Strange Animals Podcast

This week we’re going to find out about the biggest turtles that ever lived! Spoiler: one of them is alive right now, swimming around eating jellyfish. A green sea turtle. These guys are adorable: A hawkbill glowing like a neon sign! The majestic and enormous leatherback: Bebe leatherback. LET ME GOW Seriously, how are baby sea turtles so darn cute? Archelon was a big tortle: Further reading: This is a link to a pdf of that “Historicity of Sea Turtles Misidentified as Sea Monsters” article Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re back in the sea, but not the deep sea this time, because we’re looking at marine turtles! The oldest known turtle ancestor lived around 220 million years ago, but it wouldn’t have looked a whole lot like a modern turtle. For one thing, it had teeth instead of a bill. It resembled a lizard with wide ribs that protected its belly. It lived in the ocean, probably in shallow inlets and bays, but it may have also spent part of its time on land. Some researchers think it may have had at least a partial shell formed

We’re going to learn about the colossal squid in this episode, with bonus info about the giant squid…and then we’re going to learn about the massive things that eat this massive squid! A giant squid, looking slightly guilty for eating another squid: A colossal squid, looking less than impressive tbh: THAT EYEBALL: A sperm whale looking baddass: A southern sleeper shark, looking kind of boring: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn first about the colossal squid, and then we’re going to learn about what eats the colossal squid. You’ve probably heard of the giant squid, but maybe you haven’t. Let’s start with it, because the giant squid and the colossal squid are both massive, amazing deep-sea animals. Stories of huge squid go back to ancient times. Aristotle and Pliny wrote about it, the legend of the kraken may be at least partially inspired by it, and sailors have told stories about it for time out of mind. Naturalists of the mid-19th century knew it must exist because whalers had found enormously long tentacles and huge beaks in sperm whale stomachs. But except for the occasional badly damaged specimen washed up on shore, no one had seen a giant squid. Certainly no one had seen a living giant squid. It wasn’t until 2001 that a live giant squid was caught on film, and then it was only a larval squid. In 2002 a live adult giant squid was caught off the coast of Japan. It wasn’t especially big, just 13 feet l

This week we’re learning about some out-of-place marsupials, from phantom kangaroos to colonies of wallabies living in places like England and Hawaii. Thanks to Richard E. for the suggestion! A Bennett’s wallaby and a red kangaroo: George Stubbs’s kangaroo painting: The controversial maybe-it’s-a-kangaroo engraving from 1593 (detail to the right). For more information, this is a great article. You can find the 2013 video of a kangaroo in an Oklahoma cowfield here. It’s definitely a kangaroo, too. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We started 2018 with a couple of episodes about out of place animals. I meant to make that a regular feature this year, but I keep getting distracted. Imagine that. This week I was going to revisit out of place animals in general, with lots of excellent suggestions from Richard E. But the second I started researching some populations of wallabies in places far outside of their usual home, I got sucked into the strange world of phantom kangaroos. Reports of so-called phantom kangaroos are something between an urban legend and a genuine cryptozoological mystery. The problem with the earliest accounts is that they’re impossible to verify as real reports. Newspapers from earlier than about the 1920s would sometimes play fast and loose with reality in order to sell papers or just fill space. I suspect that at the time, most people reading the papers understood that these sorts of accounts were just fun nonsense, but we don’t have the same frame of reference to interpret them properly today. A hundred years from now scholars are going to be reading memes from 2018 and taking them at face value because they don’t understand most of the pop culture references. But let’s dig into some of these phantom kangaroo reports and see what we can find out. The first report of a phantom kangaroo is usually listed as one from 1899 in Wisconsin. The story goes that on June 12 of that year, a woman in New Richmond reported seeing a kangaroo run through her neighbor’s yard. Some accounts say it was her yard, and some reports say it happened during a storm. Some reports also mention that a circus was in the

It’s been too long since we discussed whales, so this week let’s learn about how whales evolved and some especially strange or mysterious whales! Pakicetus was probably kind of piggy-looking, but with a crocodile snout: Protocetids were more actually whale-like but still not all that whale-like: Now we’re getting whaley! Here’s basilosaurus, with a dinosaur name because the guy who found it thought it was a reptile: Here’s the skull of a male strap-toothed whale (left). Those flat strips are the teeth: Another view. See how the teeth grow up from the lower jaw and around the upper jaw? A dead pygmy right whale: The walrus whale may have looked sort of like this: The half-beak porpoise had a chin that just would not quit:

Not-Elephants! They’re like elephants but WEIRD! Let’s take a look at a lot of extinct proboscidea this week. Oh, and the Casual Birder Podcast episode where I talk about indigo buntings should be released this week, not last week. Oops. Gomphotheres, looking deceptively normal at first glance: THEIR FACES AAAHHHH art by Pedro Toledo: Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon, art also by Pedro Toledo. Note the spiral on Cuvieronius’s tusks: Stegodon: Deinotherium, just going totally weird with the tusks and chin: It might have looked a little something like this when alive. What the actual heck: Anancidae tusks were just out of control:

This week we’ll learn about birds that are mysterious in one way or another. If you need more bird knowledge, check out the awesome Casual Birder Podcast, especially this week’s episode with a guest spot by me about indigo buntings! Lots of pictures for this one, hoo boy. The Nechisar nightjar wing. It’s all we’ve got: Junkin’s warbler, a mystery bird whose identity was solved by SCIENCE: The lovely blue-eyed ground dove: The two tapestries depicting a mystery bird: Close-ups of the mystery bird from the tapestries: A black grouse, that may have inspired the tapestry birds: A wandering albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any living bird known and will CURSE YOU: The bee hummingbird, s

This week let’s find out a little something about the Cambrian explosion, where the relatively simple and tiny life on earth suddenly proliferated and grew much larger…and definitely stranger. The Burgess shale area: beautiful AND full of fascinating fossils: Anomalocaris, pre-we-figured-out-what-these-things-are: What anomalocaris probably actually looked like, plus a couple of the “headless shrimp” fossils: More “headless shrimp” fossils because for some reason I find them hilarious: Marrella. Tiny, weird, looks sort of like those creepy house centipedes that freak me out so much, but with horns: Hallucigenia, long-time mystery fossil: What hallucingenia probably looked like, maybe: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your hos

It’s time to look at two more supposedly mysterious, supposedly identified animals off those “Ten Cryptozoological Animals That Have Been FOUND Please Click Please Click” articles. First is the dingiso, or bondegezou, which is just about as adorable as an animal can get: Next is the Hoan Kiem Turtle: Dat FACE Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re revisiting those “top ten cryptozoological animals found to be real!” clickbait articles that pop up online sometimes. In episode 24 we looked at two animals frequently found on those lists, so let’s examine two more today. We’ll start in Papua New Guinea, a country that gets mentioned a lot on this podcast. I was curious, so I looked it up and now I’ve learned some geography that I desperately needed to know. Papua New Guinea is a country in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. Only Greenland is a bigger island than New Guinea, so we’re not talking a dinky little islet like the ones where cartoon shipwreck survivors end up. New Guinea has a huge mountain range, rainforests, wetlands, savannahs, coral reefs, and pretty much everything else an animal could want. More species live on New Guinea than in all of Australia. More species live on New Guinea than in all of the United States. More species live on New Guinea than in Australia and the United States combined. So it’s not surprising that new species are found there all the time. People live on the island too, of course, and have for at least 40,000 years, probably much longer. People have lived on the island for so long, in fact, that something like 1,000 different languages are spoken there among the various tribes. The first animal we’re going to learn about today was known to the Moni tribe long before any scientists got wind of it. The Moni people live in the remote mountainous rainforests of Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t find much information about the Moni except through Christian missionary sites, so as far as I can tell their culture was never studied before it started being influenced by outside groups. But one thing we do know is that the Moni are familiar with a black and white animal called the dingiso, or bondegezou, which holds the spirit of an ancestor. When one is encountered, it will sit up, whistle, and raise a paw in greeting. No one outside of the Moni tribe paid any attention to this story until the 1980s, when someone sent a photograph of a dingiso to Tim Flannery, an Australian zoologist. He recognized it as a youn

Finally, it’s the follow-up to our first sea monsters episode that sounds so terrible now that I know how to put a podcast together! Here’s the published drawings of a strange animal seen from the HMS Daedalus: Here’s Drummond’s sketch of what he saw: Here’s a sketch of the HMS Plumper animal sighted: And here’s a sei whale rostrum sticking up out of the water while it’s skim feeding: Sei whales are neat and have gigantic mouths:   The rotten “sea serpent” that’s actually a decomposing baleen whale: The Naden Harbour Carcass. It’s the black thing on the table with a white backdrop. It doesn’t look like much, but you probably wouldn’t look like much either after being eaten by a sperm whale:

Thanks to Damian, who suggested T. rex as a topic! Let’s learn all about the T. rex and especially the most famous and controversial specimen ever found, Sue. A T. rex: Sue, also a T. rex: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Our topic this week is a suggestion from Damian, who wants to hear about the one, the only, the tyrant lizard king with massive everything except arms, Tyrannosaurus rex. Aw yeah You probably know a lot about T. rex without realizing it. It’s THE dinosaur, the one people think of first when you say dinosaur. But a lot of popular knowledge about the T. rex is actually out of date, so let’s find out what’s really going on with that big toothy theropod. First of all, T. rex did not live in the Jurassic period. It lived much later, in the late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago. But I guess Late Cretaceous Park doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. It was one of the last non-avian dinosaurs, dying off in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. It lived in what is now western North America, with close relatives in many other parts of the world. T. rex was a big animal, no doubt about it. The biggest individual we know of, called Sue, stood around 12 feet tall, or a little over 3 ½ meters at the hips. The weight of its massive head was balanced by its long tail. Nose to tail it was around 40 feet long, or about 12 meters. Plenty of other dinosaurs were bigger than T. rex, but T. rex was the biggest land predator we know of. While T. rex had long legs, its arms are famously teeny, only about three feet long, or one meter. That’s barely longer than an adult human’s arm. But recent research shows that the arms weren’t weak. The bones were strong and so were the muscles, although the arm had a limited range of motion and only two toes. Many researchers think T rex used its arms to hold onto struggling prey. Since all we have are fossils, we don’t really know what T. rex looked like beyond its bones and muscles, which we know about from study of muscle attachment sites on the bones. Some researchers think it probably had at least some feathers, since we have feather impressions from some of T rex’s close relations. Baby T rex might have had feathers and shed them as it grew up, or it might have had feathers its whole life. We have fossilized skin impressions from a specimen found in 2002 that show scales on the tail, neck, and hip, so many researchers suggest that T rex only had feathers on its head and back, possibly for decoration or protection from the elements. Closely related species show feather impressions over all of the body, so we know T rex’s cousins were feathered. We also know that T rex had large flat scales on its snout with patches of keratin in the middle, which probably contained sensory bundles. These same patches are present in crocodilians, which help crocs move t

We’re not looking at just any old insectivores in this episode, we’re looking at the big three of ant-eating mammals: the giant anteater, the aardvark, and the pangolin! A giant anteater and baby: Teeny anteater mouth alert! Also long tongue: An aardvark walking with style: An aardvark. Look at that tongue! And those claws! An Indian pangolin. Please do not eat: A pangolin ball. Please do not kick: Save the Pangolins organization Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about the anteater, the aardvark, and the pangolin, all of them specialized eaters of ants. Are they related? How do we tell them apart? The anteater is a South and Central American animal related to sloths and, more distantly, armadillos. The aardvark is an African animal related to several rodent-like animals including the golden mole, which is not a mole, and the elephant shrew, which is neither an elephant nor a shrew. Although, as it happens, the elephant shrew is actually related to the elephant. So is the aardvark, although these connections are pretty darn distant. The pangolin is an Asian and African animal that’s not very closely related to anything. Let’s start with the giant anteater. The giant anteater can grow over seven feet long if you include the tail, or more than 2 meters. It’s brown and gray with markings that look like go-faster stripes. Its head is small and elongated. You know how a cartoon character can cram its head into a bottle and its head stays bottle-shaped? It kind of looks like the giant anteater did that. Its snout is shaped like a tube, with nostrils and a tiny mouth at the end. It can’t open its jaws very far. It has a short upright mane along its spine all the way down its back, which blends with its bushy tail. Its tail is so awesomely furry that when an anteater sleeps, it covers its body with its tail like a blanket. Anteaters eat ants, although they also love termites and will eat other small insects and insect larvae. The giant anteater uses its massive front claws to dig into anthills. Then it flicks its tongue really fast, catching insects with a combination of tiny hooklets on the tongue and sticky saliva. An anteater’s tongue is over two feet long

It’s update week! I call myself out for some mistakes, then catch us all up on new information about topics we’ve covered in the past. Then we’ll learn about the Nandi bear, a mystery animal that is probably not actually a bear. Check out Finn and Lila’s Natural History and Horse Podcast on Podbean! Check out the Zeng This! pop culture podcast while you’re at it! A new species of Bird of Paradise: Buša cattle: Further reading/watching: http://www.sci-news.com/biology/vogelkop-superb-bird-of-paradise-05924.html Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to dig into some updates to previous episodes! Don’t worry, it’ll be interesting. We’re also going to look at a mystery animal we haven’t examined before. First, though, a big shout-out to Sir Finn Hayes, a long-time listener who has started his own podcast! It’s called Finn’s Natural History, although now I see it’s been renamed Finn and Lila’s Natural History and Horse Podcast, and you can find it on Podbean. I’ll put a link in the show notes. The great thing is, Finn is just ten years old but he and his younger sister Lila are already dropping knowledge on us about animals and plants and other things they find interesting. So give their podcast a listen because I bet you’ll like it as much as I do. Before we get into the updates, let me call myself out on a few glaring mistakes in past episodes. In episode four, I called my own podcast by the wrong name. Instead of Strange Animals, I said Strange Beasties, which is my Twitter handle. In episode 29, I said Loch Ness was 50 miles above sea level instead of 50 feet, a pretty big difference. In episode 15 I called Zenger of the Zeng This! podcast Zengus, which is just unforgiveable because I really like that podcast and you’d think I could remember the cohost’s name. There’s a link to the Zeng This! podcast in the show notes. It’s a family-friendly, cheerful show about comics, movies, video games, and lots of other fun pop culture stuff. If you ever hear me state something in the podcast that you know isn’t true, definitely let me know. I’ll look into it and issue a correction when appropriate. As they say on the Varmints Podcast, I am not an animal expert. I do my best, but sometimes I get things wrong. For instance, in episode 60, I said sirenians like dugongs and manatees have tails in place of hind legs like seals do, but sirenian tails actually developed from tails, not hind legs. Pinniped tails developed from hind legs and have flipper-like feet. Anyway, here are some updates to topics we’ve covered in past episodes. It isn’t all-inclusive, mostly just stuff I’ve stumbled across while researching other animals. In episode 47 about strange horses, I talked a lot about Przewalski’s horse. I was really hoping never to

This week we’re learning about the hammerhead worm and the ichthyosaur, two animals that really could hardly be more different from each other. Thanks to Tania for the hammerhead worm suggestion! They are so beautifully disgusting! Make sure to check out the podcast Animals to the Max this week (and always), for an interview with yours truly. Listen to me babble semi-coherently about cryptozoology and animals real and maybe not real! Here are hammerhead worms of various species. Feast your eyes on their majesty! An ichthyosaur: More ichthyosaurs. Just call me DJ Mixosaurus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re looking at a couple of animals that hav

It’s badger week at Strange Animals Podcast, thanks to a suggestion by Richard E.! I knew the honey badger was something special, but I had no idea how special. And by “special” I mean “terrifying.” Shout-out to Turn of Phrases podcast just because I love it so much. It’s a short, family friendly podcast that explains the weird idioms we say without thinking about them. A honey badger. Look at that adorable snarl! A wolverine and its TEETH: An American badger: A European badger: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I’ve been getting a bunch of great topic suggestions and I’m falling behind on addressing them, so this week I was going to cover two or three suggestions in one big episode. I started with the honey badger, though, and soon I realized this animal and some of its close relations deserved an episode to themselves. The honey badger was suggested by Richard, who has also sent lots of other great topic suggestions I’m working on. That’s not my brother Richard, it’s a different Richard. Hello to both of you. The honey badger sounds like it should be a cuddly Pooh-bear kind of animal that gets its hand stuck in the honey jar and its friends have to help free it. In fact, the honey badger is a terrifyingly dangerous animal that’s related to other badgers, as well as to weasels, wolverines, and otters, although not closely. One interesting thing I just found out: the European badger is not all that closely related to the American badger. In fact, the American and European badgers are about as closely related to each other as they are to the honey badger. The European badger is more closely related to the wolverine than it is the American badger and the honey badger. We’ll look at all these animals this week. The honey badger has short legs, a broad body, a flattish head with a stubby nose, small ears and eyes, a medium-length tail, and strong claws. That’s the same rough description of the wolverine and the European and American badgers too. Its fur is black with a broad pale gray or white stripe from t

This week we’re going to find out some surprising possible inspirations for the qilin, sometimes called the kirin or the Chinese unicorn, and the phoenix! Strap in, kids. We’re going to do history! A qilin A giraffe My beautiful art of tsaidamotherium, both subspecies, with their weird horns: A saiga antelope A takin A bird of paradise: Another bird of paradise: Further reading: Dale Drinnon’s Frontiers of Zoology about the qilin An online Bestiary. This is where I got the quotes from Herodotus. The Book of Beasts, trans. T.H. White