Summary: <p>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.</p> <p>First is the dingiso, or bondegezou, which is just about as adorable as an animal can get:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-626" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/dingiso-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300"></p> <p>Next is the Hoan Kiem Turtle:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-627" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Turtle-Hoan-Kiem-Lake-300x186.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="186"></p> <p>Dat FACE</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-628" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2-Hoan-Kiem-Turtle-300x198.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="198"></p> <p><strong>Show transcript:</strong></p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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</p>
