Strange Animals Podcast

In Episode 30, I admit a M I S T A K E, in that I did not realize Finland has a sizable moose population and so therefore assumed that although this thing looks like a moose, it must be a reindeer head. So because I made a M I S T A K E, the whole class is being punished by learning about reindeer and moose of Finland. Oh yeah, I’m back from my trip to Finland. I had a great time! Finnish forest reindeer: Barren-ground caribou: Finnish moose: Alaskan moose: Whee! Oh, here’s a link to information about my new book! More details coming next week. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This is the first episode I’ve put together since returning from Finland last week. I had a great time on my trip! WorldCon was amazing, I got to hang out with some good friends, and I had lots of positive feedback after the panel I was on. One day I went to a fun Viking-themed restaurant with my friends Emma and Dave (hi guys!), where I ordered reindeer. It was really good, and when I

This week we investigate a couple of famous lake monsters, Nessie and Champ. Don’t worry, there are more lake monster and sea monster episodes coming in the future! Most lake monster pictures look like this. Compelling! This was taken in Loch Ness: The famous Mansi photograph taken in Lake Champlain: Beluga whales are really easy to spot. Look, this one has a soccer ball! Further reading: Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in March, we released an episode about sea monsters. For a long time it was our second most downloaded show, behind the ivory-billed woodpecker, although the jellyfish and shark episodes have taken over the top spots lately. I always intended to follow up with an episode on lake monsters, so here it is. Let me just say going in that I think most lake monster sightings are not of unknown animals. On the other hand, I also firmly believe there are plenty of unknown animals in lakes—but they’re probably not very big, probably not all that exciting to the average person, and probably not deserving of the name monster. But who knows? I’d love to be proven wrong. Let’s take a look at what people are seeing out there. One of the biggest names in cryptids is Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. She and Bigfoot are the superstars of cryptozoology. But despite almost a century of close scrutiny of Loch Ness, we still have no proof she exists. Loch Ness is the biggest of a chain of long, narrow, steep-sided lakes and shallow rivers that cut Scotland right in two along a fault line. Loch Ness is 22 miles long with a maximum depth of 754 feet, the biggest lake in all of the UK, not just Scotland. It’s 50 feet above sea level and was carved out by glaciers. During the Pleistocene, Scotland was completely covered with ice half a mile deep until about 18,000 years ago. And before you ask, plesiosaurs disappeared from the fossil record 66 million years ago. Loch Ness isn’t a remote, hard to find place. All the lochs and their rivers have made up a busy shipping channel since the Caledonian Canal made them more navigable with a series of locks and canals in 1822, but the area around Loch Ness was well populated and busy for centuries before that. Loch Ness has long been a popular tourist destination, well before the Nessie sightings started. There have been stories of strange creatures in Loch Ness and all the lo

Hello from Finland! While I’m far from home, I’m thinking of animals of my native land. So join me to learn about crawdads (aka crayfish aka crawfish aka freshwater lobsters aka everything) and cicadas! A lovely blue crayfish from Indonesia Fite me The giant Tasmanian crayfish A periodical cicada. A cicada killer about to do horrible things to a cicada. Nature is disgusting. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. For this week’s episode, which I’m putting together right before I leave for Finland on a madcap two-week adventure—okay, two weeks staying in the city of Helsinki while attending a conference and eating a lot of pastries—I’m going to look at two invertebrates that live close to home. The first is the crawdad. I’ve always wondered if those muddy holes near creeks and streams that we call crawdad holes around here are actually crawdad holes. Sometimes they’re nowhere near water. So I looked it up. Yes, they are actually holes dug by crawdads. So that’s one mystery solved. The crawdad has a lot of different names depending on where you live: crayfish, crawfish, mountain lobsters, freshwater lobsters, mudbugs, and many other names. In Australia they may be called yabbies. There are a lot of species throughout the world, most of them in North America. Some also live in South America, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, Japan, and Europe. In fact, they live everywhere except Africa and Antarctica.

This week is our six-month anniversary! To celebrate, we’ll learn about some of the creatures that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench’s deepest section, Challenger Deep, as well as other animals who live in deep caves on land. We also learn what I will and will not do for a million dollars (hint: I will not implode in a bathysphere). A xenophyophore IN THE GRIP OF A ROBOT A snailfish from five miles down in the Mariana trench. The Hades centipede. It’s not as big as it looks, honest. The tiny but marvelous olm. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. For this week’s episode, we’re going to find out what lives in the deepest, darkest places of the earth—places humans have barely glimpsed. We’re not just talking deep sea, we’re talking the abyssal depths. Like onions and parfaits, the earth is made up of many layers. The core of the earth is a ball of nickel and iron surrounded by more nickel and iron. The outer core is molten metal, but the inner core, even though it’s even hotter than the outer core—as hot as the surface of the sun—has gone through the other side of liquid and is solid again. Surrounding the core, the earth’s mantle is a thick layer of rocks and minerals some 1900 miles deep, and on top of that is the crust of the earth, which doesn’t actually sound very appealing but that’s where we live and we know it’s really pretty, with trees and oceans and stuff on top of it. The upper part of the mantle is broken up into tectonic plates, which move around very slowly as the molten metals and rocks beneath them swirl around and get pushed up through cracks in the mantle. Under the oceans, the crust of the earth is only around 3 miles thick. And in a few places, there are crevices that actually break entirely through the crust into the mantle below. The deepest crack in the sea floor is the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. At its deepest part, a narrow valley called Challenger Deep, the crack extends sev

Part two of our humans episode is about a couple of our more distant cousins, the Flores little people (Homo floresiensis) and Homo naledi, with side trips to think about Rumpelstiltskin, trolls, and the Ebu gogo. Homo floresiensis skull compared to a human skull. We are bigheaded monsters in comparison. Also, we got chins. Homo naledi’s skull. I stole that picture from Wits University homepage because I really liked the quote and it turns out it’s too small really to read. Oh well. Some of our cousins. Homo erectus in the middle is our direct ancestor. So is Lucy, an Australopithecus, although she lived much longer ago.

This week is our first two-parter ever! I don’t intend to do that often but there was just too much to go over for one episode. This week we’ll talk about humans: where we come from, how we evolved, and who our closest cousins are–Neanderthals and Denisovans. Some young humans. Humans can do many surprising things, including surfing, making stained glass, and repairing helicopters. Most humans like the color blue and enjoy listening to music. The bracelet found with Denisovan bones in a Siberian cave. Humans didn’t make or wear this lovely thing, Denisovan people did. Further reading: How to Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge

This week’s episode is about two solved mysteries that aren’t exactly solved after all, the water owl and the devil bird! Let’s figure out what those two might really be! Cuvier’s Beaked Whale: A swordfish, swording everywhere it goes: Seems definitive: A possible culprit for the devil bird, the spot-bellied eagle owl: The brown wood owl. Nice hair, dude.

This week’s episode is about nonhuman musicians. It’s rarer than you’d think. The palm cockatoo. Nature’s drummer. In possibly related news, I know what my next tattoo is going to be. Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo. Members of the Thai Elephant Orchestra at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center.

Episode 22 is all about megatherium, the giant extinct ground sloth–and a little bit about glyptodon, the giant extinct…thing. Megatherium vs trees was basically no contest. Giant ground sloth FTW! Giant sloth big, yeah yeah yeah, it’s not small, no no no Glyptodon. Like a giant armadillo that can’t roll up and doesn’t need to. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. For this week’s episode, let’s learn about some Ice Age megafauna! But first, a quick note about my schedule. I’ll talk more about this in a few weeks, but in August I’m going to be in Helsinki, Finland for WorldCon 75. I don’t have the final schedule yet, but I am going to be on a panel about podcasting. If you’re going to WorldCon too, or if you’ll be in Helsinki the week of the convention or the week after, let me know so we can meet up! I’ll also be in Oslo, Norway for part of the day on August 7. I got a cheap flight to Helsinki because it has an 11-hour layover in Oslo, but to me that’s a bonus. Oslo has birds! Birds I’ve never seen before! So if you’re going to be in Oslo on August 7 and you’d like to meet me for a birding trip and/or lunch, definitely let me know! And don’t worry, I’ll schedule episodes ahead of time so you can continue to learn about strange animals even while I’m gone. Now, on to the megafauna. Until about five million years ago, South America was a big island continent the way Australia is today. As a result, many of the animals that evolved there at the time don’t look anything like animals in other parts of the world. The various species of giant ground sloth, such as Megatherium and Eremotherium, were South American mammals that lived from around 30 million years ago until only about 10,000 years ago—but we’ll come back to that in a minute. Those two species were huge—as big as African elephants. It was 20 feet long and stood more than 12 feet high on its hind legs. They liked woodlands and grasslands and ate plants. Megatherium had huge curved claws on its forefeet just like modern sloths, four claws that were a foot long each, and we know it walked on the sides of its paws as a result because we have some fossilized tracks. A ground sloth could walk on its hind legs, at least for short distances, and when feeding it spent a lot of its time reared up on its hind legs, helped to balance by its thick tail. It could reach branches some 20 feet off the ground that way. It hooked the branches down with its claws to eat the leaves. Around 5 million years ago, South America became connected to North America by the Central American Isthmus, which is volcanic in origin. Over the millennia, peaking around 3 million years ago, North American animals migrated south, and South American animals migrated north, called the Great American interchange. A lot of South American megafauna went extinct with the increased competition for resources, but nothing bothered the giant ground sloths. One medium-sized species, named Megalonyx by Thomas Jefferson, spread throughout North America as far north as Alaska. It was “only” about 10 feet long and weighed some 800 pounds, with three claws on its fo

Episode 21 is all about the Tatzelworm, a mysterious reptile from the Alps, and some of its mystery reptile friends from around the world! Bipes, a two-legged amphisbaenid from Mexico. A cute little skink. Big eyes, little legs. A handful of bigger baby skinks. OMG WANT A modest-sized monitor lizard in a tree.

We’ve reached the big two-oh! Episode 20 catches us up on listener suggestions. Crossover University podcast wants to know about geckos and Bearly Ready Broadcast wants to know about the shoe-billed stork! Your wish is my command! Also those are some neato animals. Behold the majestic shoebill! 12/10 would pet softly Pterodactyl-y Adorable crested gecko, aka eyelash gecko Alain Delcourt and stuffed giant gecko. I bet they both hate this picture. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have two more listener suggestions. The hosts of Crossover University suggested geckos as a topic because they have a leopard gecko named Lockheed, after the X-Men character, as their podcast mascot. The hosts of Barely Ready podcast want to hear about the shoe billed stork. I’m not sure if they have a pet shoebill as a mascot. Both are awesome fun pop culture podcasts. I’ll put links in the show notes so you can check them out. The shoebill is commonly called the shoe-billed stork. Originally researchers thought it was related to storks, but DNA analysis shows that it’s actually more closely related to pelicans. I was going to go into details of the confusion about where the bird fits in the avian family tree, but basically it’s just two groups of scientists shouting back and forth, “Storks!” and “Pelicans!” Probably not that interesting to most people. The shoebill is a big bird, four or even five feet high, mostly due to its long legs. Its wingspan can be almost nine feet. It lives in swampy areas in east central Africa and its toes are really long, which distributes its weight over a large surface so it can stand on floating vegetation without sinking even though it doesn’t have webs between its toes. Its feathers are slate gray and it has a little floofy tuft on the back of its head. But the most memorable part of its appearance is its bill. It’s a great big heavy bill with a hook on the end. It looks like the shoebill could kill crocodile

Thanks to Varmints! podcast for suggesting the dodo for this week’s topic. And thanks to Two Clams Gaming podcast for suggesting clams as this week’s topic. It’s two suggestions in one fun episode! Learn all about that most famous of extinct birds and all about a thing that tastes great deep-fried. (Well, okay, everything tastes great deep-fried. But you know what I mean.) The dodo: A giant clam and its algae pals: Stop, thief! Put that clam down! The disco clam looks as awesome as its name implies. It looks like a Muppet clam: Calyptogena magnifica hanging out around a hydrothermal vent: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re getting backed up on suggestions, so I’m going to combine two in one episode today even though they don’t really have anything to do with each other. The first suggestion is from the podcast Varmints, a super fun podcast about animals. They want to know about the dodo. After that, we’ll go on to learn about clams. Yes, clams! Totally not anything to do with dodos, but the hosts at Two Clams Gaming suggested it. That’s another fun podcast, this one about video games—which you may have guessed. I’ll have links to both podcasts in the show notes for you to check out. The dodo isn’t just extinct, it’s famously extinct. Dead as a dodo. That makes it difficult to research the dodo, too—type “dodo” into the search bar at Science Daily, for instance, and you get a ton of hits that have nothing to do with the actual dodo bird, like the article that says “Researchers believe they now know why the sup

This week’s episode is about a couple of mystery elephants and a non-mysterious animal, the tapir…but there might be some mystery associated with that little-trunked cutie too. The tapir and its weird snoot: The Moeritherium probably looked something like this: Some super cute Borneo elephants with super long tails: A baby tapir omgimgoingtodieofcuteomg Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re looking at some animals with snoots. Specifically, a couple of mysterious elephants, and the tapeer, which looks like what you might get if a pig and an elephant had a baby. Usually I start episodes with the facts about a known animal and finish up with a mystery, but this week we’re starting with a strange and mysterious animal called a water elephant. There’s only been one reported sighting of a water elephant and it’s not a recent one. In 1912, an article appeared in the Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society. It was written by R.J. Cuninghame but concerned a Mr. Le Peti. Now, before I go on to discuss the water elephant, let me just say that I have a great big problem with someone named M. Le Peti. No pun intended. Going by the name, and the secondhand nature of the account, and the fact that a lot of stories about strange African animals from this era are hoaxes of one variety or another, I’m taking this whole thing with a grain of salt. But it’s an interesting story, and if there really was a guy saddled with the name of little mister man, I can see why he spent a lot of time exploring the Congo instead of becoming a Shakespearian actor or something. Anyway, I was able to find the original article, which has been digitized. It’s quite short, so instead of paraphrasing it I’ll just read the whole thing. It’s from the July 1912 issue of the journal, volume two number four, pages 97 through 98. [read article] There is no known animal that precisely fits Le Petit’s description. The closest is possibly the tapeer. You can pronounce it taper if you want. It’s spelled T-A-P-I-R and no one seems to know how it’s supposed to be pronounced. Anyway, there are five species of tapir still around, four in Central and South America and one in Asia. While the different species vary in size and coloring, generally a tapir is about 3 feet high

We’re talking about Thunderbird this week and the huge North American birds that may have inspired Thunderbird’s physical description. Thanks to Desmon of the Not Historians podcast for this week’s topic suggestion! Further listening: While I was in the middle of researching this episode, Thinking Sideways did a whole episode on Washington’s Eagle. Further reading: “The Great Quake and the Great Drowning” “The Myth of 19th Century Pterodactyls” Depiction of Thunderbird on a Pacific Northwest totem pole A wandering albatross hanging out with a lot of lesser birds. Biggest wingspan in the world right here, folks! A California condor. #16, in fact. An adult bald eagle with a juvenile. Washington’s eagle as painted by James Audubon

If you look at this episode and think, “Oh, ho hum, think I’ll skip this one because snore, jellyfish,” you are so wrong! Jellies are fascinating, creepy, and often beautiful. Come learn all about our squishy friends in the sea! A Portuguese man o’war. Creepy as heck. A lion’s mane jelly. You do not want this guy on your ship. Incidentally, a lot of the photos you find of divers with enormous lion’s mane jellies are fakes that make the jellies look gigantic. The cosmic jelly, a deep-sea creature. The creepy Stygiomedusa gigantea, guardian of the underworld A newly discovered golden jelly. Further reading: Jelly Biologist (I’ve been enjoying browsing this site)