern right whale crossed the equator between one and two million years ago and joined up with right whales in the North Pacific. Ordinarily right whales can’t cross the equator, since their blubber is too thick and they overheat in warm water. Researchers suggest that the right whale in question was an adventurous juve

Is it an invertebrate? Is it a vertebrate? It’s the Tully monster! Further reading: 3D Tully monster probably not related to vertebrates Has the “Tully monster” mystery finally been solved after 65 years? Possibly what the Tully monster looked like while alive: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an ancient creature surrounded by mystery. When I was working on last week’s updates episode, I found some new information about it and intended to include it as an update. Then I realized I was referencing a Patreon episode, which I also reworked into a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book. So instead, I included the new information in this episode all about the Tully monster. In 1955, an amateur fossil collector named Francis Tully discovered a really weird fossil. This was in one particular area of Illinois in the United States, roughly in the middle of North America. The fossil was about six inches long, or 15 cm, and Tully thought it resembled a tiny torpedo. He took the fossil to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in hopes that somebody could tell him what his fossil was. The paleontologists he showed it to had no idea what it was or even what it might be related to. It was described in 1966 and given the name Tullimonstrum, which means Mr. Tully’s monster, which is pretty much what everyone was calling it already. 300 million years ago, in what is now the state of Illinois, a strange animal lived in the shallow sea that covered part of the area. The land that bordered this sea was swampy, with many rivers emptying into the ocean. These river waters carried dead plant materials and mud, which settled to the bottom of the ocean. When an animal died, assuming it wasn’t eaten by something else, its body sank into this soft muddy mess. The bacteria in the mud produced carbon dioxide that combined with iron that was also present in the mud, which formed a mineral called siderite that encased the dead animal. This slowed decay long enough that an impression of the body formed in the mud, and as the centuries passed and the mud became stone, the fossilized body impression was surrounded by a protective ironstone nodule. That’s why we know about the soft-bodied animals from this area, even though soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossil evidence. So what did this weird animal look like? The Tully monster was shaped sort of like a slug or a leech, and it had a segmented body. Its eyes were on stalks that jutted out sideways, although the stalks were more of a horizontal bar that grew across the top of the head. The tail end had two vertical fins, which argues that the Tully monster was probably a good swimmer. But at the front of its body it had a long, thin, jointed proboscis that ended in claws or pincers lined with eight tiny tooth-like structures. It’s easy to assume that the pincers acted as jaws and therefore the proboscis was a mouth on a jointed stalk, but we really don’t know. The Tully monster may have used its proboscis to probe for food in the mud at the bottom of the sea, but because the proboscis had a joint, it probably couldn’t act as a sort of straw. The pincers may have grabbed tiny prey and conveyed it to a mouth that hasn’t been preserved on the specimens we have. The Tully monster resembles nothing else known, and is so bizarre that researchers aren’t sure where to place it taxonomically. And it wasn’t rare. Paleontologists have since found lots of Tully monster fossils in the Illinois fossil beds, known as the Mazon Creek formation. The Mazon Creek formation is also the source of highly detailed fossils of hundreds of other plant and animal species, including some that have never been found anywhere else. Scientists have suggested any number of animal groups that the Tully monster might belong to. It might be a type of arthropod, a mollusk, a segmented worm…or it might be a vertebrate. The tiny tooth-like structures in the pincers have been analyzed and some researchers think they were more similar to keratin than chitin. Keratin is a vertebrate protein while chitin is an invertebrate protein. In 2016 a study argued that pigments in the eyes are arranged the same way as they are in vertebrates, which meant the Tully monster might have been a vertebrate. The problem is that some invertebrates also have these same pigment arrangements, notably cephalopods like octopuses. A 2019 study also looked at the chemical makeup of the fossil eyes, this time with even more advanced equipment—specifically, a synchrotron radiation lightsource, which is a type of particle accelerator. It sounds so science-y. This study suggested that the Tully monster’s eyes had a different chemical makeup than the vertebrates found in the same fossil beds, which means the Tully monster probably wasn’t a vertebrate after all. But it also didn’t match up with known invertebrates from the same fossil beds. Of cou

This week we have our annual updates and corrections episode, and at the end of the episode we’ll learn about a really weird clam I didn’t even think was real at first. Thanks to Simon and Anbo for sending in some corrections! Further reading: Lessons on transparency from the glass frog Hidden, never-before-seen penguin colony spotted from space Rare wild asses spotted near China-Mongolia border Aye-Ayes Use Their Elongated Fingers to Pick Their Nose Homo sapiens likely arose from multiple closely related populations Scientists Find Earliest Evidence of Hominins Cooking with Fire 153,000-Year-Old Homo sapiens Footprint Discovered in South Africa Newly-Discovered Tyrannosaur Species Fills Gap in Lineage Leading to Tyrannosaurus rex Earth’s First Vertebrate Superpredator Was Shorter and Stouter than Previously Thought 252-Million-Year-Old Insect-Damaged Leaves Reveal First Fossil Evidence of Foliar Nyctinasty The other paleo diet: Rare discovery of dinosaur remains preserved with its last meal The Mongolian wild ass: The giant barb fish [photo from this site]: Enigmonia aenigmatica, AKA the mangrove jingle shell, on a leaf: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our annual updates and corrections episode, but we’ll also learn about the mangrove jingle shell, a clam that lives in TREES. A quick reminder that this isn’t a comprehensive updates episode, because that would take 100 years to prepare and would be hours and hours long, and I don’t have that kind of time. It’s just whatever caught my eye during the last year that I thought was interesting. First, we have a few corrections. Anbo emailed me recently with a correction from episode 158. No one else caught this, as far as I can remember. In that episode I said that geckos don’t have eyelids, and for the most part that’s true. But there’s one family of geckos that does have eyelids, Eublepharidae. This includes the leopard gecko, and that lines up with Anbo’s report of having a pet leopard gecko who definitely blinked its eyes. This family of geckos are sometimes even called eyelid geckos. Also, Anbo, I apologize for mispronouncing your name in last week’s episode about shrimp. After episode 307, about the coquí and glass frogs, Simon pointed out that Hawaii doesn’t actually have any native frogs or amphibians at all. It doesn’t even have any native reptiles unless you count sea snakes and sea turtles. The coqui frog is an invasive species introduced by humans, and because it has no natural predators in Hawaii it has disrupted the native ecosystem in many places, eating all the available insects. Three of the Hawaiian islands remain free of the frogs, and conservationists are working to keep it that way while also figuring out ways to get them off of the other islands. Simon also sent me the chapter of the book he’s working on that talks about island frogs, and I hope the book is published soon because it is so much fun to read! Speaking of frogs, one week after episode 307, an article about yet another way the glass frog is able to hide from predators was published in Science. When a glass frog is active, its blood is normal, but when it settles down to sleep, the red blood cells in its blood collect in its liver. The liver is covered with teensy guanine crystals that scatter light, which hides the red color from view. That makes the frog look even more green and leaf-like! We’ve talked about penguins in several episodes, and emperor penguins specifically in episode 78. The emperor penguin lives in Antarctica and is threatened by climate change as the earth’s climate warms and more and more ice melts. We actually don’t know all that much about the emperor penguin because it lives in a part of the world that’s difficult for humans to explore. In December 2022, a geologist named Peter Fretwell was studying satellite photos of Antarctica to measure the loss of sea ice when he noticed something strange. Some of the ice had brown stains. Dr Fretwell knew exactly what those stains were: emperor penguin poop. When he obtained higher-resolution photos, he was able to zoom in and see the emperor penguins themselves. But this wasn’t a colony he knew about. It was a completely undiscovered colony. In episode 292 we talked about a mystery animal called the kunga, and in that episode we also talked a lot about domestic and wild donkeys. We didn’t cover the Mongolian wild ass in that one, but it’s very similar to wild asses in other parts of the world. It’s also called the Mongolian khulan. It used to be a lot more widespread than it is now, but these days it only lives in southern Mongolia and northern China. It’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss, climate change, and poaching, even though it’s a protected animal in both Mongolia and China. In February of 2023, a small herd of eight Mongolian wild asses were spotted along the border of both countries, in a nature reserve. A local herdsman not

Thanks to Zachary and Anbo for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some shrimp! Further reading: This is why the pistol shrimp is immune to its own powerful shock waves The Symbiotic Relationship Between Gobies and Pistol Shrimp An eastern ghost shrimp: A snapping shrimp: A goby fish and its snapping shrimp buddy: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to have an episode about a few different types of shrimp, with suggestions from Zachary and Ambo. Let’s start with the ghost shrimp, since Zachary recently got an aquarium and has some ghost shrimp in it. The name ghost shrimp refers to various species of freshwater shrimp in the genus Palaemon. One of the most popular species to keep as a pet is Palaemonetes paludosus. It’s sometimes called the glass shrimp since it’s mostly transparent, or the eastern ghost shrimp. The eastern ghost shrimp can grow up to about an inch long, or 2.5 cm. It’s native to the southeastern United States, mostly east of the Appalachian Mountains, where it lives in lakes and eats plankton. Even though the eastern ghost shrimp is mostly transparent, it can actually change its color to blend in with its background. Only one other species of ghost shrimp is known to do this, a very similar species that is only found in the Mississippi River. There are dozens of species of ghost shrimp, though, and they live throughout the world. Some species are freshwater, others are marine. Most are at least partially transparent and rarely grow more than two inches long, or maybe 5 cm at most. In some cases people catch them to eat, although more often they’re caught to use as bait or fish food, and of course they’re eaten by a whole lot of wild animals. We actually don’t know a whole lot about many species of ghost shrimp. Some have only recently been discovered, and some are endangered. For instance, the Florida cave shrimp is only found in a single sinkhole near Gainesville, Florida. It’s the only known species of ghost shrimp that lives in a cave, and it’s closely related to the eastern ghost shrimp. The Florida cave shrimp grows a little over one inch long, or about 3 cm. It has eyes but doesn’t need them, so they don’t work anymore. It’s mostly transparent with some white spots. It was discovered in 1953 during a scientific exploration of a sinkhole in the Squirrel Chimney Cave and hasn’t been seen since 1973. It may even be extinct by now, but further explorations of the sinkhole have revealed that it connects with a much larger underwater cave system. Hopefully the little shrimp lives within this cave system, but it hasn’t been found anywhere else so far and we know almost nothing about it. That’s pretty much all there is to know about the ghost shrimp, so congratulations to Zachary for keeping a mysterious little friend in your aquarium. Next, Anbo wanted to learn about snapping shrimp. (Anbo also wanted to learn about the mantis shrimp, but it turns out that the mantis shrimp isn’t actually a shrimp, or a mantis, and it deserves its own episode one day.) We talked about the snapping shrimp before in episode 273, but there’s definitely more to learn about it. There are a whole lot of species–like, more than a thousand. They’re especially common in coral reefs and live in colonies that communicate with each other by snapping their claws. The sound is so loud that it can sound like a gunshot, which is why it’s sometimes called the pistol shrimp. The snapping shrimp is about the same size as the ghost shrimp, about 2 inches long at most, or 5 cm. One of its claws is ordinary, but the other claw is much bigger, and it’s the large claw that makes the snapping sound. As we discussed in episode 273, the snapping shrimp 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. The bubbles only travel a few millimeters in distance, but the shock wave is powerful enough at this short range to stun or outright kill a small animal. Scientists figured out how the snapping shrimp’s snap worked in 2020, but it wasn’t until 2022 that they discovered why the shrimp doesn’t damage its tiny shrimp brain when it snaps. It turns out that its brain is protected by a translucent helmet called an orbital hood. It needs to be translucent because it covers the shrimp’s eyes as well as the rest of its head. The hood is an extension of the shrimp’s exoskeleton, and it has an opening at the back. Scientists think that when the shock wave of a snap meets the hood, the change in water pressure under the hood is expelled out the opening instead of affecting the brain. Scientists want to learn how exactly the orbital hood works to redirect pressure wa

Thanks to Kari for suggesting this week’s topics! Definitely check out her book Butt or Face?, which is funny and has lots of animal information! Further reading: Butt or Face? by Kari Lavelle GBIF: Araneus praesignis [the spider pictures below come from this site] The turtle ant’s body is flattened and the soldier caste ants have specialized head shapes to block the nest entrances: The alien butt spider has a butt that looks like an alien’s face! The alien butt spider hides during the day in its leaf fort: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about two really weird invertebrates suggested by Kari. One of these two animals is her favorite and the other is a weird ant from a book she wrote. Kari’s full name is Kari Lavelle and her book is for kids, called Butt or Face? It actually releases tomorrow as this episode goes live, so if you’re listening to this episode on Monday, July 10, 2023, you still have time to preorder the book, or you can just wait a day and run out to your local bookstore or library to get a copy. Kari was nice enough to send me a copy of the book and it’s really funny and interesting. It’s partly a game where you look at a picture and decide whether it shows an animal’s butt or its face. It’s a lot harder than you’d think! You make your guess and turn the page to find out if you’re right and learn about the animal. It’s very fun and I actually guessed wrong on one animal, but I’m not telling you which one. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about the book and maybe order a copy for yourself. Anyway, let’s talk about the ant first, because it’s actually one I’ve had on the list to talk about for a while. I was really excited to see it in Kari’s book. It’s called the turtle ant, sometimes called the “door head” ant. That gives you a clue as to whether its picture in the book features its butt or its face. The turtle ant is any of the well over 100 species of ant in the genus Cephalotes, which are native to the Americas. Most live in Central and South America, especially in tropical and subtropical areas. Almost all species live in trees, nesting in cavities originally made by beetle larvae. For the most part, turtle ants are pretty typical compared to other ant species. They have a generalized diet, eating pretty much anything they find. This includes plant material, dead insects and other animals they find, bird poop, nectar, and even pollen in some species. Each colony has a single queen that mates with multiple males and lays all the eggs for the colony. Worker ants tend the eggs and larvae, gather food, and keep the colony clean. But as in some other ants, many species of turtle ant have a soldier caste. These are worker ants who are specialized to defend the nest. We talked about army ants recently, in episode 328, and also back in episode 185, and army ant soldiers have massive sharp mandibles that can inflict painful bites. But the turtle ant soldiers don’t have sharp mandibles and aren’t aggressive. They have one job, and that job is to stand at the nest’s entrances and stop them up with their heads, only moving when another ant needs to get through. As a result, turtle ant soldiers have weird-shaped heads. The head shape varies from species to species, with some looking more normal and some being heavily armored and strangely shaped. Well, they’re not strangely shaped except in comparison to an ordinary ant head. They’re shaped exactly right to do the job they’ve evolved to do, be a door. In some species, the top of the soldier’s head is completely round and flattened, just the right size and shape to block the entrance. Turtle ants have another ability that they share with some other ants. If an ant falls from the twig or branch it’s climbing on, instead of just falling to the ground, it can glide back to the tree trunk. Turtle ants have flattened bodies, which helps catch the air like a tiny ant-shaped parachute. Unlike other ants that do this, which glide head-first, the turtle ant glides abdomen-first. It uses its legs and head to adjust which way it’s gliding, and most of the time it lands safely on the tree trunk. There are undoubtedly more turtle ant species than we know about so far, and we actually don’t know very much about most of the species we have discovered. Most turtle ants live in trees, and that makes them hard to study. There’s actually a spider called the ant-mimicking crab spider that eats turtle ants. It looks so much like a turtle ant worker that it can get close to the actual ants before it’s recognized as a predator, at which point it has a good chance of grabbing an ant to eat before the ant can run away. But that’s not actually the type of spider we’re talking about next. The other animal we’re talking about today isn’t one from the book, it just happens to be one of Kari’s favorite animals *cough*sequel*cough*. It’s called the alien butt sp

We’re kicking off July with a beautiful butterfly that does horrible things to ants! Further reading: UK Butterflies – Large Blue The large blue butterfly (picture taken from page linked above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I recently realized that I have so many weird and interesting invertebrates saved up to feature for invertebrate August that I can’t fit them all into one month, so let’s kick off invertebrate August in July! This week we’re going to learn about a beautiful butterfly called the large blue, because it is both large and blue. Well, sort of large. The butterfly has a wingspan of up to two inches, or about 5 cm. Its wings are a dusty blue with black spots, although there are a lot of regional differences. Some populations are almost black, some are more tan than blue, and some don’t have spots. The large blue lives throughout much of Eurasia, although its numbers have decreased in many places in the last 50 years or so. In some places it’s even gone extinct, mainly due to habitat loss. It needs specific host plants for the caterpillars to eat, and it also needs a particular type of ant in order for the caterpillars to survive–because the large blue caterpillar is a brood parasite! We’ve talked about brood parasites before in birds, where a bird will lay an egg in the nest of a different species of bird. In the case of the large blue butterfly, in summertime the female lays her eggs on wild thyme or marjoram plants near a colony of red ants in the genus Myrmica [meer-mee-kuh]. She usually only lays one egg on any given plant. When the eggs hatch, the newly emerged caterpillars feed on plants at first, just like any other caterpillar, especially the flowers of the plant. If more than one large blue caterpillar is on a plant and they encounter each other, one of them will grab the other and eat it. Drama among the thyme plants! The caterpillar goes through three growth stages, called instars, as an ordinary caterpillar (except for the cannibalism thing), but once it reaches the fourth instar it starts acting very different. The caterpillar drops to the ground and releases a chemical that mimics the smell of the Myrmica ant larvae. When an ant finds a caterpillar, the caterpillar will rear up so that it resembles an ant larva. The ant usually takes it back to its nest at this point, but sometimes the caterpillar will just follow an ant trail and enter the nest on its own. Either way, the ants will assume it’s a lost baby and take it to the nesting chamber, where they feed and take care of it. The caterpillar is bigger than a usual ant larva, but it uses this to its advantage. It mimics the sounds made by a queen ant, which means the ants take extra good care of it. If the ants run out of regular food to feed the caterpillar, they will even start feeding it real ant larvae. But sometimes the caterpillar gets impatient, or maybe just hungry, and will just start eating the other pupating ant larvae. The system isn’t perfect, because a lot of times the ants figure out that the caterpillar is an intruder and will kill and eat it. If the queen ant encounters the caterpillar, she recognizes that it isn’t an ant larva and will attack it. Sometimes the ants just up and abandon the nest, leaving the caterpillar behind. In that case, the caterpillar will either leave the nest itself and find another one, or it will wait for a new ant colony to find the nest and move in. This can actually happen repeatedly during the nine months or so that the caterpillar requires to finish growing, although during the winter the caterpillar is more or less dormant. Around the end of spring, the caterpillar spins a cocoon and pupates right there in the ant nest. The ants continue to take care of it, making sure the pupa is clean. When it emerges as a new butterfly after a few weeks, it has to find its way out of the ant nest and to the surface, where it climbs a plant stem and rests while its wings inflate and dry. The adult butterflies only live for a few weeks, eating flower nectar, especially of the thyme plant. One of the places where the large blue butterfly went extinct was in the British Isles, where it was last seen in 1979. Before that, though, scientists already recognized that the species was in danger in Britain. They knew that the butterflies needed wild thyme and Myrmica ants, and made sure to plant lots of the thyme in areas with lots of Myrmica ant colonies. But the butterflies still declined until none were left in Britain. It turns out that the large blue butterfly requires a particular species of Myrmica ant, Myrmica sabuleti, and if the caterpillars are adopted by other ant species, they aren’t usually successful in surviving to grow up. Fortunately, a few years later, scientists re-introduced large blue butterflies to Britain from Sweden, and this time it worked. Not only are there still large blue butterflies in Britain again, they’re

Thanks to David for this week’s suggestion, the piranha! Further reading: Florida wildlife officer’s fish seizure nibbles at illegal piranha sales How Teddy Roosevelt Turned Piranhas into Ferocious Maneaters The beautiful butterfly peacock bass (not a piranha): The red-bellied piranha (By H. Zell – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82557603): Chompy chompy teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re covering a type of fish that I absolutely cannot believe we haven’t talked about before. It’s the piranha! Thanks to David for telling me on Mastodon about a piranha incident that led to me realizing we don’t have an episode about it yet. David’s incident is something that happened in Florida in 2009. In October of that year, a 14-year-old boy named Jake was fishing in a retention pond in West Palm Beach, Florida, which he did a lot. He’d caught all kinds of unusual fish in the pond, including a butterfly peacock bass, which is yellow, green, or even orange in color with three black stripes on its back. It can grow well over two feet long, or 74 cm. The peacock bass is native to tropical areas of South America but was deliberately introduced to Florida in 1984 to prey on other invasive species. This actually worked, and because the fish can’t survive if the water gets too cold, it can’t spread very far. But on this particular October day in 2009, Jake caught a fish that no one wanted to find in Florida, a red-bellied piranha! The teenager took the fish to his dad, who called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A wildlife biologist investigated and caught another piranha in the same pond the following week. That was enough of a problem that wildlife officials decided to poison the entire 4-acre pond rather than risk having piranhas become naturalized in Florida. The poison killed every single fish in the pond, including at least one other piranha, although it was a poison that quickly broke down into nontoxic compounds. The pond was later restocked with bluegills and other native fish. The reason that Florida wildlife officials would rather kill all the fish in a big pond rather than let any piranhas live is that Florida is very similar to the piranha’s native habitat in South America. Florida already has enough issues with invasive species like the Burmese python, cane toad, lionfish, and giant land snail without adding another fish that’s famous for its sharp teeth and voracious appetite. If the piranha became established in Florida, it could drive all kinds of native fish and other animals to extinction very quickly. This has actually happened in parts of China, where red-bellied piranha were first found in the wild in 1990 and have since spread throughout much of South China. In some waterways, up to half of the native fish have disappeared after piranha and other invasive species became established. But wait, you may be thinking, what about the danger to humans? Aren’t piranhas incredibly dangerous to swimmers? The red-bellied piranha is the species that most people think is dangerous to people. We’ve all heard the stories and maybe seen movies where a pack of piranha attack someone swimming along, and within minutes all that’s left of them is a skeleton. But it may not surprise you to learn that those stories are fake, but they’re widespread for an unusual reason. Back in 1913, the former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, who we talked about in episode 284 about the teddy bear, took part in an expedition to the Amazon basin in South America. The expedition was arranged by the Brazilian government, who invited Roosevelt along. The expedition planned to explore the headwaters of the Amazon and it did, at great peril. Three people died and almost everyone got sick from malaria or some other disease, including Roosevelt, who got a cut on his leg that became badly infected. One of the three people who died was murdered by another expedition member, and instead of taking the murderer home to face justice, they just…left him in the jungle, a looooooooong way from anywhere or anyone. Anyway, one of the things Roosevelt saw early on in the trip was something he told everyone about later, in gruesome detail. You’ve probably heard about it too. The local dignitaries took Roosevelt and the other expedition members on a tour of their town, showing things off, as people do all over the world when they have important visitors. They also showed how ferocious the local piranhas were by driving a cow into the water. A pack of piranhas attacked the cow, and within minutes it was nothing but a skeleton, just like in the movies! But wait, you’re probably thinking again, I just said that was all fake! Did it really happen? It did, but not the way it sounds. The whole cruel spectacle was arranged ahead of time by the local dignitaries. They had people capture piranhas from miles away and bring them to

Thanks to Liesbet, Simon, and Thea for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some birds! Further reading: Blue Tits and Milk Bottle Tops Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering Further watching: A Raven Calling [this is a great video of a raven making all sorts of interesting sounds–I only used a tiny clip of it in the episode but it’s worth watching the whole thing] The European robin: The American robin and a worm that is having a very bad day: A blue tit [photo By © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37675470]: A blue tit about to get the cap off that milk bottle [photo from link above]: The Eastern bluebird: A raven: An American crow: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have suggestions from Liesbet, Simon, and Thea, who suggested some relatively common birds that you may already think you know all about, but there’s lots to learn about them! We’ll start with Liesbet’s suggestion, about the European robin and bluebird, and while we’re at it we’ll learn about the American robin and bluebird. The European and American birds are completely different species. The reason they have the same names is because when Europeans first started paying attention to the birds of North America, they needed names for the birds. The native peoples had names for them, of course, but the Europeans wanted names in a language they understood, so in a lot of cases they just borrowed names already in use at home. Let’s start with the robin, which we also talked about way back in episode 81. The European robin is a little bitty bird, only around 5 inches long, or 13 cm, with a brown back, streaked gray or buff belly, and orange face and breast. It has a short black bill and round black eyes. It eats insects, worms, berries, and seeds. The eggs are pale brown with reddish speckles. It lives throughout much of Eurasia, but robins in Britain tend to be fairly tame, probably because they were traditionally considered beneficial in Britain and Ireland, so farmers and gardeners wouldn’t hurt them. In other parts of Europe they were hunted and are much more shy. European robins are also common on Christmas cards in Britain and Ireland, possibly because in the olden days, postmen used to wear red jackets. The postmen started to be called robins as a result, and since postmen bring Christmas cards, the bird robin became linked with card delivery and finally just ended up on the Christmas cards. Plus, their orange markings are cheerful in winter. This is what the European robin sounds like: [robin song] The American robin is a type of thrush. It lives year-round in most of the United States and parts of Mexico, spends summers in much of Canada, and winters in parts of Mexico. It’s very different from the European robin. The European robin is tiny and round and adorable, while the American robin is big and always looks kind of angry. It grows around 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It’s dark gray on its back, with a rusty red breast, white undertail coverts, and a long yellow bill. It also has white markings around its eyes. Young birds are speckled. It mostly eats insects, worms, and berries. If you see a bird on the ground, running quickly and then stopping, it’s probably a robin. Mostly the robin hunts bugs by sight, but it has good hearing and can actually hear worms moving around underground. You can sometimes see a robin with its head cocked, listening for a worm, before pouncing and pulling it out of the ground, just like in a cartoon. American robin eggs are a light teal blue, so common and well-known that robin’s-egg-blue is a typical description of that particular color. In the spring after eggs hatch, the mother robin will carry the eggshells away from the nest to drop them, so predators won’t see the shells and know there’s a nest nearby. That’s why you’ll sometimes see half a robin eggshell on the sidewalk. It doesn’t mean something bad happened to the baby, just that the mother bird is doing her job. Both parents feed the chicks, and the parents also carry off the babies’ droppings to scatter them away from the nest. This is what an American robin’s song sounds like. [robin song] Liesbet also wanted to learn about the European bluebird, more commonly called the Eurasian blue tit. We haven’t talked about it or the American bluebird before, even though they’re both beautiful birds. The blue tit lives throughout Europe and parts of western Asia. It grows around 4 and a half inches long, or 12 cm, and has a bright blue crown on its head with blue on its wings, tail, and back. Its face is mostly white but it has a black streak that crosses its eye and a black ring around its neck. In fact, if you’re familiar with the blue jay of North America, the blue tit looks a lot like a miniature blue jay. It even has a little bit of a crest that it can raise and lower. Be

Thanks to Vaughn and Jan for their suggestions this week! We’re going to learn about mutualism of various types. Further reading: The odd couple: spider-frog mutualism in the Amazon rainforest What Birds, Coyotes, and Badgers Know About Teamwork Octopuses punch fishes during collaborative interspecific hunting events An Emotional Support Dog Is the Only Thing That Chills Out a Cheetah Buddies [picture from the first link above]: The honeyguide bird: Cheetahs and dogs can be friends: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a topic that I’ve been wanting to cover for a long time, mutualism. It’s a broad topic so we won’t try to cover everything about it in this episode, just give an overview with some examples. Vaughn suggested symbiotic behavior ages ago, and Jan gave me a great example of this, also ages ago, so thanks to both of them! Mutualism is similar to other terms, including symbiosis, often referred to as “a symbiotic relationship.” I’m using mutualism as a general term, but if you want to learn more you’ll quickly find that there are lots of terms referring to different interspecies relationships. Basically we’re talking about two unrelated organisms interacting in a way that’s beneficial to both. This is different from commensalism, where one organism benefits and the other doesn’t but also isn’t harmed, and parasitism, where one organism benefits and the other is harmed. We’ll start with the suggestion from Jan, who alerted me to this awesome pair of animals. Many different species have developed this relationship, but we’ll take as our specific example the dotted humming frog that lives in parts of western South America. The dotted humming frog is a tiny nocturnal frog that barely grows more than half an inch long from snout to vent, or about 2 cm. It lives in swamps and lowland forests and spends most of the day in a burrow underground. It comes out at night to hunt insects, especially ants. It really loves ants and is considered an ant specialist. That may be why the dotted humming frog has a commensal relationship with a spider, the Colombian lesserblack tarantula. The tarantula is a lot bigger than the frog, with its body alone almost 3 inches long, or 7 cm. Its legspan can be as much as 8 and a half inches across, or 22 cm. It’s also nocturnal and spends the day in its burrow, coming out at night to hunt insects and other small animals, although not ants. It’s after bigger prey, including small frogs. But it doesn’t eat the dotted humming frog. One or even more of the frogs actually lives in the same burrow as the tarantula and they come out to hunt in the evenings at the same time as their spider roommate. So what’s going on? Obviously the frog gains protection from predators by buddying up with a tarantula, but why doesn’t the tarantula just eat the frog? Scientists aren’t sure, but the best guess is that the frog protects the spider’s eggs from ants. Ants like to eat invertebrate eggs, but the dotted humming frog likes to eat ants, and as it happens the female Colombian lesserblack tarantula is especially maternal. She lays about 100 eggs and carries them around in an egg sac. When the babies hatch, they live with their mother for up to a year, sharing food and burrow space. This particular tarantula also gets along with another species of frog that also eats a lot of ants. Researchers think the spiders distinguish the frogs by smell. The ant-eating frogs apparently smell like friends, or at least useful roommates, while all other frogs smell like food. Or, of course, it’s possible that the ant-eating frogs smell and taste bad to the spider. Either way, both the frogs and the tarantulas benefit from the relationship–and this pairing of tiny frogs and big spiders is one that’s actually quite common throughout the world. Mutualism is everywhere, from insects gathering nectar to eat while pollenating flowers at the same time, to cleaner fish eating parasites from bigger fish, to birds eating fruit and pooping out seeds that then germinate with a little extra fertilizer. Many mutualistic relationships aren’t obvious to us as humans until we’ve done a lot of careful observations, which is why it’s so important to protect not just a particular species of animal but its entire ecosystem. We don’t always know what other animals and plants that animal depends on to survive, and vice versa. Sometimes an individual animal will work together with an individual of another species to find food. This may not happen all the time, just when circumstances are right. Sometimes, for example, a coyote will pair up with a badger to hunt. The coyote is closely related to wolves and can run really fast, while the American badger can dig really fast. Both are native to North America. They also both really like to eat prairie dogs, a type of rodent that can run really fast and lives in a burrow. Some prairie dog tunnels can ex

This week we have a mystery fish from Australia, the ompax! Main source consulted: Whitley, G. P. (1933). Ompax spatuloides Castelnau, a Mythical Australian Fish. The American Naturalist, 67(713), 563–567. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2456813 The fateful Ompax drawing: The freshwater longtom (picture by Barry Hutchins): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. For the Patreon episode this month, we had a bird mystery from Queensland, Australia. While I was researching it I came across this mystery fish, also from Queensland. In 1872, a man named Karl Staiger visited the town of Gayndah as part of his job. He was a chemist, but he also had an interest in nature and years later he worked for the Queensland Museum. One morning in Gayndah he went to breakfast and was served a strange-looking fish—so strange-looking that he asked what it was. He was told it was a very rare fish found in the nearby Burnett River. Staiger was interested enough that he asked the road inspector, presumably one of his coworkers, to draw the fish for him. But the drawing wasn’t made until after Staiger ate the fish. It was his breakfast and he was hungry and, as he wrote later, he didn’t know he should have at least saved the head for study. Presumably he also didn’t want his breakfast to get cold while the drawing was being made. The road inspector was a careful artist although he wasn’t a naturalist himself, so he did what he could to draw the fish accurately from the remains of Staiger’s meal. According to the drawing, the fish had a long, flattened rostrum that looked a little like a very long, thin duckbill, big scales on its body, and a fin that went all the way around the edges of the tail starting about halfway down the back, which appeared to be connected dorsal, caudal, and ventral fins. Its pectoral fins were small, and its eyes were also small and near the top of its head. The fish was brown in color and about 18 inches long, or 46 cm. Staiger eventually wrote to a French naturalist and sent him the drawing. The French naturalist has about 500 names and titles, usually shortened to something like Francis de Laporte de Castelnau. I’m going to call him Francis because obviously I can’t pronounce any of those names properly. Francis saw at a glance that the fish was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He suspected it didn’t just deserve its own genus but its own family. Staiger had reported what he’d been told, that the fish was known from a particular part of the Burnett River, and he’d also mentioned that it lived in the same area as another strange fish, the Australian lungfish. The Australian lungfish had only been described a few years before, in 1870, and it’s a very big fish. It can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, and is greenish in color. It has big overlapping scales on its body and four strong fins that look more like flippers than ordinary fish fins, which it uses to stand and walk on the bottom of the river. Its tail comes to a single rounded point and it has tooth plates instead of regular teeth, which it uses to crush the small animals it eats. It also has a single lung in addition to gills, and like other lungfish it comes to the surface every so often to replace the air in its lung. When it’s especially active it will breathe at the surface more often. The ability to breathe air allows it to survive in water with low oxygen. Francis noted that there were some similarities between the new fish and the Australian lungfish, but he thought it was more likely to be related to the alligator gar of North America. It had the same type of scales as the alligator gar. He also noted that its duckbill rostrum resembled the rostrum of the American paddlefish, which is similarly shaped but even longer than the new fish’s, but that the rest of the new fish was very different from the paddlefish. Francis described the new fish in 1879 and gave it the name Ompax spatuloides, but as early as 1881 some fish experts wondered if the original drawing was misleading. They pointed out that the fish wasn’t drawn by someone with a knowledge of fish and that it had already been cooked and eaten, so the details might be completely wrong. As it happens, the details were completely wrong, but not in a way anyone expected. There’s actually some confusion as to whether the drawing of the fish was made before or after Staiger ate it, but it doesn’t actually matter after all. In 1930, an article in the Sydney Bulletin claimed that Ompax was a hoax to fool Staiger, made up of a lungfish head, a mullet body, and an eel tail. The 1930 article isn’t available online, but one published in 1933 is, and it quotes the 1930 article. The 1933 article appears in a periodical called The American Naturalist and discusses the history of Ompax from start to finish, which is where most of our information comes from. The article finishes by pointing out that the Ompax’s head can’t have been made from a lungfish he

Thanks to Lorenzo for suggesting Tiarajudens! We’ll learn about it this week along with another extinct animal, Vintana. Further reading: Funky facial flanges [the skull picture below comes from this site] First Postcranial Fossils of Rare Gondwanatherian Mammal Unearthed in Madagascar The Earliest Saberteeth Were for Fighting, Not Biting [the skeleton picture below comes from this site] Vintana’s skull had weird jugal flanges: Tiarajudens had saber teeth as well as palatal teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Just last month we had an episode about the tenrec and an extinct animal called Adalatherium. At the end of that episode, I said something I say a lot, that we don’t know very much about it or the other ancient mammals that lived at the time, and that I hoped we would find some new fossils soon. Well, guess what! A paper about a newly discovered Gondwanathere fossil was published just a few days ago as this episode goes live. Rather than save it for the updates episode later this summer, let’s learn about an animal named Vintana sertichi, along with a suggestion from Lorenzo for another extinct animal. As you may remember from episode 324, Adalatherium is a member of a group of animals called Gondwanatheria, which arose in the southern hemisphere around the time that the supercontinent Gondwana was breaking apart. We only have a few fossils of these animals so paleontologists still don’t know how they’re related, although we do know they’re not related to the mammals living today. Every new specimen found of these rare mammals helps scientists fill the gaps in our knowledge. That’s what happened with Vintana. Vintana lived at the end of the Cretaceous, until the asteroid strike about 66 million years ago that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and a whole lot of other animals, probably including Vintana. The first fossilized specimen was a skull found in Madagascar and described in 2014. It was really well preserved, which allowed scientists to learn a lot about the animal. Vintana was an active animal that ate plants. It had large eyes and a good sense of smell and hearing, so its ears might have been fairly large too. Its face probably looked a lot like a big rodent’s face, but the skull itself had a weird feature. The cheekbones extended downward on each side next to the jaw, and these extensions are called jugal flanges. They would have allowed for the attachment of really big jaw muscles. That suggests that Vintana could probably give you a nasty bite, not that you need to worry about that unless you find a time machine. It might also mean that Vintana ate tough plants that required a lot of chewing. Vintana probably looked a lot like a groundhog, or marmot, which we talked about recently in episode 327. It wasn’t related to the groundhog, though, and was bigger too. Scientists estimate it weighed about 20 lbs, or 9 kg. The fossil specimen of Adalatherium that we talked about in episode 324 was discovered in Madagascar in 2020. When a tail vertebra from another mammal was found in the same area, researchers scanned and compared it to Adalatherium’s vertebrae. They were similar but not an exact match, plus the new bone was almost twice as large as the same bone in Adalatherium’s spine. It matched the size of Vintana and was assigned to that species. Vintana was probably related to Adalatherium but was bigger and had a shorter, wider tail. And as of right now, that’s just about all we know about it. Next, let’s learn about another extinct animal, this one suggested by Lorenzo. Lorenzo gave me a bunch of great suggestions and I picked this one to pair with Vintana, because otherwise this episode would have been really short. Vintana lived at the end of the dinosaurs, but Tiarajudens lived long before the dinosaurs evolved, around 260 million years ago. Tiarajudens was a therapsid, a group that eventually gave rise to mammals although it’s not a direct ancestor of mammals. Technically it’s an anomodont. We don’t have a complete skeleton so we don’t know for sure how big it was, but we do have a skull and some leg bones so we know it was about the same size or a little bigger than a big dog. There are only two species known, one from what is now South America and one from what is now Africa, but 260 million years ago those two landmasses were connected and were part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Tiarajudens had weird teeth even compared to other anomodonts. It had a pair of saber teeth that resembled the tusks found in later anomodonts, but they weren’t really tusks. They were big fangs that grew from the upper jaw and jutted down out of the mouth well past the bottom of the jaw. Later anomodonts probably used their tusks to dig up plants, but there aren’t wear marks on Tiarajudens’s saber teeth that would indicate it used them for digging. Many paleontologists think it used them for defense and to fight other Tiarajudenses over mates or t

Thanks to Alexandra and Pranav for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about manatees and sloths, including a surprising extinct sloth. Further reading: Sloths in the Water A West Indian manatee: A three-toed sloth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Alexandra and Pranav, who wanted an episode about manatees. We’ll also talk about another marine mammal, a weird extinct one you may never have heard of. The manatee is also called the sea cow, because it sort of slightly resembles a cow and it grazes on plants that grow underwater. It’s a member of the order Sirenia, which includes the dugong, and sirenians are probably most closely related to the elephant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but there are a lot of physical similarities between the manatee and the elephant. Their teeth are very similar, for instance, even if the manatee doesn’t grow tusks. The elephant has a pair of big chewing teeth on each side of its mouth that look more like the bottoms of running shoes than ordinary teeth. Every so many years, the four molars in an elephant’s mouth start to get pushed out by four new molars. The new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and start moving forward, pushing the old molars farther forward until they fall out. The manatee has this same type of tooth replacement, although its teeth aren’t as gigantic as the elephant’s teeth. The manatee also has hard ridged pads on the roof of its mouth that help it chew its food. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female manatee can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale, but unlike a whale it’s slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee’s tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. Every so often a manatee will eat a little fish, apparently on purpose. Since most herbivorous animals will eat meat every so often, this isn’t unusual. Mostly, though, the manatee spends almost all of its time awake eating plants, often from the bottom of the waterway where it lives. It lives in shallow water and will use its flippers to walk itself along the bottom, and also uses its flippers to dig up plants. Its upper lip is divided in two like the upper lips of many animals, which you can see in a dog or cat as that little line connecting the bottom of the nose to the upper lip. In the manatee, though, both sides of the lips have a lot of muscles and can move independently. There are three species of manatee alive today: the West Indian manatee that lives in the Gulf of Mexico down to the eastern coast of northern South America, the Amazonian manatee that lives exclusively in fresh water in the Amazon basin, and the West African manatee that lives in brackish and fresh water. Sometimes the West Indian manatee will also move into river systems to find food. Back in episode 153 we talked about the Florida manatee, which is a subspecies of West Indian manatee. In the winter it mostly lives around Florida but in summer many individuals travel widely. It’s sometimes found as far north as Massachusetts along the Atlantic coast, and as far west as Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, but despite its size, the manatee doesn’t have a lot of blubber or fat to keep it warm. The farther away it travels from warm water, the more likely it is to die of cold. In the 1970s there were only a few hundred Florida manatees alive and it nearly went extinct. It was listed as an endangered species and after a lot of effort by a lot of different conservation groups, it’s now only considered threatened, but it’s still vulnerable to habitat loss, injuries from boats, and getting tangled in fishing gear and drowning. Occasionally a crocodile will eat a young manatee, but for the most part it’s so big, and lives in such shallow water, that most predators won’t bother it. It basically only has to worry about humans, and unfortunately humans still cause a lot of manatee deaths every year with boats. A lot of times, a manatee that’s hit by a boat is only injured. There are several rehabilitation centers in the United States, where an injured manatee can be treated by veterinarians until it’s healed and can be reintroduced into the wild. One other detail that makes the manatee similar to the elephant is its flippers, which is probably not what you expected me to say. Most manatees have toenails on their flippers that closely resemble the nails on elephant feet. The exception is the Amazonian manatee that doesn’t have toenails at all. A lot of the food the Amazonian manatee eats actually floats o

Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting Titanomyrma! Further reading: ‘Giant’ ant fossil raises questions about ancient Arctic migrations A fossilized queen Titanomyrma ant with a rufous hummingbird (stuffed) for scale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Richard from North Carolina, who sent me an article about an extinct giant ant called Titanomyrma. This episode is short, but I think you’ll find it interesting. We’ve talked about ants in previous episodes, most recently episode 185. Most ant colonies consist of a single queen ant who lays all the eggs for her colony, seasonally hatched males with wings who fly off as soon as they’re grown, and worker ants. The worker ants are all female but don’t lay eggs. Army ants have another caste, the soldier ant, which are much larger than the worker ants and have big heads and strong, sharp mandibles. In many species of ant, the worker ants are further divided into castes that are specialized for specific tasks. The biggest species of ant alive today is probably the giant Amazonian ant. The workers can grow over 1.2 inches long, or more than 3 cm, which is huge for an ant. It lives in South America in small colonies, usually containing less than 100 workers, and unlike most ants it doesn’t have a queen. Instead, one of the workers mates with a male and lays eggs for the colony. The giant Amazonian ant can sting and its sting contains venom that causes intense pain for up to two days. Fortunately, you will probably never encounter these giant ants, and even if you do they’re not very aggressive. Another contender for the biggest species of ant alive today is the Dorylus genus of army ants, also called driver ants, which we talked about in episode 185. It lives in Africa in colonies that have millions of members, and the queen is the largest ant known. A queen army ant can measure 2.4 inches long, or 63 millimeters, but worker ants are much smaller. Around 50 million years ago, giant ants related to modern driver ants lived in both Europe and North America. The genus is Titanomyrma and three species are known so far, found in Germany, England, Canada, and the American states of Tennessee and Wyoming. The Wyoming ant fossil was discovered years ago and donated to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where it was stored in a drawer and forgotten about. In 2011 a curator found it and showed it to a paleoentomologist named Bruce Archibald. Dr. Archibald recognized it immediately as a fossilized queen ant even though it was the size of a hummingbird. He also realized it was very similar to a type of giant ant that once lived in Germany. The German discovery was the first Titanomyrma species discovered, and it’s also the biggest known so far. The queen Titanomyrma gigantea grew up to 2.8 inches long, or 7 centimeters. Males grew up to 1.2 inches long, or 3 cm. The fossilized queen ants found have wings, with a wingspan of over 6 inches, or 16 cm. The other two known species are generally smaller, although still pretty darn big for ants.While they’re not that much bigger than the living Dorylus queens, most of the size of a queen Dorylus ant comes from her enlarged abdomen. Titanomyrma ants were just plain big all over. Titanomyrma didn’t have a stinger, so it’s possible it used its mandibles to inflict bites, the way modern army ants do. It might also have sprayed formic acid at potential predators, as some ants do today. The biggest ants alive today all live in tropical areas, so researchers thought Titanomyrma probably did too. During the Eocene, the world was overall quite warm and parts of Europe were tropical. The northern hemisphere supercontinent Laurasia was in the process of breaking up, but Europe and North America were still connected by the Arctic. Even though the Arctic was a lot warmer 50 million years ago than it is now, it was still too cold for a tropical ant. If Titanomyrma couldn’t survive in cold weather, how did it spread from one continent to another when it had to go through the Arctic? There were warming periods during the Eocene that lasted a few hundred thousand years at a time, so researchers thought the ants probably migrated through the Arctic while it was warmer than usual. Then, in early 2023, a fossilized Titanomyrma queen ant was discovered in Canada. Because the rock it was preserved in has been distorted over the years, we can’t be certain how big the ant actually was. What we do know, though, is that the ant lived in a mountainous area that could get quite chilly, very different from the tropical climate scientists thought the giant ants needed. As a result of the new finding, researchers are reconsidering whether the giant ants that lived 50 million years ago were really all that similar to modern giant ants. Just because the biggest ants alive today require tropical climates doesn’t mean that ancient giant ants did. Hopefully more giant ant

Thanks to Dean for suggesting this week’s topic, the marmot! Thanks also to Al-Ka-Lines Studio for the beautiful bat pin! You should definitely visit their online shop, because all their jewelry is hand-made by the two of them. Further reading: The secret to longevity? Ask a yellow-bellied marmot The yellow-bellied marmot doing a sit [By Inklein, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675916]: A groundhog keeping an eye out for danger: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to have a short little episode about a short little animal suggested by Dean, although I don’t know if Dean is short and/or little. Probably not. The name Dean makes me think of a tall person, probably someone who plays sports and can run really fast, so basically completely unlike a marmot. Dean suggested the marmot, specifically the yellow-bellied marmot. Before we get started, two quick notes. First, thanks so much to Kathi and Alex of Al-Ka-Lines Studio for the gorgeous bat pin! They make hand-crafted leather jewelry and while they usually sell wholesale to shops, I checked with Kathi to see if it was okay to link to their shop and they said that yes, they sometimes sell to individuals too. I’ve put a link in the show notes in case you’re interested in seeing what they have for sale. They recently started listening to the podcast in order from the first episode and so far they’re not sick of my voice yet. Second, I’ll be at Furry Weekend Atlanta this coming weekend, assuming you’re listening to this episode when it comes out on May 8, 2023. If you’re going to be there too, let me know and we can meet up. I went to way too many conventions last year so this one and Dragon Con at the end of August are the only ones I have planned this year, and I’m not on any programming on either. I just plan to look at people’s amazing costumes and attend interesting panels and have fun dancing in the evenings. Also, I’ll probably eat a lot of pizza. Now, on to the marmots! If you live in North America, you may have seen a marmot without realizing it. I didn’t realize that the groundhogs that are pretty common where I live in the eastern United States are a type of marmot. Similarly, if you live in the western part of North America, especially in mountainous areas, you may have seen the yellow-bellied marmot. Other species of marmot live in Asia, Europe, and other parts of North America. One interesting thing is that the groundhog of eastern North America is actually more closely related to the marmots of Europe and Asia than it is to the other North American marmot species. Marmots are big rodents related to squirrels, and in fact they’re considered a type of ground squirrel along with the closely related chipmunks and prairie dogs. They dig burrows and mostly eat plant material, and can grow quite large. The largest species is probably the Olympic marmot that only lives in the state of Washington in the Pacific Northwest of North America, which can weigh up to 18 lbs, or 8 kg. That’s its summer weight, though, when it’s had time to eat lots of food. All marmots hibernate and during that time they survive on the fat reserves they build up in warm weather. Basically all marmots are about the size of a cat, but they’re big chonks with short legs, short tails, little round ears, and a blunt muzzle. Its thick fur makes it look even larger than it really is. The yellow-bellied marmot mostly lives in higher elevations and, like all marmots, it’s well adapted to cold weather. It’s a social animal that lives in small colonies and spends most of its time underground when it’s not out finding food. It’s mostly brown with yellowish markings underneath and a spot of white between its eyes. It usually digs its burrow among rocks and can have multiple burrows in its territory, so if it spots a predator it doesn’t have far to run to get safely underground. It digs an especially deep burrow to hibernate in, sometimes as much as 23 feet deep, or 7 meters. Since it spends as much as eight months hibernating every year, it needs to stay comfortable. It lines its sleeping chamber with dried leaves and even digs a little side burrow that acts as a latrine. In a study released in March of 2022, a team of scientists studying yellow-bellied marmots discovered that when it hibernates, an adult marmot’s body basically stops aging. The marmot exhibits true hibernation where its body temperature drops almost to the air temperature and its breathing and heart rate slow dramatically. It will hibernate for a week or two, wake up slightly for about a day so it can stretch and rearrange itself more comfortably, and then will go back into hibernation for another few weeks. This goes on for almost three-quarters of the year and during that time, the yellow-bellied marmot doesn’t eat or drink anything. It just lives off its fat reserves, and because its metabolic rate is so low it hardly uses a

Thanks to Eva and Anbo for suggesting the harpy eagle! Further reading: Crested Eagle Feeding a Post-Fledged Young Harpy Eagle Harpy eagle with a food [By http://www.birdphotos.com – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3785263]: The harpy eagle has great big feet and talons: The harpy eagle with its feather crown raised [photo by Eric Kilby]: The New Guinea harpy eagle looks similar to its South American cousin [By gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K – New Guinea Harpy Eagle. Harpyopsis novaeguineae, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86187611]: Ruppell’s griffon vulture: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’ve been talking about a lot of mammals lately, so let’s have an episode about birds. Anbo suggested the harpy eagle not too long ago, and a much longer time ago Eva suggested the harpy eagle and other raptors. The word raptor can be confusing because it refers to a type of small theropod dinosaur as well as a type of bird. When referring to a bird, the term raptor includes eagles, hawks, vultures, owls, and other birds of prey. And that includes the harpy eagle. The harpy eagle lives throughout much of Central and South America, although not as far south as Patagonia. It has a wingspan up to about seven feet across, or over 2 meters, and like other raptors, females are larger than males. This isn’t an especially big wingspan for an eagle, but that’s because the harpy eagle hunts in forests and needs short, broad wings that allow it to maneuver through branches. The harpy eagle is a beautiful bird. It has a light gray head and darker gray or black body, and is white underneath with delicate black stripes on its leg feathers, with broader stripes on its tail and wings. It has a black ring around its neck, huge yellow feet with enormous talons, and a black bill. Each talon, which is the term for a raptor’s claws, can be over 5 inches long, or 13 cm, while its feet in general are bigger than a grown man’s hand, even if the man has especially big hands. Most striking of all is the harpy eagle’s crest, also sometimes referred to as a crown. The crown is made of long, rounded feathers and most of the time they don’t show very much. When a harpy eagle is alarmed, it raises the feather crown and poofs out the feathers on its face, which makes its head look bigger and sort of owl-shaped. The harpy eagle mostly lives in lowland rainforests. It mates for life and doesn’t have babies every year. Every two or three years a harpy eagle pair will build a huge nest out of sticks in the top of the tallest tree they can find. The female lays two eggs, which the parents care for together. The female spends most of her time incubating the eggs while the male brings her food, although he will also take a turn incubating while she goes out to stretch her wings and do a bit of hunting herself. When the first egg hatches, the parents bring the baby lots of food and give it lots of attention–but they ignore the other egg at that point, which usually doesn’t hatch as a result. A harpy eagle chick is all white at first, and although it can fly at around 6 months old, its parents will keep feeding it for almost another year. The harpy eagle is increasingly threatened due to habitat loss and poaching. Because it’s such a big bird, many people shoot it because they think it’s dangerous to livestock or children. But it mostly eats monkeys, sloths, kinkajous and coatis, iguanas, and other medium-sized animals. It’s rare that it attacks livestock since it mostly hunts within the tree canopy for arboreal animals. If your lambs and chickens are sitting on tree branches, you already have a bigger problem than harpy eagles eating them. A captive breeding program has been started in various zoos around the world, while conservationists work to protect the harpy eagle’s natural habitat so that individuals can be released back into the wild. We don’t actually know all that much about the harpy eagle, but we know even less about its close relation, the New Guinea harpy eagle. It resembles the harpy eagle but instead of being mostly gray and white, it’s mostly brown and cream in color. It has longer legs and tail but is smaller overall than the harpy eagle, with a wingspan closer to 5 feet across, or 1.5 meters. It has a smaller crest than the harpy eagle too. Like its South American cousin, the New Guinea harpy eagle hunts in forests, especially rainforests, and spends most of its time perched in a tree, watching for small animals to happen by. Sometimes it will shake a branch to startle any animals in the area to run or fly away, at which point the eagle flies after them. It will even climb around in a tree and poke around in any potential hiding places it finds. It eats tree kangaroos, possums, and other small to medium-sized mammals, but it also eats a lot of birds and reptiles. While it’s closely related to the

We have merch available again! Thanks to Will for suggesting this week’s topic, the burrunjor! Muttaburrasaurus had a big nose [picture by Matt Martyniuk (Dinoguy2) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3909643]: The “rock art” that Rex Gilroy “found”: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Recently, Will suggested we learn about an Australian cryptid called the burrunjor. As it happens, this is a short chapter in my book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, which is available to buy if you haven’t already. I’ve updated it a little from the chapter, so even if you have the book I think you’ll find this a fun episode. Dinosaurs once lived in what is now Australia, just as they lived throughout the rest of the world. Similar to the southwestern United States reports of little living dinosaurs that we talked about in episode 252, some people in northern Australia report seeing living dinosaurs running around on their hind legs—but these dinosaurs aren’t so little. The burrunjor, as it’s called, is often described as looking like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Mostly, though, people don’t actually see it. Instead, they hear roaring or bellowing and later see the tracks of a large, three-toed animal that was walking on its hind legs. One Australian dinosaur that people mention when trying to solve the mystery of the burrunjor is Muttaburrasaurus. It was an ornithopod that grew up to 26 feet long, or 8 meters. It walked on its hind legs and had a big bump on the top of its muzzle that made its head shape unusual. No one’s sure what the bump was for, but some scientists speculate it might have been a resonant chamber so the animal could produce loud calls to attract a mate. Other scientists think it might have just been for display. Or, of course, it might have been both—or something else entirely. None of the Australian dinosaur sightings mention a big bump on the dinosaur’s nose. Muttaburrasaurus also had four toes on its hind feet, not three, and it disappeared from the fossil record about 103 million years ago. It also probably ate plants, not meat. Another suggestion is that the burrunjor is a megaraptorid that survived from the late Cretaceous. These dinosaurs looked like theropods but with longer, more robust arms. Most scientists these days group them with the theropods. Most of the known specimens are from what is now South America, but two species are known from Australia, Australovenator and Rapator. Australovenator is estimated as growing up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and probably stood about the same height as a tall human. It was a fast runner and relatively lightly built. It disappeared from the fossil record around 95 million years ago, not that we have very many bones in the first place. We only know Rapator from a single bone dated to 96 million years ago. It was probably related to Australovenator, although some paleontologists think Australovenator and Rapator are the same dinosaur. Either way, it’s doubtful that any of these animals survived the extinction event that killed off all the other non-avian dinosaurs. “Burrunjor” is supposed to be a word used by ancient Aboriginal people to describe a monstrous lizard that eats kangaroos. But in actuality, Burrunjor is the name of a trickster demigod in the local Arnhem Aboriginal tradition and has nothing to do with reptiles or monsters. The Aboriginal rock art supposedly depicting a dinosaur-like creature doesn’t resemble other rock art in the region and isn’t recognized by researchers or Aboriginal people as being authentic. All accounts of the burrunjor trace back to a single source, an Australian paranormal writer named Rex Gilroy. Gilroy was the one who “discovered” the rock art of a supposed dinosaur and none of the sightings he reports appear in local newspapers. The first mention of the word burrunjor referring to a monster appears in 1995, when Gilroy’s book Mysterious Australia was first published. According to Gilroy, the most recent burrunjor sighting is from 1985, when a family driving to Roper River reported seeing a feather-covered dinosaur that was 20 feet long, or 6 meters. But again, that report doesn’t appear in the newspapers, just in Gilroy’s books. Gilroy’s burrunjor is probably a hoax, but there is a big lizard in Australia that sometimes stands on its hind legs. Monitor lizards live throughout Australia and are often called goannas. The largest Australian species can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. All monitor lizards, including the Komodo dragon that lives in Indonesia, can stand on their hind legs. The lizard does this to get a better look at the surrounding area. It uses its tail as a prop to keep it stable and can’t actually walk on its hind legs, but an 8-foot lizard standing on its hind legs might look like a dinosaur from a distance. An even bigger monitor lizard, c

We have merch available again! Thanks to Eva and Leo for suggesting the tenrec! Further reading: Marooned on Mesozoic Madagascar Introduction to Adalatherium hui The lowland streaked tenrec: The hedgehog tenrec rolls up just like an actual hedgehog [photo by Rod Waddington, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]: Actual hedgehog, not a tenrec: Lesser hedgehog tenrec REALLY looks like an actual hedgehog [By Wilfried Berns www.Tierdoku.com – Transferred from de.wikipedia to Commons.Orig. source: eigene Fotografie, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2242515]: Adalatherium: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a weird little animal suggested by both Eva and Leo, the tenrec of Madagascar. While we’re at it, we’re going to learn about another little animal found on Madagascar a long time ago that’s one of the weirdest mammals ever discovered. Before we get started, though, someone sent me a book! If your name is Jennifer or someone named Jennifer mailed this book to me for you, thank you! The book is called The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Bercott. Thank you so much! I did not know when I started this podcast over six years ago that one of the benefits of doing an animal podcast is sometimes people send you books about animals, which is the best thing in the world. There’s no note so I thought I’d give you a shout-out on the podcast. As we learned in episode 318, about 88 million years ago, the island of Madagascar broke off from every other landmass in the world, specifically the supercontinent Gondwana. The continent we now call Africa separated from Gondwana even earlier, around 165 million years ago. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and even though it’s relatively close to Africa these days, many of its animals and plants are much different from those in Africa and other parts of the world because they’ve been evolving separately for 88 million years. But at various times in the past, some animals from Africa were able to reach Madagascar. We’re still not completely sure how this happened. Madagascar is 250 miles away from Africa, or 400 kilometers, and these days the prevailing ocean currents push floating debris away from the island. In the past, though, the currents might have been different and some animals could have arrived on floating debris washed out to sea during storms. During times when the ocean levels were overall lower, islands that are underwater now might have been above the surface and allowed animals to travel from island to island until they reached Madagascar. Sometime between 25 and 40 million years ago, a semiaquatic mammal reached Madagascar in enough numbers that it was able to establish itself on the island. It was related to the ancestors of a semiaquatic mammal called the otter-shrew, even though it’s neither an otter nor a shrew. The otter-shrew lives in parts of Africa and is pretty weird on its own, but we’ll save it for another episode one day. The otter-shrew’s relative did so well in its new home of Madagascar that over the millions of generations since, it developed into dozens of species. We now call these animals tenrecs. It’s hard to describe the tenrec because the various species are often very different in appearance. There are some things that are basically the same for all species, though. First, the tenrec has a low body temperature, although it varies from species to species and also varies depending on time of year. That’s because some species of tenrec go into torpor when it’s cold, or sometimes full hibernation. During torpor the animal’s body temperature drops even more than usual. The common tenrec hibernates up to nine months out of the year. Second, the tenrec has a cloaca, which is really unusual in placental mammals. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians have a cloaca, which is a single opening used for excretion and often for giving birth or laying eggs too. Most mammals have separate openings for different uses. Third, all tenrecs are pretty small with only a little short tail. The biggest is only a little over a foot long at most, or 39 cm, and most are much smaller. Leo specifically likes the streaked tenrec, so let’s learn about it to give us a better idea of what tenrecs are like in general. There are two species of streaked tenrec and while they live in different parts of Madagascar, they mostly live in tropical rainforests. They’re considered a type of spiny tenrec because they have quills all over like a tiny porcupine or a brightly colored hedgehog. The highland streaked tenrec is black and white, while the lowland streaked tenrec is black and yellow. The streaked tenrec’s bright coloration gives a warning to potential predators that it is pointy. If a predator doesn’t figure it out, the tenrec will raise its quills and shake th

Thanks to Lincoln for suggesting this week’s subject, the kinkajou! Further reading: Early Primates Groomed with Claws Not actually a monkey: Not actually a bear [photo taken from this site]: 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 Lincoln. It’s the kinkajou, an adorable but weird little animal from Central and South America. In episode 302 we talked about the coatimundi and the olingo, and both those animals are closely related to the kinkajou. So is the raccoon. But the kinkajou is the only member of its own genus that probably started evolving separately from its closest relations around 22 million years ago. When the kinkajou was first described scientifically in the late 18th century, it was considered to be a type of lemur, which is a primate. At first glance, the kinkajou really does look like a primate in many ways. It’s arboreal, meaning it lives in trees, and it has a long prehensile tail. Its head is rounded with a short snout, and its large eyes are forward-pointing. Its ears are also low on the sides of its head. All these features resemble features common in primates, but the kinkajou isn’t related to primates at all. Eventually biologists figured it out and it was reclassified. You can tell the kinkajou isn’t a primate if you know what to look for. It has fur on the bottoms of its feet, while primates always have bare skin on the bottoms of our feet and hands. Its fingers also all have long claws, whereas all primates have fingernails. The only exception is what’s called a toilet claw that some primates retain, including lemurs, where one toe has a claw instead of a nail that the animal uses to groom its fur. But no modern primates have claws on all their digits. The kinkajou is covered with thick, plush fur that keeps it warm in cold weather. Some populations live in high elevations where it can get cold at night, and since it’s a nocturnal animal it needs to stay warm while it’s out looking for food. It’s yellowish-brown in color but some of its hairs are tipped with darker brown. Even though the darker hairs are mixed in with the lighter ones and the kinkajou doesn’t actually have a pattern of darker spots, the dark hairs absorb more light than the lighter hairs and can make it look spotted in low light. This helps it blend in with the dappled shade in the trees where it lives. The kinkajou and its close relations make up the family Procyonidae, which is classified in the order Carnivora. Carnivora means “meat-eaters,” but Procyonids are all omnivores that don’t eat a lot of meat. The kinkajou mostly eats fruit, and its favorite fruit is the fig. It also eats other plant parts, insects, and honey, but it mostly just wants lots of yummy ripe figs. (Same.) The kinkajou lives in family groups, typically one female and her young offspring, a dominant male, and a subordinate male. During the day the family members sleep in a tree hollow or in a tangle of branches that give them plenty of shade. When it starts getting dark, the kinkajous wake up and go out looking for food. Sometimes the family forages together but more often they split up and forage on their own. When there’s a lot of food available in one place, like a bunch of fig trees, a whole lot of kinkajous may gather to eat and play together. Because it spends just about all its life in the treetops, the kinkajou is well adapted to arboreal life. It can turn its hind feet around backwards to help it climb headfirst down a tree trunk, which is another trait it shares with the raccoon. Other animals have evolved the same ability, though, even ones that aren’t closely related to the kinkajou. The kinkajou’s prehensile tail is strong and thick, and it often hangs from its tail to eat. It’s not a very large or heavy animal, only 10 lbs in weight at the most, or 4.6 kg, and usually less than half that. Because it’s only about the size of a cat, it can climb onto thin branches to pick fruit. It also has an extremely flexible spine, so flexible that it can twist its head and shoulders 180 degrees from its pelvis. A female kinkajou usually only has one baby at a time, sometimes two. She mostly takes care of the baby herself, although occasionally its dads will play with the baby or help it collect fruit. The baby stays with the family even after it’s able to care for itself, until it grows old enough that it leaves to find its own territory. The kinkajou can live a long time, 30 or 40 years, partly because it doesn’t have very many predators in its treetop habitat. One other interesting detail about the kinkajou is its tongue. It has a surprisingly long tongue that it can stick far out of its mouth to lick up insects like ants. It also likes nectar and honey, so its long tongue helps it gather both. The kinkajou is sometimes called the honey bear since it likes honey and its fur is the color of honey, but it’s not related to bears any more th

Thanks to Oceana and Leo for suggesting this week’s episode about the javelina! We’ll even learn about a mystery peccary too. Further reading: New Species of Peccary–Pig-Like Animal–Discovered in Amazon Region A javelina, also called the collared peccary [By Wing-Chi Poon – Own work by uploader; at Cottonwood Campground, Big Bend National Park, Texas, USA, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4394434]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion by Oceana and Leo, the javelina! It’s an animal native to the Americas, also called the collared peccary. We’re going to learn about it and its close relations, including a mystery animal. The javelina is in the family Tayassuidae, called the New World pigs. The rest of the world’s pigs, including the warthog and the babirusa and the domestic pig, belong to the family Suidae. While the two families are related, the ancestors of the New World pigs, or peccaries, split off from the ancestors of other pigs around 40 million years ago and they’ve been evolving separately for all that time. Peccaries live throughout almost all of Central and South America up to southwestern North America and some of the Caribbean islands. All peccaries look like little hairy pigs, including a flat-ended pig snout that it uses to root in the ground, small eyes, short tusks, slender legs with cloven hooves, and a thin little tail. It’s relatively small compared to domestic pigs, about the size of a big dog at most, and is covered with a thick coat of bristly hair. When it’s angry or frightened, it can raise the bristles along its back to make it look larger. It also has scent glands that give off a pungent smell, which is how members of the same herd recognize each other, since peccaries have poor eyesight. Peccaries mostly eat plant material, but they’re omnivores and will eat meat when they find it, from insects and grubs to frogs and even carrion. Because they root around in the ground and leaf litter, they stir up nutrients in a way that benefits other animals and the environment in general. In the case of the javelina, also called the collared peccary, musk hog, or skunk pig, it’s sometimes considered a pest since it will root up people’s flowerbeds and gardens. But the javelina doesn’t know the difference between a garden and a not-garden. It just wants to find some tasty grubs and roots. Peccaries are social animals that usually live in small herds. The white-lipped peccary is widespread in the forests of Central and South America, and sometimes lives in herds of 300 animals or more, even as many as 2,000 according to some reports. It requires an enormous range as a result, and travels a lot of the day to find new areas to forage. It’s threatened by habitat loss, mostly deforestation. Like other peccaries, it smells sort of skunky and can be aggressive if threatened. It eats a lot of fruit in addition to other plant material, and because it has stronger jaws than the javelina, it can eat seeds and nuts that the javelina can’t, so the two species can coexist in the same environment without competing for the same food sources. Until 1972, the Chacoan peccary was only known from some fossils found in 1930. Not only did scientists think it was extinct, they thought it had been extinct for a long time. But in the early 1970s, rumors about a new peccary species started to circulate. A team of biologists followed up with locals and discovered the peccary living in a small area of South America called Chaco. Surprise! New peccary just dropped. The Chacoan peccary, also known as the tagua, looks a lot like a javelina although it doesn’t have a dew claw on its hind feet. It has a tough snout and brown and gray bristles, with white on its shoulders and around its mouth. It lives in small bands of around a dozen individuals that roam across a large range, eating tough vegetation that other animals wouldn’t even consider food—cacti, for instance. A peccary will roll a cactus around on the ground with its snout and hooves, rubbing the spines off so it can eat it. If that doesn’t work, it will pull the spines out with its teeth. Cacti contain acids that other animals can’t digest, but the Chacoan peccary has specialized kidneys that are adapted to break down those acids. The Chacoan peccary is endangered due to hunting, habitat loss, and disease. The area where it lives is being rapidly deforested to make way for huge cattle ranches. This is bad enough, but when ranchers move in, they want roads to get to their land more easily, and once the roads are in place, not only can more hunters get to the area, but more peccaries are killed by traffic. It’s estimated that only about 3,000 Chacoan peccaries are alive today. The government of Paraguay is trying to reduce the impact of habitat loss by protecting key areas of forest, and breeding populations are kept in a number of zoos acr

We have merch available again! Thanks to Eilee for suggesting this week’s topic, Archaeopteryx! Further reading: Dinosaur feather study debunked Archaeopteryx fossil provides insights into the origin of flight An Archaeopteryx fossil [By H. Raab (User: Vesta) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8066320]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’ve had a lot of mammal episodes lately, so this week let’s learn about a reptile…uh, a bird. Not quite a bird, not exactly a reptile. That’s right, it’s an episode about archaeopteryx, a suggestion by Eilee! A quick note before we start to say that I finally got around to setting up merch again if you want to order a t-shirt or water bottle or whatever with the podcast’s logo on it. I’m using Redbubble this time because they have a lot more items available than our previous vendor. There’s a link in the show notes. We also have new stickers and those are free, so if you want one, just drop me an email and let me know what your mailing address is. The new sticker is a drawing of a capybara made by me. Anyway, on to the archaeopteryx! The first archaeopteryx fossils were discovered in Germany in 1861. Before the first skeleton of an archaeopteryx was discovered, though, a single feather impression was found in a limestone quarry that has produced a lot of spectacularly well-preserved fossils. When the full specimen turned up later that same year, palaeontologists decided the feather came from the same animal. That decision has been questioned repeatedly over the years. A study conducted with laser imaging determined that the single feather was different from the feathers of other archaeopteryx specimens. Results of that study were published in 2019, but in October of 2020 results of a study conducted with a specialized electron microscope determined that the feather did come from an archaeopteryx. The 2020 study also found that the feather was black. Archaeopteryx lived around 150 million years ago in what is now Europe. It was about the size of a crow but while it looked a lot like a bird, it also looked a lot like a little dinosaur. It had small teeth and a long lizard-like tail. Of the twelve Archaeopteryx fossils found so far, all but one have feather impressions that indicate it had flight feathers on its arms, or rather wings, but at least one specimen also had flight feathers on its legs, which are sometimes referred to as hind wings. These hind wings would have helped it maneuver through branches even though its front wings were limited in their range of motion. It was probably a slow flyer that ate whatever small animals it could catch. The wing feathers of archaeopteryx were very similar to those of modern birds, and a study published in late 2020 discovered another similarity. Birds molt their feathers and replace them the same way mammals shed hairs and regrow them, but it’s a little trickier for birds. A bird that loses too many feathers from its wings can’t fly until new feathers grow in. Modern birds solve this issue by molting only one pair of wing feathers at a time, and once the replacement grows in, the next pair is shed. The study examined fossilized archaeopteryx wings using a process called laser-stimulated fluorescence imaging, which can reveal details that aren’t otherwise visible. It discovered feather sheaths hidden under what would have been the skin of the wings, ready to grow new feathers. The feather sheaths were the same on both wings and resembled the molting pattern seen in modern falcons. Archaeopteryx also had feathers on the rest of its body, but they aren’t well preserved so paleontologists can’t determine too much about them. They might have been more fluffy than sleek, like the soft downy feathers in young modern birds, or it might be that the fluffy feathers just happened to be the ones that were most preserved. Palaeontologists study archaeopteryx because it gives us so much information about how birds evolved from dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx was still very much a dinosaur even though it looked superficially like a bird. Microscopic examination of the fossilized cells and blood vessels inside its bones show that it actually grew very slowly. Modern birds grow extremely quickly when they’re young. One scientist pointed out that when you watch a flock of pigeons, you can’t really tell which ones are fully grown and which ones are still quite young, because baby pigeons grow to an adult size so quickly. Dinosaurs grew to their adult size much more slowly, even the small carnivorous dinosaurs that were ancestral to modern birds. The study determined that Archaeopteryx would probably have taken almost three years to grow to its adult size. The Archaeopteryx fossil called “specimen number eight” was determined to be a different species from the others, in a study published in 2018. It’s about half a million years younger than the other known

Thanks to Connor and Pranav who suggested this week’s episode about elephants! It’s been too long since we had an elephant episode and there’s lots more to learn. Further reading: Asian elephants could be the maths kings of the jungle Many wild animals ‘count’ A big difference between Asian and African elephants is diet Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie The Asian elephant (left) and the African elephant (right): The African bush elephant (left) and the African forest elephant (right) [photo taken from this page]: The osage orange is not an orange and nothing wants to eat it these days: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We haven’t talked about elephants since episode 200! It’s definitely time for some elephant updates, so thanks to Conner and Pranav for their suggestions! Conner suggested we learn more about the Asian elephant, which was one we talked about way back in episode 200. The biggest Asian elephant ever reliably measured was a male who stood 11.3 feet tall, or 3.43 meters, although on average a male Asian elephant, also called a bull, stands about 9 feet tall, or 2.75 meters. Females, called cows, are smaller. For comparison, the official height of a basketball hoop is 10 feet, or 3 meters. An elephant could dunk the ball every single time, no problem. The Asian elephant used to live throughout southern Asia but these days it’s endangered and its range is reduced to fragmented populations in southeast Asia. There are four living subspecies recognized today although there used to be more in ancient times. Elephants are popular in zoos, but the sad fact is that zoo elephants often don’t live as long as wild elephants, even with the best care. The elephant is adapted to roam enormous areas in a family group, which isn’t possible in captivity. In the wild, though, the elephant is increasingly endangered due to habitat loss and poaching. Even though the Asian elephant is a protected species, people kill elephants because their tusks are valuable as ivory. Tusks are a modified form of really big tooth, and it’s valuable to some people because it can be carved into intricate pieces of art that can sell for a lot of money. That’s it. That’s the main reason why we may not have any elephants left in another hundred years at this rate, because rich people want carvings made in a dead animal’s tooth. People are weird, and not always the good kind of weird. In happier Asian elephant news, though, a 2018 study conducted in Japan using zoo elephants replicated the results of previous studies that show Asian elephants have numeric competence that’s surprisingly similar to that in humans. That means they understand numbers at least up to ten, and can determine which group of items has more or less items than another group. That sounds simple because humans are really good at this, but most animals can only understand numbers up to three. It goes one, two, three, lots. Many animals do have a good idea of numbers in a general way even if they can’t specifically count. Gray wolves, for instance, know how many wolves need to join the hunt to successfully bring down different prey animals. Even the humble frog will choose the larger group of food items when two groups are available. But the Asian elephant seems to have an actual grasp of numbers. I specify the Asian elephant because studies with African elephants haven’t found the same numeric ability. Elephants make a lot of sounds, such as the iconic trumpeting that they make using the trunk. Way back in episode 8 we talked about the infrasonic sounds elephants also make with their vocal folds, sounds that are too low for humans to hear. But the Asian elephant also sometimes makes a high-pitched squeaking sound and until recently, no one was sure how it was produced. It turns out that the elephant makes this sound by buzzing its lips the same way a human does when playing a brass instrument. It’s the first time this particular method of sound production has been found outside of humans. This is what a squeaking Asian elephant sounds like: [elephant squeak] Pranav suggested we learn more about the African forest and bush elephants. Those are the two species of African elephants that are still alive, and they’re also endangered due to habitat loss and poaching. The forest elephant is critically endangered. The forest elephant lives in forests, as you probably guessed, especially rainforests, while the bush elephant lives in grasslands and open forests. It’s sometimes called the savanna elephant since it’s well adapted to life on the savanna. The forest elephant is only a little larger on average than the Asian elephant, while the bush elephant is much bigger on average. A big bull bush elephant can stand as much as 13 feet tall, or 4 meters, which means it might not dunk the basketball every time because the basketball hoop is awkwardly low. The bush elephant lives i

Thanks to Kristie for suggesting this week’s topic, the phascogale! Further reading: Red-tailed phascogales (all photos below come from this site) Sleeping phascogale: Wide-awake phascogales: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Ages ago, Kristie suggested I look up the phascogale, a really cute Australian animal. It’s definitely adorable and a little bit weird, so let’s learn about it this week! Like most mammals that live in Australia, the phascogale is a marsupial. That means that the babies are born very early, then finish developing in their mother’s pouch. In this case, though, the phascogale mother doesn’t have a real pouch. Instead, when the mother is pregnant she develops what’s called a pseudo-pouch. Pseudo means false, so it’s not really a pouch although it resembles one. The pseudo-pouch is made up of folds of skin that develop around the mother’s teats, which protects the babies and keeps them warm. Since every baby needs its own teat at this stage, and the mother only has eight teats, if more than eight babies are born, the extra ones die. The babies stay in the pseudo-pouch for about a month and a half, at which point they’re big enough that the mother can’t carry them around anymore. She makes a nest for them in a hollow tree, where they stay for another several months. She leaves them in the nest while she finds food, but comes back periodically to take care of them. The phascogale is silvery-gray or gray-brown with a long tail that’s fluffy and black toward the end. It looks sort of like a mouse or rat with a long nose and a squirrel-like tail that’s almost as long as its body. It’s almost as big as a squirrel, up to about 10 inches long not including its tail, or 26 cm. Despite its resemblance to a rodent, the phascogale isn’t related to rodents at all. Rodents are placental mammals, not marsupial mammals. The phascogale is nocturnal and mostly eats insects and spiders, but it will eat birds and mice too. It especially likes to eat cockroaches, yum. It mostly lives in trees although it will also hunt on the ground or in low brush, and it can jump long distances. During the day the phascogale sleeps in a little hollow in a tree. It actually enters torpor while it’s asleep in order to save energy, which means it lowers its metabolic rate and its body temperature. But it can rev itself up again in only a few minutes when it needs to. The strangest thing about the phascogale is that after mating season the males die. Mating season takes place over about three weeks in mid-winter, during which time a female may mate with several males. She’s able to store sperm in her body until she’s ready to have babies several months later, at which point she uses the stored sperm to fertilize her eggs. As a result, babies born in a single litter may have different fathers. The males expend so much energy during these three weeks of mating season that they die of stress-related illnesses. In captivity, where the males can be treated by a veterinarian, a male who survives his first mating season can live as long as three years, but he doesn’t mate again. The female usually only has one litter of babies in her life even if she lives for several years. The phascogale is closely related to the antechinus, which looks similar but has a skinny tail instead of a fluffy one. Antechinus males also die after mating season, while females give birth to tiny babies who latch onto a teat in the pseudo-pouch and stay there while they continue to develop, just like phascogales. Unlike phascogales, though, which always have eight teats, female antechinuses have different numbers of teats. How many teats a female has depends on where she lives. (Just a reminder, the word teats is another word for nipples.) Populations that live in areas where there’s plenty of food have more nipples, up to 13 but usually 12 at most. Populations that live in areas where it’s hard to find enough food have as few as 6 nipples. Producing milk for 12 or 13 babies requires a lot of energy, so females with more nipples can only survive and successfully raise that many babies when they have plenty of food. Females with only 6 nipples can survive on less food while still producing enough milk for six babies. It seems strange that phascogale and antechinus males die after mating, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense. Both these animals are small and very likely to end up eaten by a larger animal. Odds are good that any given male won’t live long enough to see a second mating season anyway, so instead of conserving energy to stay alive, he expends all his energy during his first mating season to make sure he passes his genes along to the next generation. One last interesting fact about the phascogale is that the red-tailed phascogale doesn’t need to drink water. It gets all the moisture it needs from its diet, which remember consists of insects and other animals. I guess animals are pretty

Thanks to the Tracing Owls podcast for this week’s suggestion. I’m a guest on that podcast so make sure to check it out (but while my episode is appropriate for younger listeners, most episodes are not, so be warned). Further reading: Huge Hippos Roamed Britain One Million Years Ago Kenyan fossils show evolution of hippos The Kilopilopitsofy, Kidoky, and Bokyboky: Accounts of Strange Animals from Belo-sur-mer, Madagascar, and the Megafaunal “Extinction Window” A sort-of Malagasy hippo: Actual hippo (not from Madagascar, By Muhammad Mahdi Karim – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121282994): A modern hippo skull. There’s a reason the hippo is more dangerous to humans than sharks are [By Raul654 – Darkened version of Image:Hippo skull.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=242785]: A pygmy hippo and its calf! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a topic suggested by the host of the podcast Tracing Owls, because I’m actually a guest on that podcast in an upcoming episode! I think the episode releases later this week. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but be aware that while the podcast is interesting and often very funny, with topics that focus on weird stuff related to science, most episodes are not appropriate for younger listeners. (I think my episode should be okay.) Several years ago now there was a movie called Madagascar, which is about a group of zoo animals that end up shipwrecked on the island of Madagascar. I love this movie, especially the lemur King Julian, but one of my favorite characters is a hippopotamus named Gloria, voiced by Jada Pinkett Smith. The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa, but as we talked about in episode 77, it’s been separated from the continent of Africa for millions of years and the animals of that country have mostly evolved separately from the animals of Africa. That’s part of why the movie Madagascar is so funny, since the main characters in the movie are all native to Africa—a lion, a zebra, a giraffe, and Gloria the hippo—and don’t know anything about the animals they encounter on Madagascar. Like this guy: [King Julian clip] But it turns out that hippos did once live on Madagascar, and that’s what we’re going to learn about today. We’re not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2500 years ago and possibly as much as 9500 years ago or even earlier. By 1500 years ago people were definitely living on the island. It’s likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live. Madagascar is a really big island, the fourth largest island in the world. It’s been separated from every other landmass for around 88 million years, and has been separated from Africa for about 165 million years. Many of the animals and plants that live on Madagascar are very different from the ones living anywhere else in the world as a result. To put this into perspective, here’s your reminder that the closest living relative of the hippopotamus is the whale, and 60 million years ago the common ancestor of both hippos and whales was a small semi-aquatic animal. That was about 28 million years after Madagascar was on its own in the big wide ocean, and 105 million years after the landmass that we call Africa broke off from the supercontinent Gondwana and began moving very slowly into the position it’s in today. When Madagascar finally broke free of the landmass we now call India, dinosaurs were still the dominant land animal. So why are there remains of small hippos on Madagascar? How did the hippos get to Madagascar and why aren’t they still around? Did the hippo originate in Africa or in some other place? So many questions! The ancestors of modern cetaceans, which includes whales and dolphins and their close relations, are found in the fossil record about 52 million years ago, although it might have been 53 or even 54 million years ago depending on which scientist you ask. That’s when the whale side of the suborder Whippomorpha started developing separately from the hippo side. The “morpha” part of Whippomorpha just means “resembling,” and I’m happy to report that the “whippo” part is actually a combination of the words whale and hippo. Truly, it gave me great joy when I learned this fact, because I assumed “whippo” was something in Greek or Latin, or maybe referred to an animal with a whip-like tail. Nope, whale+hippo=whippo. Anyway, while we know a fair amount about the evolution of cetaceans from their semi-aquatic ancestors, we don’t know much at all about the hippo’s evolution. There’s still a lot of controversy about whether hippos really are all that closely related to whales after all. They share a lot of similarities both physically

Thanks to Leo for suggesting this week’s topic, the ponies of Assateague Island! Further reading: Assateague Wild Ponies Some ponies running free on Assateague Island [photo taken from the site linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about the feral horses of Assateague! Thanks to Leo for the suggestion! That’s the grown-up Leo; we also have a young Leo who’s sent some great suggestions, including one we’re hopefully going to get to pretty soon. Before we talk about Assateague ponies, though, we need to start somewhere else. The kelpie is a Scottish water spirit that’s supposed to appear as a pony wandering by itself, but if someone tries to catch the pony or get on its back to ride it, suddenly it drags the person into the water and either drowns them or eats them. It’s said that the only way to tell that the pony isn’t really a pony is to examine its feet. A real pony has hooves, but a kelpie has claws. The story comes from the olden days when it was common to see ponies wandering around loose in Scotland and other parts of the UK. Some of the ponies in these areas were semi-feral, meaning they lived a lot of the time like wild animals. Some ponies were kept in stables and farmyards as working animals, but others were allowed to roam around and feed themselves as they liked. Every so often the wild ponies would be rounded up and any young ones branded by their mother’s owner. Sometimes the owner would need another pony to pull a cart or something, and they’d catch one of their ponies and bring it home to train. Sometimes the owner needed money so would catch some of their ponies to sell. The ponies that lived this way had to be tough and hardy to survive almost without human care, but luckily ponies are famously tough. Ponies are a type of small horse, but they’re still horses. They’re generally sturdy, with a thicker coat than a full-sized horse, and usually stand around 14 hands high at the withers at most. The withers is the little bump of shoulder at the base of a horse’s neck, and the horse’s back starts behind the withers. A hand is an old horse measurement that has been standardized to four inches, or just over 10 cm, roughly the width of an adult person’s hand. 14 hands is equivalent to about 4 and a half feet tall, or 1.4 meters. One of the best-known pony breeds is the Shetland pony, which also happens to be one of the smallest. It only stands 42 inches tall at most, or 107 cm. That’s about 3 and a half feet tall. It’s mostly used as a child’s mount but originally the Shetland was used to pull carts and plows and carry heavy loads, since despite its small size the Shetland pony is incredibly strong. The Shetland comes from the Shetland Isles off the northeastern coast of Scotland, where it’s lived for at least two thousand years and probably more like 3,000. The islands get very cold in winter and there isn’t a lot of food, so over time the ponies evolved to be small and tough to survive. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, there are feral horses living on an island called Assateague. Assateague Island is off the eastern coast of the United States, closest to the states of Virginia and Maryland. They’re actually not technically ponies except that they’re small, since ponies actually share certain traits that differentiate them from horses, even though these differences aren’t enough to call ponies a subspecies of horse. But because the Assateague horses rarely grow taller than 4 and a half feet tall, or 140 cm, people call them ponies. I’m going to stop here and tell you a personal story, because I’ve actually seen the Assateague ponies myself. I lived in Pennsylvania for a little while after I finished grad school, and at the time I had an awesome dog named Jasper, a Newfoundland I got through Newf rescue. Newfies are bred to be water dogs in the harsh coastal regions of Newfoundland, Canada, but Jasper had never seen the ocean. I knew he didn’t know or care, but it mattered to me that he got to experience the ocean at least once in his life. I had also wanted to see the Assateague ponies since I was a little girl and read Misty of Chincoteague and its sequels approximately 10,000 times, books by Marguerite Henry. So I planned a trip to Assateague Island, which is a wildlife refuge these days. I decided to go over a weekend in October, when it wouldn’t be crowded. At the time I was working in a sales office while I tried to find a job I actually liked, and I mentioned my trip to my boss. He said he’d been to the island, and of course I asked if he’d seen the ponies. He said yes, and said, “We brought a picnic and put all the food on a picnic table while we looked around, and when we came back to our table the ponies had eaten all our food. I cried. As a grown man, I cried.” That’s literally what he said, and he wasn’t kidding. He was genuinely mad at those ponies for eating his picnic, which I find h

This week we learn more about the blobfish thanks to Matilde’s suggestion, and we’ll also learn about a primitive rabbit. Further reading: In Defense of the Blobfish: Why the ‘World’s Ugliest Animal’ Isn’t as Ugly as You Think It Is A rare rabbit plays an important ecological role by spreading seeds The Amami Rabbit: A Living Fossil in the Wilds of Amami Ōshima [amazing photos in this article!] The blobfish as we usually see it: The blobfish as it looks when it’s in its deep-sea home: The Amami rabbit is so so so round: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn a little more about the blobfish, which is Matilde’s suggestion, and we’ll also talk about an unusual primitive rabbit that’s still alive today. We talked about the blobfish briefly in episode 231. The blobfish lives on the sea floor in deep water near Australia and New Zealand. It grows about a foot long at most, or 30 cm, and has weak muscles and a weak skeleton, but it doesn’t need to be any stronger since the intense pressure of the water presses in around the fish all the time. Its gelatinous flesh is slightly less dense than the water around it, which means it can float just above the sea floor without much effort, just drifting along, giving its tail and broad fins a little flap every so often. It eats whatever detritus floats down from far above, although it also really likes to eat small crustaceans that live on the sea floor. But wait, you may be thinking, I’ve seen pictures of the blobfish and it looks like a pinkish blob with a cartoony frown and a droopy nose. Is that blobfish a different one from the one I just described? No! The trouble is that the blobfish lives in really deep water, up to 4,000 feet below the surface, or 1200 meters. That means that there’s up to 4,000 feet of water above the fish, and if you’ve ever had to carry a bucket of water more than a few steps, you’ll know that water is really heavy. So the blobfish has 4,000 feet of water pressing on it from all directions. This is naturally called water pressure, and at the depths where the blobfish lives, it’s 120 times higher than water pressure in, for instance, your bathtub. At that water pressure, you could not survive for even one second. You would be instantly crushed into a messy blob if you were suddenly transported into water that deep, because your body is adapted to live on the earth’s surface. But the opposite is true for the blobfish. If it was suddenly transported to the earth’s surface, or at least the water’s surface, without all that comfortable pressure keeping its body in place like a really big exoskeleton you can swim through, the blobfish would expand. And that’s exactly what happens when a fishing net catches a blobfish and pulls it to the surface. It just goes BLOB all over the place. The blobfish was voted the world’s ugliest animal in 2013, which doesn’t seem fair since no one looks good when they’ve exploded into a blob. When the blobfish is alive in its deep-sea home, it’s silvery or grayish with little spikes all over its body. It’s a member of the family Psychrolutidae, sometimes called toadfish, and it has little black eyes near the top of its head sort of like a toad. Its head is large and wide, while its body tapers to a thin little flat tail. We know almost nothing so far about the blobfish, but we do know a bit about some of its close relatives like the blob sculpin. The blob sculpin lives in the North Pacific Ocean in even deeper water than the blobfish, up to 9200 feet deep, or 2800 meters. That’s about a mile and three-quarters deep, or almost 3 kilometers. Deep-sea animals are mostly solitary, but the blob sculpin gathers in large numbers to spawn. The females choose a nesting area and they all lay their eggs in the same place. Then the males release sperm into the water that fertilizes the eggs. Some nesting areas have been found to contain well over 100,000 eggs! Not only that, but the females guard the nesting area, and as they hover over their eggs, their slow-moving fins help keep the eggs clean of sand and sediment, which allows the eggs to absorb more oxygen. It’s the first documented case of a deep-sea fish taking care of its eggs. Deep-sea animals often live for a long time, and it’s estimated that the blobfish might live to be as much as 130 years old. That’s about all we know about the blobfish right now, so let’s finish with some information about a different cute round animal, although not a blobby one. It’s the Amami rabbit that only lives on two tiny islands off the southern coast of Japan. The Amami rabbit used to live throughout Asia but as modern species of rabbit evolved, it eventually died out on the mainland. Now it only survives on these two small islands, and although it’s now a protected species, it’s still endangered. It’s especially vulnerable to habitat loss and introduced predators like dogs and ca

Thanks to Fabiana and Hazel for their suggestions this week, where we learn more about dogs and cats! Further reading: Gene mutation that makes dogs small existed in ancient wolves Feline genetics help pinpoint first-ever domestication of cats Cats Learn Names of Their Feline Friends A cat (Dracula, specifically, with Dracula the toy): A dog, in case you’ve never seen a dog before: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to revisit two great topics suggested by two great listeners, Fabiana and Hazel. They suggested dogs and cats, respectively. We’ve covered both before, but there’s always more to learn about any animal. Let’s look specifically at two recent studies that can add to our knowledge. We’ll start with Fabiana’s suggestion of dogs. Results of a study published in January of 2022 examined the genetics of wolves and dogs to see how small dog breeds developed. We’re not completely sure how domestic dogs are related to wolf species alive today, since dogs have been domesticated for tens of thousands of years, and were probably domesticated at different times in different places by different groups of people, and potentially domesticated from different species of wolf, and since wolves and dogs can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. It’s very complicated, to say the least. Wolves are roughly the same size throughout the world, depending on species and environment. The gray wolf, which is native to the northern parts of North America and most of Eurasia, stands about 2 and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or about 85 cm, and weighs around 88 lbs, or 40 kg, on average, although wolves who live in warmer areas tend to be smaller. There are certainly dog breeds bigger than this, but there are lots of dog breeds that are much, much smaller. I mean, the Chihuahua only grows around 9 inches tall, or 23 cm, and usually barely weighs 6 lbs, or 2.7 kg. The prevailing belief is that small dog breeds came about because people bred the smallest dogs together and chose the smallest puppies from that pairing to breed to other small dogs. That’s true, but the genetic capacity for small size had to be there to start with in order to breed a 6-lb Chihuahua from an 88-lb wolf, no matter how many generations of dogs were in between. Researchers knew the genetic code for this size difference had to be somewhere, but it took a decade of study before they found it. Once they found the growth hormone mutation that could allow for very small size when expressed, they searched for it in over 200 dog breeds to see if it was there in all dogs. Sure enough, it was. The scientists hypothesized that the genetic mutation showed up after dogs were domesticated, somewhere around 20,000 years ago. To test this, they looked for the mutation in the genetic profiles of both living and extinct canid species. To their surprise, the mutation was present in all of them, including the genetic profile of a Siberian wolf that lived 54,000 years ago. Without this mutation, we wouldn’t have Chihuahuas or Yorkshire terriers or other small dog breeds that so many people love. That means the mutation was beneficial for domesticated dogs, but at the same time it was mostly non-beneficial for wild canids. When dogs were domesticated around 20,000 years ago, and possibly well before that, the world was in the middle of a glacial maximum. The climate throughout the entire Earth was considerably colder than it is today. Ocean levels were lower because so much water was frozen, with ice sheets covering northern Europe and North America to a depth of about 2 1/2 miles, or 4 km. Northern Asia had fewer ice sheets but was much dryer than it is today. In fact, the world was a lot dryer overall, so places that weren’t covered in ice were more likely to be deserts, leading to massive dust storms and just a general dustiness throughout the world. Most of northern Africa and central Australia were what’s called “tropical extreme desert,” which doesn’t sound like any fun, but a lot of Asia was a polar desert. Most of Europe and eastern North America that wasn’t covered in ice was tundra or taiga, and even the most hospitable parts of the world were mostly open woodland and savannas. In other words, this was a world that favored really big animals like mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses and giant deer and buffalo and moose, and wolves needed to be big in order to hunt this megafauna. But the world wasn’t going to be so cold for much longer. The ice sheets began to melt as the climate worldwide warmed up around 19,000 years ago, which led to sea levels rising and all sorts of other dramatic changes. Humans took their dogs and migrated to lots of places where they’d never been able to live before. Before this, dogs were probably mostly hunting partners, but as life got easier for people as mild winters and rainy spring weather became more common, dogs were more likely to be pets as well as working

Let’s learn about some of the animals discovered in 2022! There are lots, so let’s go! Further Reading: In Japanese waters, a newly described anemone lives on the back of a hermit crab Rare ‘fossil’ clam discovered alive Marine Biologists Discover New Giant Isopod Mysterious ‘blue goo’ at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists New Species of Mossy Frog Discovered in Vietnam A Wildlife YouTuber Discovered This New Species of Tarantula in Thailand Meet Nepenthes pudica, Carnivorous Plant that Produces Underground Traps Scientists discover shark graveyard at the bottom of the ocean Further Watching: JoCho Sippawat’s YouTube channel A newly discovered sea anemone (photo by Akihiro Yoshikawa): A mysterious blue blob seen by a deep-sea rover: A newly discovered frog: A newly discovered tarantula (photo by JoCho Sippawat): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the 2022 discoveries episode, where we learn about some of the animals discovered in 2022! Most of the time these animals were actually discovered by scientists before 2022, but the description was published in that year so that’s when we first learned about them. And, of course, a lot of these animals were already known to the local people but had never been studied by scientists before. There are lots of animals in the world but not that many scientists. The great thing is, so many animals get discovered in any given year that I have to pick and choose the ones I think listeners will find most interesting, which in a stunning coincidence turns out to be the ones that I personally find most interesting. Funny how that works out. We’ll start in the ocean, which is full of weird animals that no human has ever seen before. It’s about a hermit crab who carries a friend around. The hermit crab was already known to science, but until a team of scientists observed it in its natural habitat, the deep sea off the Pacific coast of Japan, no one realized it had an anemone friend. The sea anemone is related to jellyfish and is a common animal throughout the world’s oceans. Some species float around, some anchor themselves to a hard surface. Many species have developed a symbiotic relationship with other animals, such as the clownfish, which is sometimes called the anemonefish because it relies on the anemone to survive. Anemones sting the way jellyfish do, but it doesn’t sting the clownfish. Researchers aren’t sure why not, but it may have something to do with the clownfish’s mucus coating. Specifically, the mucus may have a particular taste that the anemone recognizes as belonging to a friend. If the anemone does accidentally sting the clownfish, it’s still okay because the fish is generally immune to the anemone’s toxins. The clownfish lives among the anemone’s tentacles, which protects it from predators, and in return its movements bring more oxygen to the anemone by circulating water through its tentacles, its droppings provide minerals to the anemone, and because the clownfish is small and brightly colored, it might even attract predators that the anemone can catch and eat. Anemones also develop mutualistic relationships with other organisms, including a single-celled algae that lives in its body and photosynthesizes light into energy. The algae has a safe place to live while the anemone receives some of the energy from the algae’s photosynthesis. But some species of anemone have a relationship with crabs, including this newly discovered anemone. The anemone anchors itself to the shell that the hermit crab lives in. The crab gains protection from predators, who would have to go through the stinging tentacles and the shell to get to the crab, while the anemone gets carried to new places where it can find more food. It also gathers up pieces of food that the crab scatters while eating, because crabs are messy eaters. The problem is that hermit crabs have to move into bigger shells as they grow. Anemones can move, but incredibly slowly. Like, snails look like racecar drivers compared to anemones. The anemone moves so slowly that the human eye can’t detect the movement. What the team of scientists witnessed was a hermit crab spending several days carefully pushing and pinching the anemone to make it move onto its new shell. If it wasn’t important, the crab wouldn’t bother. The sea anemone hasn’t yet been officially described since it’s still being studied, but it appears to be closely related to four other species of anemone that also attach themselves to the shells of other hermit crab species. In other marine invertebrate news, a researcher named Jeff Goddard was turning rocks over at low tide at Naples Point, California a few years ago. He was looking for sea slugs, but he noticed some tiny clams. They were only about 10 mm long, but they extended a white-striped foot longer than their shells. Goddard had never seen anything quite like these clams even though he was familiar with the beach and everyth

This week we learn about two interesting animals from opposite parts of the world! Thanks to Felix and Jaxon for suggesting the wolverine and the kakapo. Further reading: Study: Wolverines need refrigerators Kakapo Comeback [this article has some fantastic pictures!] The wolverine likes cold weather: So many young kakapos! The kakapo is a really big bird: (Photo by Matu Booth) Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to cover two animals suggested by listeners who spell their names with an X. I had already picked out these topics from the list and just now noticed both suggesters have X’s in their names. Thanks to Jaxon and Felix for these suggestions! First, Felix suggested we learn about the wolverine. We’ve talked about it before in episode 62, but there’s a whole lot more to learn about this uncommon animal. The wolverine is a mustelid, which is a family that includes weasels, ferrets, and other small, long, skinny animals with short legs. But the wolverine is big and broad, although its legs are pretty short. It kind of looks like a small bear and stands about 18 inches tall at the shoulder, or 45 cm. It’s light brown with darker brown or black legs, muzzle, tail, and back, and some have silvery-gray markings too. Its tail is short but fluffy. It lives in cold, mountainous areas, including northern Canada and Alaska, Siberia, and parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The wolverine is mainly a scavenger of animals that are already dead, but it will also kill and eat pretty much anything it can catch. This includes rabbits, mice, rats, porcupines, geese, and other small or relatively small animals, but it sometimes kills animals a lot bigger than it is, like deer. It will also eat eggs, berries, seeds, and anything else it can find. It’s not a picky eater. The wolverine nearly went extinct in the 19th century due to overhunting for its fur, which is mostly waterproof and frost-proof. People used it to line winter clothes. The wolverine is also vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change, since it needs deep snow and cold temperatures to survive. Because the wolverine lives where winters are harsh, when it finds a lot of food, it will sometimes bury it in snow to eat later. It chooses a protected area between boulders or a natural crevice in rocks to put the dead animal, then covers it with deep snow to keep it fresh for longer, just like putting meat in a freezer. Females in particular need this stored food, because they give birth in winter and need lots of food so they can produce milk for their babies. But if you’ve ever taken food out of the freezer, you know it’s hard as a rock. How does the wolverine eat meat that’s frozen solid? Not only does the wolverine have strong jaws and teeth, it actually has a special tooth in the back of the mouth that points inward, one on each side of the upper jaw. The inward-pointing tooth allows the wolverine to tear off chunks of frozen meat more easily. Other mustelids have this arrangement of teeth too. A male wolverine roams widely through a large territory, which can sometimes be hundreds of square miles. Pairs often mate for life although they don’t spend a lot of time together, and sometimes a male will have two or three mates. In winter, the female digs a den deep into the snow to have her babies, and while she mostly takes care of them by herself, the father wolverine will visit from time to time and bring everyone food. The babies stay with their mother for up to a year, and sometimes the half-grown wolverines will go traveling with their dad for a while. The wolverine is sometimes called the nasty cat because it has a strong smell, which it uses to mark its territory. “Nasty cat” is the funniest name for an animal I’ve ever heard. Next, Jaxon suggested the kakapo, which is a weird and adorable bird. It’s flightless and nocturnal, lives only in New Zealand, and is a type of parrot. A flightless, nocturnal parrot! The kakapo is really big even for a parrot. It can grow over two feet long, or 64 cm, but since it’s flightless its wings and tail aren’t very big. Its legs are relatively short considering it has to walk everywhere. It has green feathers with speckled markings, blue-gray feet, and discs of feathers around its eyes that make its face look a little like an owl’s face. That’s why it’s sometimes called the owl parrot. Males are almost twice the size of females on average. The kakapo evolved on New Zealand where it had almost no predators. A few types of eagle hunted it during the day, which is why it evolved to be mostly nocturnal. Its only real predator at night was one type of owl. As a result, the kakapo was one of the most common birds throughout New Zealand when humans arrived. The Maori discovered New Zealand around 700 years ago. They killed the kakapo to eat and to use its feathers in clothing, and they also brought dogs and the Polynesian rat that also liked to kill and eat the kak

Thanks to Zachary and Oran for this week’s topic, some little animals that bounce around like tiny kangaroos! Further reading: Evolution of Kangaroo-Like Jerboas Sheds Light on Limb Development Supposedly extinct kangaroo rat resurfaces after 30 years High-Speed Videos Show Kangaroo Rats Using Ninja-Style Kicks to Escape Snakes Williams’s jerboa [picture by Mohammad Amin Ghaffari – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/177950563, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115769436]: A drawing of a jerboa skeleton. LEGS FOR DAYS: The San Quintin kangaroo rat lives! [photo from article linked above] Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about two cute little animals suggested by Zachary and Oran! Both of these animals are rodents but although they look remarkably alike in some unusual ways, they’re not actually all that closely related. First, Zachary suggested the jerboa. We talked about the pygmy jerboa in episode 136, but we haven’t talked about jerboas in general. It’s a small rodent that’s native to the deserts of Asia, north Africa, and the Middle East. It’s usually brown or tan with some darker shading on the back and tail. It looks sort of like a gerbil with long ears, long hind legs, and a tuft at the end of the tail. Its front legs are short and it has an adorable whiskery nose. The reason the jerboa’s hind legs are so long while its front legs are really short is that it jumps around on its hind legs like a kangaroo. Not only can it jump really fast, up to 15 mph, or 24 km/h, it can change directions incredibly fast too. This helps it evade predators, because most animals are fastest when running in a straight line. The jerboa bounces in all sorts of directions, hopping or just running on its long hind legs, with its long tail held out for balance. It can also run on all fours with its short front legs helping it maneuver, but for the most part it’s a bipedal animal. It has tufts of stiff hairs under its toes that help it run through loose sand. The jerboa eats plants, although sometimes if it finds a nice juicy insect it will eat it too. Mostly it just eats leaves, bulbs, roots, and some seeds. It gets all of the moisture it needs from its diet, which is good because it lives in the desert where there’s not much water available. Some species of jerboa mainly eat insects and spiders, and some have short ears instead of long ears. This is the case for the thick-tailed pygmy jerboa that lives in parts of China, Mongolia, and Russia. Its head and body only measures about two inches long, or almost 5 cm, but its tail is twice that length. The reason it’s called a thick-tailed jerboa is because it stores fat at the base of its tail, which makes the tail look thick compared to many rodent tails. The jerboa is mostly active at dawn and dusk, although some species are fully nocturnal. It spends the day in a burrow it digs in sand or dirt. A jerboa will usually have more than one burrow in its territory, with the entrances usually hidden under a bush or some other plant. Different burrows have different purposes. Some have numerous entrances and lots of side tunnels but are relatively shallow, which is useful if the jerboa lives in an area with a rainy season. A shallow burrow won’t flood if it rains a lot. Some burrows are temporary, which the jerboa may dig if it’s out and about during the day looking for food. A mother jerboa will dig a burrow with a roomy nesting chamber to raise her babies, and a jerboa’s winter burrow has a nesting chamber that’s deep underground to help it stay warm. Some species of jerboa construct unusual burrows, like the lesser Egyptian jerboa that has spiral-shaped burrows with storage chambers. Most jerboas are solitary animals, although sometimes a group will hibernate together in winter to help everyone stay warmer. Scientists have been studying the jerboa to learn how different animals have evolved radically different leg lengths. The jerboa’s incredibly long hind legs are very different from its very short front legs, but it evolved from animals that had four short legs. But jerboas are born with four short legs, and as the babies grow up their hind legs grow longer and longer. The jerboa is an incredibly efficient runner. Some species can jump as far as six feet in a single bound, or 1.8 meters, and up to three feet, or 90 cm, straight up. The jerboa isn’t the only rodent that hops on its hind legs like a kangaroo. The kangaroo rat does too, and it’s Oran’s suggestion. Oran pointed out that a long time ago, I think in the humans episode, I said that humans are the only fully bipedal mammal, meaning we only ever walk on our hind legs. (Crawling when you’re a baby or trying to find something under the couch don’t count.) I was wrong about that for sure, because the kangaroo rat, the jerboa, and a few other mammals are also bipedal. The kangaroo rat is native to parts of we

Thanks to Llewelly for this suggestion, and thanks to Dr. Thomas A. Hegna for providing me with the two papers I reference in this episode! Images are taken from the papers. The mystery “spider”: Long-legged isopods: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. My carefully planned out episode schedule has already gotten messed up, but I got excited about this topic and couldn’t wait to share it! It’s a mystery invertebrate from the deep sea that has been solved! Thanks to Llewelly for bringing this to my attention, and thanks to arthropod paleontologist Dr. Thomas A. Hegna for posting this information on Mastodon in the first place, and for providing the relevant papers to me. People are pretty great. I knew about this topic from the book The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl Shuker, but I hadn’t been able to find out more. Until now. In the late 1980s, a program called DISCOL 1 was launched to study disturbances on the sea floor due to underwater mining. It focused on the deep sea in the South Pacific. One of the things the expedition did was drop underwater cameras with bait tied to them. When an animal came to investigate the bait, the camera took pictures. I have a birdfeeder like this now although I don’t have to drop it anywhere. In February 1989, the camera descended to about 13,600 feet, or 4,150 meters, in the Peru basin. When it was hauled up a few days later and the pictures retrieved, the scientists saw something they didn’t recognize on 20 of the photos. It looked like a spider. The scientists were able to get a good idea of the animal’s size because they knew how big the bait was and how big the metal rod was that the bait was tied to. The animal’s body was about 2 and a half inches long, or 6 cm, and about half that width, not counting its long, jointed legs. It had five pairs of appendages, including three pairs of walking legs. The other two pairs of appendages were longer and might be feelers of some kind, with the front pair possibly used to manipulate food. The estimated legspan was almost 8 inches across, or more than 20 cm. The scientists published a short article about the finding later in 1989 and proposed that the animal be tentatively placed in the phylum Arachnida with spiders and their relations. But this placement is a big deal, because there are no known spider relations that live in deep water. Some spiders have evolved to live in water at least part of the time, but they always have to have access to the air. For a long time that’s all anyone knew. Most scientists thought the animal was probably a pycnogonid [pik-NA-gunid], an arthropod commonly called a sea spider although it’s not actually an arachnid. We talked about sea spiders in episode 105, so I’ll revisit some of the information from that episode. Sea spiders live throughout the world’s oceans and there are well over a thousand known species. Most are small and live in shallow water, but a few live in water up to 23,000 feet deep, or 7,000 meters. The biggest species live in the cold waters around Antarctica, with the very largest individual ever found having a legspan of about 27 inches across, or 70 cm. The sea spider has four pairs of legs, although a few species have five or six pairs of legs instead. Some species have one or two pairs of simple eyes, but other species have no eyes at all. The body is quite small in relation to the legs, which are extremely long, which means the digestive tract is actually partly in the legs, because the body is too small for it. It walks along the bottom of the ocean or may swim by pulsing its long legs like a jellyfish with legs instead of a bell. In species that swim, the legs may be lined with long bristles. Some species have mouthparts, but most eat using a proboscis that it uses to suck fluids out of its prey. Some species have spines at the tip of the proboscis. It sticks its proboscis into a sponge, worm, jelly, sea anemone, or other invertebrate, injects digestive fluids that liquefy the surrounding tissues, and slurps the fluids up. Sometimes this kills the prey animal, sometimes it doesn’t. All this does sound a lot like the spider-like animal photographed in 1989. But in 2004 a new paper was published about the animal, where the original scientists teamed with some other experts to re-examine the photographs. Their conclusion is that the mystery animal wasn’t a spider or a sea spider but something else: a munnopsidid isopod. Isopods are crustaceans that have been around for at least 300 million years. They live all over the world, on land and in both fresh water and in the ocean. The animal sometimes called the woodlouse or pill bug or roly-poly or sow bug are actually isopods. All isopods have segmented exoskeletons, as you may have seen in roly-polies or whatever you call those little guys, and all have two pairs of antennae and seven pairs of jointed legs. Isopods are very common animals in the ocean and

Thanks to Dean for this week’s suggestion, the crab-eating fox! Further reading: Jaguars could prevent a not-so-great American biotic exchange The crab-eating fox is not actually a fox: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’m happy to report that I’m feeling healthy and testing negative for covid now. Even my lingering cough has pretty much cleared up! I hope you’re healthy too. Anyway, this week let’s learn about an unusual animal suggested by Dean, the crab-eating fox. The crab-eating fox lives in parts of South America east of the Andes Mountains. It likes forests and open woodlands, and sometimes lives in savannas too although it prefers areas with a lot of tree cover and rivers. It’s a fairly small animal that rarely weighs more than 18 pounds, or 8 kg, and stands about 16 inches tall at the shoulder, or 40 cm. It has a thick coat that’s mostly gray or brown with reddish ears and paws, black markings on the ears, tail, and legs, and a black stripe down its spine. It also has a bushy tail and a relatively short muzzle. There are two important questions we need to answer about the crab-eating fox. First, does it actually eat crabs? Second, is it actually a fox? The crab-eating fox does indeed eat crabs, although it’s an omnivore and will eat pretty much anything it can find. This includes insects, eggs, fruit, carrion, and small animals of various kinds, especially rodents. But during the wet season, when it rains a whole lot and rivers flood and ebb repeatedly, the crab-eating fox eats a whole lot of crabs and other crustaceans. The crab-eating fox is not, in fact, a fox. It’s definitely related to foxes, since it’s a canid and the family Canidae includes foxes as well as wolves, dogs, coyotes, and all their relations, and it looks like a fox. It’s the only member of its own genus, but it’s grouped together with some other South American canids that look like foxes but are more closely related to wolves. But they’re not all that closely related to either foxes or wolves. Another member of this group is the maned wolf, the one with super long legs, which we talked about most recently in episode 167. Scientists think that the crab-eating fox’s closest relation is another South American canid called the short-eared dog, which we talked about in episode 195. Unlike the crab-eating fox, the short-eared dog likes heavy forests and lives in the Amazon rainforest. We know so little about it that researchers sometimes refer to it as the ghost dog. The crab-eating fox is nocturnal and spends most of the daytime sleeping in a den. Sometimes it makes a den by burrowing into thick grass, sometimes it will dig a burrow, but it prefers to find a den made by another animal and move into it if it’s empty. It may have several dens in its territory, which it often shares with its mate. Both parents help take care of the babies, and a female may have two litters a year. I’m happy to report that the crab-eating fox is not endangered. It’s doing just fine in most places. It’s an adaptable, intelligent animal, which helps it thrive in a changing environment the same way coyotes do in North America. In fact, it fills the same ecological niche in South America that the coyote fills in North America, and this has led to a really weird potential problem. The crab-eating fox is native to South America, but it has been spreading northward into Central America. Likewise, the coyote is native to North America, but it has been spreading southward into Central America. Neither species likes thick forested areas, but as more rainforests are cleared for agriculture and housing, people have inadvertently made a sort of corridor for both species. Having people around doesn’t bother either the crab-eating fox or the coyote. Coyotes have made it as far south as Panama, almost to South America. If this continues, with crab-eating foxes migrating north and coyotes migrating south in ever greater numbers, eventually they’ll start to compete with each other. This isn’t good for either of them. The only thing stopping coyotes from migrating farther south at this point is a thick strip of tropical forest called Darien National Park in Panama, where jaguars live. Unlike coyotes and crab-eating foxes, jaguars are very shy of humans and need a lot of dense forest to live in. This is exactly the kind of place that coyotes and crab-eating foxes like least, not to mention that a jaguar would be more than happy to catch and eat either species of canid. So as long as the forest in the national park remains intact, it acts as a barrier to keep both canid species apart, and that’s good. It’s also good for the jaguars and lots of other animals. Hooray for protected forests! You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. If you like the p

Thanks to Zola for suggesting this week’s topic, the red panda! Further reading: Study Reveals Key Differences in Skulls of Red and Giant Panda A red panda: A red panda asleep in a tree [photo by By Aconcagua – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2169002]: Not exactly a real red panda but pretty darn cute (from the Disney/Pixar movie Turning Red): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Happy new year! I’m still getting over covid but feeling much better and have mostly regained my sense of smell and taste. I’m still coughing, though, so apologies that my voice doesn’t sound great (at least, I don’t think it does). One of my goals for this year is to really clear out the backlog of suggested topics. So many people have sent me such great ideas for episodes, and while I really do try to get to as many of them as possible, some people have been waiting literally years for me to cover their suggestion. So I’m just going to pick one every week until we’re more or less caught up. We’ll start with someone who’s probably used to being at the end of the line when you have to line up alphabetically. Zola suggested the red panda and I have no idea why we’ve never talked about this amazing animal! The red panda lives in parts of the Himalaya Mountains in various countries, including China, India, Tibet, Myanmar, and Nepal, where it mostly lives in high elevations where there’s plenty of water and bamboo. When it gets really cold, it can lower its metabolism and enter a torpid state something like hibernation, although only for short amounts of time, and it also wraps itself up in its big fluffy tail to stay warm. It’s mostly nocturnal and spends a lot of time in trees, although it’s perfectly comfortable on the ground too, although it almost always sleeps in a tree. The red panda is about the size of a dog but with short legs. It’s bigger than a raccoon but resembles one superficially, including a bushy ringed tail and a dark stripe across the eyes that continues down the cheeks. It’s mostly reddish-brown or orangey in color, with white markings on the ears and face and darker red or black belly and legs. Its tail is almost as long as its body, around 19 inches long for a big male, or 48 cm, while its head and body is about 25 inches long, or 63 cm. It has a round head with a short muzzle and big triangular ears. The red panda has a lot in common with the giant panda, and that has caused a lot of confusion in the past and even today. We talked about the giant panda in episode 42, including its extra toe. It’s not really a toe although it acts like a thumb. The giant panda’s front paws have five toes just like all bears, and also a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves. The red panda has a false thumb too, also formed from a projecting wrist bone. It’s not as dexterous as the giant panda’s false thumb, but both animals use it to help it hold bamboo. In the red panda’s case, though, the false thumb probably originally evolved to help it climb trees. It also has flexible joints in its legs that allow it to climb more easily, including straight down a tree head-first, and it has semi-retractable claws. The red panda even lives in some of the same places as the giant panda. Researchers weren’t sure how the two species could live in the same places and eat the same foods without one species out-competing the other. The red panda mostly eats bamboo just as the giant panda does, and both are considered carnivores even though they hardly eat anything but plants, but a study published in 2014 determined that the two animals actually eat different parts of the bamboo plant. The red panda is able to climb up to eat the smaller, more tender leaves and stems while the giant panda has a stronger jaw that allows it to eat larger, tougher leaves and shoots. But is the red panda closely related to the giant panda? Scientists still aren’t completely sure. The red panda was known to science long before the giant panda was, and was just called the panda. After the giant panda was discovered, scientists thought that it had to be related to the red panda, which they started calling the lesser panda or red panda to differentiate it from the giant panda. The two animals eat the same thing and have some traits in common, so it made sense that they were related. But that was before the giant panda was well understood. Once scientists figured out that the giant panda is actually a type of weird bear, they reclassified it and determined that the red panda was probably more closely related to procyonids, which includes the raccoon and the coatimundi we talked about a few weeks ago. After genetic studies, currently the red panda is placed in its own family and is probably most closely related to the family Mephitidae, which includes skunks, but is also closely related to procyonids

Yay, we’re at the end of the year and looking forward to 2023! Boo, I caught covid and I’m still recovering, so here’s a repurposed Patreon episode about whale strandings and how people help the whales! A minke whale calf being transferred via rescue pontoon to a boat to tow her farther out to sea than the pontoon could manage for such a big whale (photo from this article, which explains that she rejoined her mother and swam away safely): Pilot whales being rescued after stranding: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast! I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s the last episode of 2022, and…I’ve got Covid. I’m fully vaccinated and fortunate enough to be a basically healthy person, so my symptoms were mostly quite mild and I’m feeling much better although I’m still quarantining. Because my voice isn’t really at 100% due to coughing, and because I haven’t had the energy to do any research, I decided to run an old Patreon episode this week. I always feel bad for my awesome patrons when I do this, but I really like this episode and it’s several years old now. It’s about mass whale strandings but I focused on how people help whales, so even though it’s a sad topic I hope you find it hopeful and interesting. With the end of 2022, we also say goodbye to the birthday shout-outs since it was only for 2022. I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Let’s have one final birthday shout-out, though. This one’s for everyone! You’re having a birthday in 2023 so I hope it’s the best birthday you’ll have had so far! Now, let’s learn about mass whale strandings. [little intro sound to help hide the fact that the audio changes a whole lot here] This is a sad phenomenon where whales swim onto shore and get beached, and if they don’t get help they die. A whale breathes air, sure, but it’s evolved to be in the water full-time. As soon as it’s on land, the weight of its own body starts to smother it and it also starts to overheat. Sometimes just one or two whales strand themselves, sometimes it’s a whole pod. We’re still not completely sure of the causes except that there’s undoubtedly more than one cause. Navy sonar may play a part, disorienting and frightening whales, even deafening them. Water pollution, disturbances of the earth’s geomagnetic field, extreme weather, injuries, disease, the whales fleeing predators or pursuing prey, and all sorts of other issues may be causes or partial causes. Most whales that strand themselves are toothed whales, which rely on echolocation to navigate. Many researchers think that some coastlines that slope very gently can confuse the whales, who think the seafloor is level when the water is actually getting shallower and shallower. Certain areas with gently sloping beaches have mass strandings of whales and dolphins almost every year. Some species of whale are more prone to stranding than others, too, especially pilot whales, which are actually dolphins despite their name. The largest mass stranding known was of pilot whales, with over a thousand of them beached in 1918 on Chatham Island in New Zealand. Pilot whales can grow more than 23 feet long, or over 7 meters, and live throughout much of the world’s oceans. They mostly eat squid but will eat fish too, and sometimes dive deeply to find food. Chatham Island is one of those areas where whales get stranded repeatedly, as are several other islands and bays around New Zealand. The coastal waters are shallow with a number of sandbars, and the whales apparently get disoriented and don’t realize they’re coming up onto the beach instead of just crossing another sandbar. Almost every summer some pilot whales become stranded, sometimes hundreds of them. One species of whale that almost never gets stranded is the killer whale, or orca. Orcas frequently hunt seals, which flee onto land. Orcas learn how to navigate beaches, and will sometimes beach themselves on purpose while attempting to catch a seal, then wriggle back into the sea. But most whales never approach the shore that closely under ordinary circumstances so they never learn how to avoid getting stranded permanently. When people find stranded whales, our first impulse is to help them. But whales are big and heavy, so much so that most of the time even a group of people can’t lift them. But humans are smart and social, and we’ve worked out a system to help stranded whales. First, the whales need to be kept as cool as possible until more help arrives. People pour water over stranded whales to help cool them down, but make sure that their blowholes remain clear of sand and water so they can continue to breathe. Wet bed sheets draped over the whales help too, again making sure to keep the blowholes clear. Next, as the tide comes in and the water rises around the whales, it’s important to help turn the whales onto their bellies. The whales usually can’t do it themselves, especially if they’ve been stranded for hours and are exhausted and having difficulty breathing. If they a

Thanks to Miranda and Henry for this week’s frog suggestions! Further reading: Shattering the Glass Frog Ceiling The Puerto Rican wetland frog, AKA coquí llanero: The golden coquí in happier times: Glass frog from above and below: A female granulosa glass frog named Millie (in one of the few successful breeding programs of these frogs), looking demure: Laura’s glass frog, rediscovered after almost 70 years [photos from this article]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have suggestions from Henry and Miranda, so we’re going to learn about some weird but cute frogs! First, Miranda listened to episode 270 about the tapir frog and commented about a little frog native to Puerto Rico that sounds very similar. It’s call the coquí frog and it has an adorable beep! It sounds like this: [frogs beeping] You can definitely hear why the coquí frog is called that. It sounds like it’s saying “coquí.” The coquí is a type of tree frog although most species prefer to live on or near the ground. Instead of webbed toes, their toes have discs that act sort of like suction cups that help them stick to leaves. Different species of coquí frogs are different colors, including brown, green, gray, and yellow. Their tummies are usually white or yellow. Most species are quite small, although a few species grow as big as 3 inches long, or about 8 cm. There are at least 17 species of coquí frog known in Puerto Rico, with more species found in other parts of the Caribbean and in Central and South America. New species are discovered from time to time, including the tiniest species, the Puerto Rican wetland frog. It was only discovered in 2005 and described in 2007. It’s about 15 mm long from nose to butt, or more properly snout to vent, and while males are bright yellow, females are browner. It lays its eggs on the leaves of a plant called the bulltongue arrowhead, and it only lays one to five eggs at a time. Instead of hatching into tadpoles, the eggs hatch into miniature frogs which are ready to hop out and eat lots of ticks, because that’s mainly what this species of coquí eats. And that’s about all we know about this particular species except that it only lives in one small area of Puerto Rico and is critically endangered. Another species of coquí is the golden coquí, which is almost as small as the Puerto Rican wetland frog. It’s yellow or golden in color, or sometimes a more olive green. Instead of laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles that develop into frogs, the golden coquí skips most of these steps and just gives birth to fully developed teeny baby frogs, three to six of them at a time. The golden coquí lives in a small, specific habitat, a moist subtropical forest where bromeliad plants grow. Bromeliads are shrubby plants with succulent-type leaves that retain water. Pineapples are a type of bromeliad, although not the ones the golden coquí lives in. Unfortunately, the golden coquí is also critically endangered and may actually be extinct. No one has seen one since 1981. Most species of coquí lay their eggs on leaves instead of in water. The eggs still need to stay moist, though, so in many species the male will bring water to the eggs. He does this by just dunking himself in water, then returning to the leaf where the eggs are and plunking himself down on the eggs. He will also guard the eggs from potential predators. The eggs of all coquí species hatch into frogs instead of tadpoles. A few species of coquí have been introduced to other parts of the world, either by accident or on purpose, and have become invasive species. This is especially true in Hawaii, where the coquí has become incredibly common and as a result is causing some native frogs to decline in numbers, along with other animals. But in Puerto Rico, where the coquí belongs, people are naturally proud of their loud little frogs. The indigenous people of Puerto Rico, the Taíno, incorporated the frog into their legends, and there’s even 700-year-old cave art on nearby Mona Island that includes paintings of coquí frogs. The coquí frog mostly eats small invertebrates, including lots of cockroaches and other beetles, so they’re good to have around. Unfortunately, as is the case with so many frog species around the world, their numbers are in decline due to habitat loss, climate change, pollution, introduced predators, and a deadly fungus that we talked about in episode 250. Studies have shown that some populations of the coquí show a natural resistance to the fungus, so if we can just protect their habitats, the frogs will be okay. Next, Henry wanted to learn more about the glass frog, which lives in Central and South America. We’ve talked about it very briefly in episode 148 and a couple of old Patreon episodes, but we’ve never really gone in-depth about it. Let’s do that now, because this is a really weird and interesting frog! The glass frog lives in forests of Central and South America, mostly in tr

This week we’re going to learn about a brand new study in Nature about animals and plants that lived in Greenland about two million years ago. Happy birthday to Dillon! Further reading: A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNA Scientists Reconstruct 2-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem from Environmental DNA No bones? No problem: DNA left in cave soils can reveal ancient human occupants Greenland now: Greenland two million years ago [art by Beth Zaiken, taken from the second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to do something a little different and talk about a new study just published in the journal Nature. A little section of this episode is taken from a recent Patreon episode, for those of you who listen and think, “Wait, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that before.” Before we get started, though, we have a birthday shoutout! A great big happy birthday to Dillon! I hope you do something really silly and fun on your birthday, like dance around wearing a ridiculous party hat and then eat cake. Greenland is a big island off the eastern coast of Canada, but way far north, more or less in the Arctic. Even though it’s off the coast of North America, it’s considered part of Europe because for the last thousand years, it’s been controlled by Norway or Denmark at various times. Denmark’s got it right now. A little over 56,000 people live there today, most of them Inuit. A big part of Greenland is covered in an ice sheet over a mile thick, which is so heavy it has pushed the central section of the island down so that it’s almost a thousand feet, or over 300 meters, below sea level. The land is much higher around the edges of the country. Basically Greenland is a gigantic bowl full of ice. In 1966, the U.S. Army drilled into the ice to see what was under it, and the answer is dirt, as you might have expected. They took a 15-foot, or 4.5 meter, core sample and stuck it in a freezer, where everyone promptly forgot about it for 51 years. At some point it ended up in Denmark, where someone noticed it in 2017. In 2019, the frozen core sample was finally studied by scientists. They expected to find mostly sand and rock. Instead, it was full of beautifully fossilized leaves and other plant material. The main reason scientists were so surprised to find leaves and soil instead of just rock is that ice is really heavy, and it moves—slowly, but a mile-thick sheet of ice cannot be stopped. If you remember episode 277 about the rewilding of Scotland, you may remember that Scotland doesn’t have a lot of fossils from the Pleistocene because it was covered in glaciers that scoured the soil and everything in it down to bedrock, destroying everything in its path. But this hasn’t happened in Greenland. Where the ice sheet now is, there used to be a forest. Obviously, the ice sheet hasn’t always covered Greenland. Research is ongoing, but a study of the sediment published in 2021 indicates that Greenland was ice free within the last million years, and possibly as recently as a few hundred thousand years. If you go back a little farther, around two million years ago, Greenland was radically different. Not only was it ice free, it was much warmer than it is today. In north Greenland, which is now a polar desert, there was once an open forest where an incredible number of plants and animals lived. We know because of environmental DNA sequencing, often referred to as eDNA. At this point most of us have a good understanding of what DNA is, but I’ll give you a quick explanation in case you’re not sure. DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid, and it’s a polymer chain found in every organism’s cells that contains genetic instructions, essentially a guide on how to grow a particular type of animal. It’s way more complicated than that, but that gives you a basic idea. When cells replicate as an organism develops, either from an egg cell or a seed, the DNA directs what sequences of development happen at what stages. You inherit DNA from your parents but your personal DNA is always a little different from both parents’. True crime podcasts talk about DNA a lot because every individual organism has a unique DNA profile, and since every single cell in our bodies contains DNA, criminals leave their unique signature at every crime scene. Now that scientists can sequence DNA from really tiny samples, many crimes have been solved when the only evidence was something like “this criminal murdered someone and then smoked a cigarette, and left the cigarette butt, and the DNA from their saliva on the cigarette butt was sequenced and run through a database of criminal DNA profiles, and now we know who the murderer is.” And then you get six commercials for mattresses and phone games. But animal podcasts talk about DNA a lot because every species of organism has a unique genetic profile in addition to having a unique personal genetic profile. Scient

Thanks to Isaac for suggesting the chamois, our main topic this week! Further reading: The chamois in New Zealand Extinct goat was cold-blooded Myotragus balearicus: Extinction of mouse-goats A chamois in its summer coat: A chamois in its winter coat: Myotragus, the “cave goat,” may have looked something like this museum restoration: Nuralagus’s femur (left) compared to a regular rabbit femur: Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about an animal suggested by Isaac, the chamois, along with a few other animals. I realize we’ve talked about a lot of mammals lately so I’ll try to switch it up for the last few episodes of the year. The chamois is a species of what are called goat-antelopes. Its name is French and is spelled c-h-a-m-o-i-s, but in English a lot of people pronounce it “shammy.” Shammy is also what people call polishing cloths of various types, because it’s short for chamois. If you ever heard those commercials on TV for something called the sham-wow, that’s a paper towel thingy that’s based on the shammy cloth. The reason for all this confusion between an animal and a cloth is that the original shammy cloth was a piece of leather from the animal that was used to polish high-quality items like fancy cars since it’s very soft and won’t scratch anything. Most shammy cloths you buy these days are likely to be made from plush cloth or the skin of domestic goats or sheep. As for the animal, it’s native to mountainous parts of Europe, including the Alps. It’s also been introduced to New Zealand’s South Island where it’s an invasive species that threatens many native plants. Since chamois meat is considered a delicacy, commercial hunters in New Zealand travel into the mountains by helicopter, kill as many of the animals as possible, and bring the meat back to sell to restaurants. This is encouraged by the New Zealand government in an attempt to protect native plants, although red deer, feral goats, and hares are also introduced animals that do a lot of damage to the delicate mountain environment. The chamois is small, only about two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 80 cm. It has cloven hooves and both males and females have small black horns. The horns are mostly straight but bend backwards at the tips into a sort of hook shape, and while males have thicker horns, they aren’t usually that much longer than the female’s. Horns grow up to 11 inches long, or 28 cm. In summer the chamois’s fur is light brown with a darker stripe on each side of the face that runs from the nostrils, over the eyes, and up to the horns. In winter its fur grows very thick to keep it warm in its mountainous habitat, and it’s a much darker brown, almost black. It still has the dark band on its face with lighter colored fur on its cheeks and jaw, though. Its tail is very short and isn’t usually visible. Female chamois live in small groups along with their offspring. Males are solitary most of the year, but during mating season in autumn and early winter, called the rut, males fight each other for the attention of females. The female gives birth to a single kid in late spring. In the winter the chamois migrates to lower elevations where there’s more food, but in summer it migrates to high elevations above the treeline where it’s safer from predators. It can run extremely fast, up to about 30 miles per hour, or 50 km/hour, and can jump as much as 20 feet, or 6 meters. It can even jump over six and a half feet high, or 2 meters, straight up. It’s very bouncy. I mentioned that the chamois is a goat-antelope, so let’s go back to that term. The goat-antelope isn’t actually a type of antelope, although it is an antelope relation. Goat-antelopes are bovids, along with antelopes, actual goats, sheep, cows, and many others. The goat-antelopes are members of the subfamily Caprinae, which includes goats, sheep, musk ox, mountain goats, takins, and many other interesting animals that we need to talk about one day. One of these is the extinct Myotragus, called the mouse goat or the Balearic Islands cave goat because the first fossils were found in a cave. It didn’t actually live in caves, although it was weird in other ways. The cave goat was a small animal, only about 18 inches tall, or 46 cm, and both males and females had small horns that probably looked like a goat’s horns. Like most other goat-antelopes, researchers think the cave goat was a browser that ate lots of different kinds of plants, although its ancestors had probably been grazers that ate mostly grass. But its eyes were oriented for binocular vision like a predator’s eyes, instead of being on the sides of its head as in most herbivores, which allows an animal a much wider range of vision to watch for predators. Since the cave goat had lived on islands for several million years and didn’t need to worry about large predators, it didn’t need the adaptations that other prey animals have. Fo

Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this week’s topic, animals of the Paleogene, the period after the Cretaceous! Thanks also to Llewelly for suggesting the horned screamer, now one of my favorite birds. Further watching: Southern Screamers making noise Horned Screamers making noise Further reading: The Brontotheres Presbyornis looked a lot like a long-legged goose [art by Smokeybjb – CC BY-SA 3.0] The southern screamer (left) and horned screamer (right), probably the closest living relation to Presbyornis: Megacerops was really really big: All four of these illustrated animals are actually megacerops, showing the variation across individuals of nose horn size: Uintatherium had a really weird skull and big fangs: Pezosiren didn’t look much like its dugong and manatee descendants: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at some strange animals of the Paleogene period, a suggestion from Pranav. Pranav also suggested the naked mole-rat that we talked about in episode 301, but I forgot to credit him in that one. As we talked about in episode 240, about 66 and a half million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into the earth and caused an extinction event that ended the era of the dinosaurs. The geologic time period immediately after that event is called the Paleogene, and paleontologists study this era to learn how life rebounded after the extinction event. We’re going to learn about a few animals that evolved to fill ecological niches left vacant after dinosaurs went extinct. These days, mammals fill a whole lot of these ecological niches, so it’s easy to assume that mammals have been successful for the last 66 million years. But while that’s true now, birds were incredibly successful for a long time. Basically for millions of years after the non-avian dinosaurs died out, it was dinosaurs 2.0 as the avian dinosaurs, better known as birds, spread throughout the world and evolved into some amazing organisms. This included terror birds, which we talked about in episode 202. They lived in South America, except for one species from North America, and evolved really soon after the dinosaurs went extinct, appearing in the fossil record about 60 million years ago. They lasted a long time, too, only going extinct around 2 million years ago. The earliest known terror bird was about three feet tall, or 91 cm, but its descendants became larger and more fearsome until they were apex predators throughout South America. The biggest species grew up to ten feet tall, or three meters, with a massive beak and sharp claws on its toes. It couldn’t fly but was a fast runner. You would not want a terror bird chasing you. Lots of other birds evolved throughout the Paleogene, but most of them would look pretty familiar to us today. Paleontologists have found fossils of the ancestors of many modern birds, including penguins, hummingbirds, and parrots, which shows that they were already specialized some 25 or 35 million years ago or even more. In the case of penguins, we have fossils of penguin ancestors dating back to the late Cretaceous, before the extinction event. Those ancient penguins could probably still fly, but it didn’t take too long to evolve to be a fully aquatic bird. The species Waimanu manneringi lived around 62 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. It resembled a loon in a lot of ways, with its legs set well back on its body, and it probably spent much of its time floating on the water between dives. But unlike a loon, it had lost the ability to fly and its wings were already well adapted to act as flippers underwater. Another bird would have looked familiar at first glance, but really weird when you gave it a second look. Presbyornis lived between about 62 and 55 million years ago in what is now North America, and it lived in flocks around shallow lakes. It was the size of a swan or goose and mostly shaped like a goose, with a fairly chonky body and a long neck. It had a large, broad duckbill that it used to filter small animals and plant material from the water and its feet were webbed…but its legs were really long, more like a heron’s legs. When the first Presbyornis fossils were found in the 1920s, the scientists thought they’d found ancient flamingos. But when a skull turned up, Presbyornis was classified with ducks and geese. It wasn’t very closely related to modern ducks and geese, though. Researchers now think its closest modern relation is a South American bird called the screamer. Llewelly suggested the horned screamer a long time ago and now that I have learned more about these birds, I love them so much! The screamer looks sort of like a goose but has long, strong legs and a sharp bill more like a chicken’s. It lives in marshy areas and eats pretty much anything, although it prefers plant material. It has two curved spurs that grow on its wings that it uses to defend its territory from predators or other screamers, an

Thanks to Emory for suggesting this week’s topic, mysterious animal sounds! Further reading/watching: The Story of Elk in the Great Smoky Mountains Terrifying Sounds in the Forests of the Great Smoky Mountains Evidence found of stingrays making noise This New AI Can Detect the Calls of Animals Swimming in an Ocean of Noise The wapiti [pic from article linked above]: The stingray filmed making noise [stills from video linked to above]: The tawny owl makes some weird sounds: The fox says all kinds of things: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Emory suggested we do a new episode about strange and mysterious animal sounds a while back, which is one of my favorite topics. The problem is, it’s hard to find good audio clips to share. It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve found some good ones. In late September 2018, in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, some hikers recorded a terrifying animal sound. The sound wasn’t a mystery for long, though, because they soon saw the animal making it. Here’s what it sounded like: [elk bugle] It’s the bugle of a male elk, which I’m going to call wapiti to avoid confusion. It’s a sound that wasn’t heard in the Smoky Mountains for at least a century. The eastern wapiti was once common throughout eastern North America but was driven to extinction in the late 19th century, although the last wapiti in North Carolina was killed almost a century earlier than that. All North American wapiti almost went extinct by about 1900, and hunters and conservationists worked to get nature preserves set aside to save it and its habitat. Starting in the 1990s, wapiti from western North American subspecies were reintroduced in the southeast, with reintroductions in the Smokies starting in 2001. There are now at least 200 wapiti living in the mountains, probably more. I’ve seen them myself and they’re beautiful animals! The wapiti is a type of deer. We talked about it way back in episode 30 along with the moose. Various species of wapiti live throughout Europe and Asia as well as North America, although it’s been hunted to extinction in many areas. As we mentioned in episode 30, the name elk is used for the moose in parts of Europe, which causes a lot of confusion, which is why I’ve chosen to call it by its Algonquin name of wapiti. The wapiti is a really big animal, one of the biggest deer alive today. Only the moose is bigger. It’s closely related to the red deer of Eurasia but is bigger. A male, called a bull, can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, with an antler spread some four feet wide, or 1.2 meters. Females, called cows, are smaller and don’t grow antlers. Males grow a new set of antlers every year, which they use to wrestle other males in fall during mating season. At the end of mating season the wapiti sheds its antlers. The bugling sound males make during mating season is extremely loud. The sound tells females that the bull is strong and healthy, and it tells other bulls not to mess with it. [elk bugle] Our next sound is from an animal that scientists didn’t realize could even make sounds. There’ve been reports for a long time of stingrays making clicking noises when they were alarmed or distressed, but it hadn’t been documented by experts. A team of scientists recently decided to investigate, with their report released in July of 2022. They filmed stingrays of two different species off the coasts of Indonesia and Australia making clicking sounds as divers approached. They think it may be a sound warning the diver not to get too close. This is what it sounds like: [Stingray making clicking sounds] One exciting new technological development is being used to detect underwater sounds and hopefully help identify them. It’s called DeepSqueak, because it was originally developed to record ultrasonic calls made by mice and rats. This is an example of a mouse sound slowed down enough that humans can hear it, specifically a male mouse singing to attract a mate, which we talked about in episode 8: [mouse song] But DeepSqueak also works really well to detect sounds made by whales and their relatives, and researchers are currently using it to determine whether offshore wind farms cause problems for whales. With DeepSqueak and other listening software, it turns out that a lot of animals we thought were silent actually make noise. For instance, this sound: [Pelochelys bibron] That’s a grunting sound made by the southern New Guinea giant softshell turtle. And here’s a caecilian, a type of burrowing reptile that we talked about in episode 82: [Typhlonectes compressicauda] Let’s finish with a strange and mysterious sound heard on land. In January and February of 2021, some residents of London, England started hearing a weird sound at night. [mystery sound] Because the animal making the sound moved around so much, some people thought it must be a bird. One suggestion is that it was a tawny owl, especially the female tawny ow

Thanks to Oceana, Leo, and Alexandra for suggesting the coatimundi this week! Further reading: Caught red handed: The mystery of an unusual Panamanian plant’s dispersal The coatimundi has a long tail and a long nose: The olingo sitting on a cloud cycad seed pod. Mystery solved! The olingo in daylight: My new podcasting studio! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about an animal suggested by several people. Thanks to Oceana, Leo, and Alexandra for suggesting the coatimundi, also called the coati! We’re also going to learn about a related animal mystery that was the subject of a Patreon episode earlier this year, because it ties in so well. The coatimundi looks superficially like a type of monkey, or maybe a lemur, but it’s not a primate at all. It belongs to the family Procyonidae, which includes raccoons, kinkajous, and a few others. Procyonids are native to the Americas, and some scientists think they may be very distantly related to canids. Since a lot of Procyonids have bushy ringed tails, at one point the red panda was classified as a relation, but it’s since been reclassified into a family all its own that doesn’t appear to be related. The coati lives in much of South America, Central America, and southern North America, including Mexico and parts of the American southwest. It’s mostly gray-brown or reddish-brown in color, with some white markings around the eyes and muzzle. Males are much bigger than females on average, but in general the coati isn’t that much bigger than a domestic cat. It has a long, thick tail that sort of resembles a cat’s tail except that it’s even longer in relation to its body. Some coatis have rings around the tail but some don’t. It depends on the species and the individual. The coati uses its long tail to help it balance in trees, since it does a lot of climbing. Its hind feet can rotate so that they’re backwards, which means it can climb down trees headfirst. Procyonids can all do this, but so can some unrelated animals like weasels, due to convergent evolution. The coati also uses its long tail to keep track of its friends when they’re traveling through long grass. It sticks its tail straight up so that it’s visible above the grass. Since female coatis live in social groups of up to 40 individuals, keeping track of friends is important. The coatimundi doesn’t worry too much that predators might see its tail sticking up and run over for a coati-sized snack. While jaguars, cougars, large eagles, and a few other predators do eat coatis, for the most part other animals leave them alone. The coati has sharp teeth, sharp claws, and it’s strong and fast for its size. It can be ferocious when it needs to, and of course it has its equally ferocious friends to help out. Plus, the coati is intelligent. In a 2013 study, the female coati’s brain was found to have a very large frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that handles sociability. Male coatis had smaller frontal cortexes, since males spend most of the time by themselves or in small bachelor groups except during mating season. And as we’ve learned when talking about other animals, the more complex an animal’s social structure, the more intelligent it’s likely to be. The coati’s ears are small and its snout is long and thin and turns slightly upwards, which makes it look a little like a piggy nose. But unlike a pig’s nose, the coati’s is extremely flexible. It uses its nose to root around in leaf litter and dirt to find food. It’s an omnivore that’s happy to eat pretty much anything, from fruit and other plant material, to insects and other invertebrates, including tarantulas, to eggs and small animals. It has a strong sense of smell and clever front paws that help it dig up grubs, termites, and other yummy things. It sleeps with its nose tucked into its belly fur and its long tail wrapped around it. When a female coati is ready to have babies, called kits, she leaves her group and builds a little nest in a tree. She gives birth there and takes care of her kits alone for about six weeks. At that point the babies can travel well and the whole family rejoins the other females and their offspring. The females take turns babysitting younger kits and watching for danger. Next, let’s learn about another Procyonid, this one associated with a mystery. But to learn about the mystery we need to start not with an animal, but with a plant. Zamia pseudoparasitica is a type of cycad that only lives in the montane cloud forests in western Panama, in Central America. Even though the cycad is a plant that resembles a palm tree, this particular plant grows in the treetops instead of on the ground. Because Z. pseudoparasitica is a mouthful, I’m going to call it the cloud cycad. The cloud cycad has a short trunk without branches, but its leaves are almost 10 feet long, or 3 meters. They look like palm fronds. It grows on other trees, clinging to the branches with its r

Thanks to Liesbet for this week’s suggestion, about two mammals that have evolved to be hairless! Happy birthday this week to Declan and Shannon! The hairless bat has a doglike face and a doglike tail but (and this is important) it is not a dog [photos from this site]: The naked mole-rat’s mouth is behind its teeth instead of the usual “my teeth are in my mouth” kind of thing: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Liesbet, who asked about furless animals. We’re going to learn about two mammals that don’t have fur, and they’re not ones you may be thinking of. But first, we have two birthday shout-outs! Happy birthday to Declan and Shannon! I hope both your birthdays are so amazing that whatever town you live in finishes off the day by giving you the key to the city. What do you do with the key? I don’t know, but it sounds like something to brag about. Mammals are famous for having hair, but not all mammals actually have hair. Cetaceans like whales and dolphins have lost all their hair during their evolution into marine animals, although before a baby whale is born it has a little bit of fuzzy hair on its head. Other mammals, like humans, pigs, walruses, and elephants, have evolved to only have a little hair. There are also domesticated mammals that have been bred to have no hair, like sphynx cats and Chinese crested dogs. There are other domesticated hairless mammals, though, including two types of guinea pig. The skinny pig only has a little bit of fuzzy hair on its face and ears, while the baldwin pig only has a tuft of hair on its nose. But the animals we’re going to talk about today are hairless animals you may not have heard of. For instance, the hairless bat, which lives in parts of Southeast Asia. Its dark gray body is almost completely hairless, although it does sometimes have little patches of fuzz on the head and tail, and longer bristles around the neck. It’s nocturnal and eats insects, but since it’s a fairly large bat, around 6 inches long, or 15 cm, it can eat fairly large insects. It especially likes grasshoppers, termites, and moths. The hairless bat roosts in colonies of up to a thousand individuals, and it lives in caves, hollow trees, or rock crevices. Although it uses echolocation, it doesn’t have a nose leaf like many microbats have, but instead has a little doglike snout. Its tail is skinny like a little dog’s tail instead of being connected to the hind legs or body by patagia. It has a little throat pouch that secretes strong-smelling oil. It also has a sort of pocket on either side of the body. Originally people thought that mother bats used these pouches to carry their babies, since hairless bats usually have two babies at a time. Instead, it turns out that mother bats leave their babies at home when they go out to hunt, and the pockets are used for something else. The pockets are formed by a fold of skin and the end of the wing fingers and membranes fit into them. The bat uses its hind feet to push the wings into the pockets, sort of like stuffing an umbrella into the little cover that it comes in when you first buy it. This allows the bat to run around on all fours without its wings getting in the way. Since most bats can’t walk on all fours at all, this is pretty amazing. Our other hairless animal today is the naked mole-rat, which is not a mole or a rat. It is a type of rodent but it’s more closely related to porcupines than to rats. It lives in tropical grasslands in parts of East Africa and spends almost its entire life underground. It lives in colonies of up to 300 individuals, and the colony’s tunnels and nesting burrows are extensive, often covering up to 3 miles, or 5 km. It eats roots of plants and the colony carefully only eats part of each root so that they don’t kill the plant. The roots continue to grow, providing the colony with lots of food. The naked mole-rat grows about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, although dominant females are larger. It has tiny eyes and doesn’t see very well, since most of the time it doesn’t need to see, and it has a chonky body but short, spindly legs. It pretty much has no hair except for whiskers and some tiny hairs between the toes, and its skin is so pale it’s almost translucent. It digs with its protruding front teeth, and these teeth are not in its mouth. They grow out through the skin and the animal’s mouth is actually behind the teeth. This way the mole-rat can dig without getting dirt in its mouth, but it sure looks weird to us. But that’s not even close to the weirdest thing about the naked mole-rat. We haven’t even scratched the surface of weirdness! The naked mole-rat lives underground in a part of the world where it’s always warm, and its tunnel system has no exits to the surface except for temporary exits when new tunnels are being excavated, because the dirt has to go somewhere. Its environment is so consistent in temperature that it