Strange Animals Podcast

This week we’re going to learn about all sorts of animals first described by Georg Wilhelm Steller in the mid-18th century and named after him, from the common Steller’s jay to the mysterious Steller’s sea ape. Steller’s jay. It looks like someone photoshopped a frowny line over its eye:   A male Steller’s eider in breeding plumage, looking spiffy: Steller’s sea eagle will MESS YOU UP: Steller’s sea lions. Looks like the cover of their latest album: A drawing of a Steller’s sea cow, one of the only drawings that was probably made from an actual animal before it went extinct: An alive dugong, just to show you what Steller’s sea cow probably looked like, only bigger and fatter because it lived in colder water: A Northern fur seal not taking any of your crap:

This week we’re going to learn about some more big cats, especially the mysterious onza of Mexico and the yemish of Patagonia. And you should totally check out the charming podcast Cool Facts about Animals. A jaguar: A jaguarundi: A puma, not dead: The Rodriguez onza, dead: A giant otter: Further reading: The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker Monsters of Patagonia by Austin Whittall Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about a couple of mystery cats that you might not have heard of, and learn about a few non-mystery animals along the way. There are several cats native to Mexico. We’ve talked about the puma recently, in episode 52. It’s the same cat that’s also called the cougar or mountain lion, and it lives throughout most of the Americas. It’s tawny or brownish in color with few markings beyond dark and white areas on the face, and sometimes faint tail rings and mottled spots on the legs. The jaguar is a spotted cat related to lions, tigers, leopards, and other big cats. It lives throughout much of Central and South America, and in North America as far north as Mexico, and was once common in the southwestern United States too but was hunted to extinction there. It prefers tropical forests and swamps, likes to swim, and is relatively stocky with a shorter tail than its relatives. Its background color is tawny or brownish with a white belly, and its spots, called rosettes, are darker. But melanistic jaguars aren’t especially uncommon. They look all bl

Join us this week to learn about the aurochs, the gaur, some mystery cattle of Patagonia, a farting monster cow, and a ghost cow that turned out to be not so ghostly! The aurochs: An aurochs skull: A gaur. Holy cow (heh) those things are enormous! A heck cow: The bonnacon, famous for stink. I love how this one looks awfully embarrassed: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re going to learn about some unusual cattle this week. You may not think cows are very interesting, but I think I can change your mind. We’ll start with the aurochs, also sometimes called the urus. It was the wild ancestor of domestic cattle and also ancestor of the European bison. The European bison is still around and is sometimes called the wisent, but the aurochs is extinct. The aurochs was a type of Ice Age megafauna. A big bull aurochs could stand almost six feet tall at the shoulder, or 180 cm, and some researchers estimate it could weigh as much as 3,300 lbs, or 1500 kg. Both cows and bulls grew horns. In shape the aurochs looked roughly like modern cattle, but the legs were longer, it was overall more muscular, and cows had small udders that weren’t especially visible. From cave paintings of aurochs, we know that calves were born reddish-brown with a lighter muzzle, but as they grew older, the bull calves became either dark brown or black, with a white stripe along the spine called an eel stripe. The aurochs was strong, fast, and could be very dangerous. Bulls sometimes killed each other when fighting, and they were famously ferocious when hunted. Sometime between the 3rd and 1st

Let’s learn about horseshoe crabs and cone snails! The former is harmless, the latter is deadly. Both are interesting! This episode’s animals are inspired by the podcast Animals to the Max and by the book Strange Survivors by Dr. Oné R. Pagán. Check both out because they are awesome! A horseshoe crab will never hurt you and just wants to be left alone to be a horseshoe crab: A trilobite fossil: A cone snail just wants to be left alone to be a cone snail but it will kill you if it has to: Above: the stripey tube thing is the snail’s siphon, the pink tube thing is the snail’s proboscis, or VENOM DUCT. The Glory of the Sea has a pretty shell: More cone snail shells: The rarest seashell in the world: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to look at animals inspired by a book I recently read and a podcast I recently discovered. The podcast is called Animals to the Max, and it’s one of several new animal podcasts that I

This week we’re going to learn about some strange snakes. Snakes in the air! Snakes in the water! Snakes on a pla–NO I am not going there Thanks to sirfinnhayes and Mackin for the topic suggestions! Mackin is host of the podcast Species, which you should listen to. A golden tree snake: A snake flying, or rather gliding with style: Northern water snake (left) and water moccasin (right). Note the head and neck differences:   The yellow sea snake (Hydrophis spiralis): Belcher’s sea snake. Have I mentioned how much I love stripey animals? I do love them, I do: Horned viper. Do not step:

Let’s learn about the LUNGFISH, which deserves capital letters because they’re fascinating and this episode took so flipping long to research! Mysteries abound! The lovely marbled lungfish from Africa: The South American lungfish: The Australian lungfish CHECK OUT THOSE GAMS: Another Australian lungfish: Further Reading: The Hunt for the Buru by Ralph Izzard Show Transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s episode is about the lungfish, and I’m going in depth about some mystery lungfish later in the episode. So don’t give up on me if you think freshwater fish are boring. Lungfish are unusual since they are fish but have lungs and can breathe air. Some fish species can get by for a short time gulping air into a modified swim bladder when water is oxygen poor, but the lungfish has real actual lungs that are more mammal-like than anything found in other fish. The ancestors of lungfish, which developed during the Devonian period nearly 400 million years ago, may have been the ancestors of modern amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is still a controversial finding, but a 2017 molecular phylogenetic study identified lungfish as the closest living relatives of land animals. Africa has four species of lungfish, from the smallest, the gilled African lungfish that only grows around 17 inches long, or about 44 cm, to the largest, the marbled lungfish, which can grow more than six and a half feet long, or two meters. They all resemble eels, with long bodies and four thin, almost thread-like fins. They mostly eat crustaceans, molluscs, and insect larvae. The adults have small gills but breathe air through their lungs exclusively. The South American lungfish is in a separate family from the African lungfishes, but it’s very similar in most respects. It can grow over four feet long, or 125 cm, and looks like an eel at first glance.

This week we’re going to learn about animals that can regenerate parts of their body. What animals can do it, how does it work, and can humans figure out how to make it work for us too? Thanks to Maxwell of the awesome Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast for suggesting this week’s topic! The planarian, not exciting to look at but you can get a lot of them easily: A starfish leg growing a new starfish, or possibly a slightly gross magic wand. Ping! You’ve been turned into a magical starfish: The adorable axolotl: The almost as adorable African spiny mouse: A hydra. Not really very adorable except possibly to other hydras but kind of pretty: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s episode was going to be about lungfish, but I had to postpone it because I ran across some conflicting information about a mystery lungfish, which required me to order a book that probably won’t arrive for a week or two. So when I tweeted about needing a new topic quick, Maxwell of the Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast suggested animals that can regenerate parts of their bodies. We’ve touched on regenerative abilities before in one or two episodes. Some lizards can drop their tail if threatened, which then regrows later—but a lizard can only do that once. The fish-scaled gecko from episode 20 can lose its scales and regenerate them repeatedly. But other animals can regenerate not just bits and pieces, but entire organs and even their brains. The sea lamprey can even regenerate spinal cord cells. You better believe researchers are trying to figure out how regeneration works and if it can be adapted for human application. A lot of worms can regenerate lost pi

It’s our one-year anniversary! To celebrate, I’ve opened up a Patreon bonus episode for anyone to listen to. Just click the link below and you can listen in your browser: bonus episode – Salty Animals This week’s episode is about dragons, specifically dragons of western/English-speaking tradition. Even narrowing it down like that leaves us with a lot of ground to cover! Thanks to Emily whose suggestion of the Komodo dragon as a topic started this whole ball rolling. A dragon from the game Flight Rising, specifically one of MY dragons. Her name is Lily. She’s so pretty. A spitting cobra: A Nile crocodile: Deinosuchus skeleton and two humans for scale. I stole this off the internet as usual so I don’t know who the people are. They look pretty happy to be in the picture: St. George and the Dragon (REENACTMENT): Klagenfurt dragon statue:

Here’s another in the 2018 series of out-of-place animals, this time ABCs–alien big cats: big cats where there shouldn’t be any big cats. Like the British Isles, where no one should find a lynx or puma wandering around these days. But not only do people see big cats in Britain, they sometimes catch or kill them too. The Eurasian lynx: The European wildcat: The puma: A photo of the Beast of Bodmin Moor: Mr. Tinkler’s unexpected serval: The Kellas cat: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s episode is about some more out of place animals, but a specific type. There are so many reports of big cats in places where big cats should not be, especially black panthers, that cryptozoologists have a term for them: ABCs, or Alien Big Cats. Thanks again to Maureen for the topic suggestion! There are whole books written about ABCs, so I won’t be able to do more than touch on the highlights in this episode. Big cat reports from Great Britain are especially common, so that’s what I’ll focus on this time. Many reports of black panthers turn out to be large domestic cats seen at a distance, where tricks of perspective and poor light contribute to the cat looking much bigger than it really is. Some big cat reports turn out to be real animals that escaped from captivity, but other reports are not so easy to explain away. The British Isles only fully separated from mainland Europe about 8,000 years ago as the land rose due to isostatic

This week’s episode is about the Carolina parakeet, a cheerful, pretty bird that was once common in the central and eastern United States but which has been extinct for a century. Thanks to Maureen for the suggestion! I’ve paired it with the elephant bird, a gigantic extinct bird that we don’t know much about except for its enormous eggs. The Carolina parakeet, deceased: An ex-parrot next to an ex-passenger pigeon: A still from the 1937? Nelson video: The 2014 mystery parakeet photo: An elephant bird, an elephant bird egg, and Sir David Attenborough (right): Further Reading/Watching: Here’s a close evaluation of the Nelson video taken in the late 1930s, supposedly in the Okefenokee Swamp. I can’t get the Nelson video to embed properly, so here’s a link to it. You’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page for a decent-sized version that will play. Show transcript:   Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s episode is about two birds, one small and one really big, and both extinct. Probably. First, let’s learn about the Carolina parakeet, a suggestion by listener Maureen. It was a type of small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States, as far west as Nebraska and parts of Colorado and as far north as New York, and as far south as Florida and around the Gulf of Mexico. It had a yellow and orange head

We’re discovering which animals are the tallest this week! This episode includes our first dinosaur! Sauroposeidon proteles: Giraffes: Bop bop bop have at thee! Paraceratherium (I couldn’t find one that I liked so I drew one, along with a giraffe and ostrich to scale): Ostrich running: I SAID DON’T @ ME A fine day at the ostrich races. I could not make this stuff up if I tried:

This week’s episode is about some interesting eels, including the Brantevik eel. A European eel: A leptocephalus, aka an eel larva: A moray eel. It has those jaws you can see and another set of jaws in its throat: Episode transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week, we’re going to learn about the Brantevik eel and some other eels, including an eel mystery. The Brantevik eel is an individual European eel, not a separate species. Its friends knew it as Åle, which I’ve probably misprounounced, so I’m nicknaming it Ollie. So what’s so interesting about Ollie the eel? First, let’s learn a little bit about the European eel in general to give some background. It’s endangered these days due to overfishing, pollution, and other factors, but it used to be incredibly common. It lives throughout Europe, from the Mediterranean to Iceland, and has been a popular food for centuries. The European eel hatches in the ocean into a larval stage that looks sort of like a transparent flat tadpole, shaped roughly like a leaf. Over the next six months to three years, the larvae swim through the ocean currents, closer and closer to Europe, feeding on microscopic jellyfish and plankton. Toward the end of this journey, they grow into their next phase, where they resemble eels instead of tadpoles, but are mostly transparent. They’re called glass eels at this point. The glass eels make their way into rivers and other estuaries and slowly migrate upstream. Once a glass eel is in a good environment it metamorphoses again into an elver, which is basically a small eel. As it grows it gains more pigment until it’s called a yellow eel. Over the next decade or two it grows and matures, until it reaches its adult length—anywhere from two to five feet, or 60 cm to 1.5 meters. When it’s fully mature, its belly turns white and its sides silver, which is why it’s called a silver eel at this stage. Silver eels migrate more than 4,000 miles, or 6500 km, back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, lay eggs, and die. One interesting thing about the European eel is that during a lot of its life, it has no gender. Its gender is determined only when it grows into a yellow eel, and then it’s mostly determined by environmental factors, not genetics. Until the late 19th century, everyone thought these different stages—larva, glass eel, elver, yellow eel, and silver eel—were all separate animals. No one knew how or even if eels reproduced. The ancie

Happy New Year! Let’s learn about a few animals that have shown up in places where they just shouldn’t be. How did they get there, and why? Sometimes we know, sometimes it remains a mystery. Some of Pablo Escobar’s hippos: King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur who was discovered almost frozen to death in London: A little alligator captured in a koi pond. In Maryland. Which is not where gators live: A monk parakeet eating pizza in Brooklyn, because of course it is: How did these beavers get into a Devon river? They’re not telling: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Happy new year! Let’s ring in the new year with some out-of-place animals. Sometimes an animal shows up in a place where it just shouldn’t be, and while the animal itself isn’t a mystery, how it got there is. In this episode we’ll chase down the solutions to a few of these mysteries, and ponder a few others we can’t solve. We’ll start with some hippos that aren’t hanging out in Africa where they belong, but are living in Columbia, South America. In this case, we do know what happened. Back in the 1980s, a guy named Pablo Escobar had a private zoo that contained four hippos, along with other animals. Escobar was not a nice person. He was a drug lord who grew obscenely rich from selling cocaine and killing anyone who didn’t agree with him. In 1993 the police raided his estate and Escobar was killed in a shoot-out. The government took over the estate and turned it into a park, and most of the animals were given to zoos. But the hippos stayed. The estate had a lake that they lived in, and they weren’t hurting anything. But after a few decades, the four hippos turned into forty. The

It’s the last episode of 2017 and we’re going out in style, learning about some unusual horses! A Przewalski’s horse PHOTO TAKEN BY ME AT HELSINKI ZOO I cropped out as many poops as I could: A Heck horse, also sometimes called a tarpan. Photo taken by *squints* Klaus Rudloff in Berlin: A Moyle breed horse with a bossed forehead: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an animal I’ve been bonkers crazy about since I was a kid, the horse. But not just regular horses. We’re going to learn about some strange and little-known horses, the best kind of all. All domestic horses are the same subspecies, Equus ferus caballus, even though the various breeds may look very different. Even mustangs and other populations of wild horses—more properly called feral horses—are the same subspecies. Feral just means a domestic animal that lives like a wild animal, like a stray dog. Only one truly wild horse remains these days, Przewalski’s [pzha-VALski’s] horse, Equus ferus przewalskii. I’ve been pronouncing it Perzwalski’s horse my whole life until today. So let’s start the episode by talking about that one. Przewalski’s horse is native to the steppes of central Asia, especially Mongolia. It’s currently considered a subspecies of horse, but some researchers think it should be its own species. It went extinct in the wild in 1969. Fortunately, in 1900 15 of the horses had been captured and sold to various zoos. Some of the pairs reproduced, but by 1945, only 13 of the descendants remained. Of those 13, two were hybrids, one of them with a domestic horse, one of them with a tarpan. More about tarpans in a minute. Nine of the 13 were used in a careful breeding program, which was so successful that by 1992, Przewalski’s horse started to be reintroduced to the wild. I’ve seen Przewalski’s horses, by the way. They had some in the Helsinki Zoo. Check the show notes for a picture taken by me and not swiped by me off the internet. Przewalski’s horse is stockier than domestic horses, dun in color with a pale belly, with a short, erect mane. The legs are frequently faintly striped. The average horse stands about 13 hands high at the withers, which is the shoulder hump, or four feet four inches, or 132 cm. Its social structure is pretty much the same as the domestic horse’s. It lives in bands consisting of a group of mares and their young, and a stallion that leads the band t

There’s more in Loch Ness than one big mystery animal. This week we look at a few smaller mystery animals lurking in the cold depths of the lake. Further reading: Here’s Nessie: A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness by Karl P.N. Shuker The goliath frog: The Wels catfish (also, River Monsters is the best): An amphipod: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in episode 29, I dismissed Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, as probably not a real animal. But this week we’re heading back to Loch Ness to see what other monsters might lurk in its murky depths. WHAAAAA? Other Loch Ness monsters??? Yes, really! See, ever since the first sightings of Nessie in the 1930s, Loch Ness has been studied and examined so closely that it would be more surprising if no one had ever spotted other mystery animals. The source of most of the information in this episode is from zoologist Karl Shuker’s book Here’s Nessie! A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness. Check the show notes for a link if you’re interested in buying your own copy of the book. Our first non-Nessie mystery dates from 1934, but it happened, supposedly, sometime in the 1880s. It appeared in the Northern Chronicle, an Inverness newspaper, on January 31, 1934. The article relates that a ship in Loch Ness hit a submerged reef called Johnnie’s Point and sank one night. Luckily no one died. The next day a local diving expert named Duncan Macdonald was hired to determine if the wreck could be raised, but he couldn’t spot the wreck during his dive. Later that evening, some of the ship’s crew who had heard stories about strange creatures living in Loch Ness asked Macdonald whether he’d seen anything unusual. After some urging, Macdonald finally admitted that he had seen a frog-like creature the size of a good-sized goat sitting on a rock ledge some 30 feet, or 9 meters, underwater. It didn’t bother him so he didn’t bother it. There are a lot of problems with this account, of course. For one thing, we don’t know who wrote it—the article has no byline. It’s also a secondhand account. In fact, the article ends with this line: quote “The story, exactly as given, was told by Mr Do