Strange Animals Podcast

Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Life arose in the oceans and only much later spread to the land. But some land animals returned to the ocean and eventually became fully marine animals. That’s our topic this month, animals that returned to the sea. Vertebrates that evolved on land are called tetrapods, meaning four-footed. It applies even to animals like birds that have two legs and two wings, and snakes that have no legs, because all the ancestors of tetrapods had four legs. Returning to marine life as a tetrapod eventually results in an animal developing certain characteristics. Even animals like sea turtles become more streamlined, which helps the animal swim more easily, and arms and legs develop into flippers for the same reason. Sometimes limbs are lost completely, like the rear legs of cetaceans and sirenians, because they’re not needed. One interesting note is that as far as we know, all marine tetrapods still have to breathe air, which requires them to come to the surface of the water periodically. The ancestors of marine tetrapods probably all started out as partially aquatic and gradually became more and more at home in the water. That’s true even for animals as well adapted to marine life as whales. Some of the earliest whale ancestors were the ambulocetids, which probably looked sort of like a cross between a hippopotamus and a crocodile. Ambulocetid means “walking whale,” but there’s some evidence that it might have already evolved to be fully aquatic 49 million years ago. It had short legs that might not have been strong enough to support it out of water. It might have been covered with short fur like a seal but it might have had little to no fur, more like a hippopotamus. Either way, it had long toothy jaws, strong legs with webbed toes that it used to propel itself through the water, and a tail that probably resembled that of an otter. It grew about ten feet long, or 3 meters. Ambulocetids lived in shallow coastal areas where the land was swampy, and it may have spent part of its time in fresh water. It wouldn’t have looked or acted much like a whale to us, but it was already developing features now found only in whales. By around 41 million years ago, the basilosaurids and their close relations had evolved, and were definitely fully aquatic. Their nostrils had moved almost to the location of modern whales’ blowholes. Their forelegs were basically flippers with little fingers, their hind legs had almost disappeared, and they had tail flukes. They were also much bigger than their ancestors. Basilosaurus could grow up to 60 feet long, or 18 meters, and probably looked more like a gigantic eel than a modern whale. It was long and relatively thin, and may have mostly lived at the ocean’s surface instead of diving for food. Dakosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur despite its name, although it lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, about 145 million years ago. It was a crocodylomorph that grew up to about 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and looked kind of like a shark with legs—but also a lot like a crocodile wearing a shark costume. Its tail had a fin near the end that made it resemble a shark’s tail, and its legs were flipper-like but still obviously legs. It had a whole lot of big serrated teeth in a deep skull with strong jaws. Because its jaws and teeth were so strong, in fact, scientists think Dakosaurus probably ate other marine reptiles instead of just fish. While Dakosaurus was streamlined and well adapted to life in the ocean, we don’t know if it left the water to lay its eggs on land the way sea turtles still do or if it gave birth in the water. We don’t have any nest sites or young specimens one way or another. Other marine reptiles definitely gave birth in the water, including ichthyosaurs. Ichthyosaurs and their close relations were incredibly successful, first appearing in the fossil record around 250 million years ago and last appearing around 90 million years ago. Most ichthyosaurs grew around 6 and a half to 11 feet long, or 2 to 3.3 meters, depending on species, so while they were pretty big animals, they weren’t enormous. They would have been fast, though, and looked a lot like fish or dolphins, with four flippers, a dorsal fin, a long tail with fins, and a long thin rostrum with lots of little teeth. We know they gave birth to live young because we have fossils of female ichthyosaurs who died in the process of giving birth, with the baby’s tail outside of its mother but the rest of it still in the birth canal. We have other fossils of ichthyosaurs with partially developed young in what would have been the mother’s uterus. We also have lots of ichthyosaur coprolites that show us what it ate, since the coprolites fossilized with pieces of undigested food in them. This includes fish scales and squid beaks. Of course, if you want to talk about big marine reptiles, you have to talk about mosasaurs. They lived in the late Cretaceous and went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs. The earlier species of mosasaur are pretty small, but after ichthyosaurs went extinct, mosasaurs got really really big. Some estimates for the largest species range up to almost 50 feet long, or 15 meters, and maybe even longer. Mosasaurs looked kind of like streamlined iguanas, with four flippers, a shark-like tail, but a very lizard-like head. They probably ate other marine reptiles, including smaller species of mosasaur, along with sharks and other fish, dinosaurs that made the mistake of getting in the water, and sea turtles. Honestly, mosasaurs could eat whatever they could catch, and they could probably catch just about anything. Their jaws were double-hinged, which allowed them to swallow prey whole like snakes do. We even have some skin impressions of mosasaurs that show smooth scales similar to those of snakes, and one study suggests that mosasaurs might have had forked tongues too. Mosasaurs were distantly related to snakes, but they were more closely related to monitor lizards that also have forked tongues. Speaking of snakes, we’ll finish with an animal that people don’t usually remember when they think of animals that have returned to the ocean: sea snakes. Not all sea snakes are fully marine. One genus spends part of its time on land and still lays eggs, but fully marine sea snakes give birth to live young. Researchers aren’t sure if the sea snakes that are fully marine were able to completely stop returning to the land because they already gave birth to live young or if that developed after the snakes started spending part of the time in the water. The sea snake has a single lung, like most snakes, but unlike snakes that live on land this lung extends almost the length of the whole body (but not the tail). The snake’s nostrils are at the top of its snout so it can breathe without sticking too much of its head above water, and its extra-long lung can store lots of air so the snake doesn’t have to breathe too often. Some sea snakes can stay underwater for up to about two hours, partly because of the air stored in the lung, but also because they can absorb some oxygen from the water through their skin. Studies have shown that a sea snake can absorb almost 25% of the oxygen it needs through its skin. Sea snakes are pretty big, with the largest growing up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Most are about half that length. They live in warm tropical oceans, usually in shallow water, and eat fish and other small animals. The sea snake’s body is slightly flattened side to side and its tail is much more flattened like a paddle, which is how it swims. In most cases, if a sea snake is washed ashore, it’s unable to crawl and is pretty much helpless. Terrestrial snakes have enlarged ventral scales that the snake can move up and down, allowing the edges of the scales to grab dirt or leaves or whatever the snake is moving over. This gives it a purchase, and as the scales move they push the body forward. Most sea snakes don’t have these specialized ventral scales and have regular smooth scales instead. But while most sea snakes can’t move on land, if you see one stranded, don’t try to pick it up to help it. All sea snakes are extremely venomous. (Use a long paddle to push the sea snake back into the water, or better yet, call an expert who can safely return the snake to the water.) Most sea snakes are brightly colored as a result, to warn potential predators away. Many have stripes and are absolutely gorgeous. Generally, if you encounter a sea snake while you’re swimming, the snake isn’t going to bite you. You’re too big for it to swallow and it doesn’t want to waste its venom on you. Don’t bother it and it won’t bother you unless it feels threatened. Just swim calmly away and be glad it’s not a mosasaur. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Pterosaur melanosomes support signalling functions for early feathers Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This month we have a small mystery from Australia, which as far as I can find is still unsolved. In 1950, a man named George Gray started hearing bellowing from the gum swamp near his house. His adult son, Ted, heard it too and reported it was loud enough to hear half a mile away, or about 800 meters. The bellowing sounded like a crocodile. The problem is, the Grays lived just outside of the small town of Wee Waa in New South Wales, Australia. Very, very rarely a saltwater crocodile wanders down the coast as far as New South Wales, but Wee Waa is a five or six hour drive inland. It’s not crocodile country. It gets cold in winter and it’s surrounded by farmland. Ted Gray found tracks in the swamp where a large animal had flattened tall grass, although the footprints didn’t have claw marks. He estimated that if the animal was a crocodile, it was only about 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, although he did note that none of the trails seemed to lead to the water. The bellowing mostly occurred in early morning and around sundown and continued for several months. Attempts to search the wetlands were unsuccessful, mostly because of heavy rain that spring and summer. The water was ordinarily no more than 3 feet deep, or about a meter [actually about 92 cm, got this wrong], but was much deeper that year. Hundreds of people came to listen to the bellowing, though, and one constable perched in a tree for most of a day hoping to shoot the animal. He never saw it. Seven years earlier, during World War II, an armored division of troops stayed in the area. The troops had been based in northwest Australia for a time and were supposed to have brought some baby crocodiles with them as mascots. The soldiers were told to kill the crocodiles, but newspapers in 1950 suggested they’d been released instead and that one had found its way to George Gray’s swamp. That doesn’t explain how it survived seven winters or why no one had seen or heard it until then. Then again, one man named Ross Tuckey claimed he’d seen a crocodile several years before about 20 miles away, or 32 kilometers. He’d first thought it was a goanna, which is a type of monitor lizard that lives in Australia. Some species of goanna can grow more than 8 feet long, or about 2.5 meters. When Tuckey’s dog rushed at the animal, it bowled the dog away with its tail and slid into a dammed stream. Tuckey watched it float in the water with only its nostrils visible. The Wee Waa monster was never identified. That’s all there is! I tried to find out more but if anyone ever found what animal was bellowing in George Gray’s swamp, the newspapers didn’t report about it. I actually only learned about this animal mystery when I was searching for something else, which is always a lot of fun. *** 115 million years ago a colony of strange flying animals lived in what is now northeastern Brazil in South America. It was a reptile that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but it wasn’t a dinosaur. It wasn’t a bird either. Its wingspan might have been as much as 13 feet across, or 4 meters, which was big for a pterosaur, which of course is what it was. Specifically, it’s Tupandactylus imperator [too-pan-DAK-tillus imper-AH-ter], and it is a complete weirdo. Tupandactylus was only described in 1997, but we have several really well preserved specimens, including nearly complete skulls. And it’s the skull that makes it so bizarre. Many pterosaurs had large crests that were probably brightly colored and probably used to attract mates, but Tupandactylus had what may be the largest crest ever found. It was just ridiculously large, nearly as big as its whole body, not counting its wings, of course. Tupandactylus’s skull is hard to describe. I’m going to do my best, but you might want to click through to the show notes and look at the picture. First, imagine a pelican’s bill. It’s long and has a pouch underneath. But in your mental picture, push that pouch forward so that it’s at the base of the lower jaw like a chin, and made of bone instead of soft tissue. Tupandactylus had a sort of keel on the underside of the end of its lower jaw that was probably for display. Next, the upper jaw is tall but narrow. Maybe it will help to picture a toucan’s bill, but unlike a toucan, Tupandactylus’s upper jaw had a projection at the top that formed the base of the crest. This projection is a big triangular piece of bone that tops the upper jaw, and at the upper point of the triangle there’s a long, thin spur of bone that points upward and bends back. It’s ridiculously long. Finally, the rear of the skull has another projection that points straight back to form the back of the crest. The tall rod of bone on top of the upper jaw forms the front of the crest. The crest itself was mostly made of soft tissue and keratin stretched between the two bony rods. To finish our description of the skull, Tupandactylus had no teeth and probably also had a keratin beak at the very tips of its jaws, especially its lower jaw. We don’t know what it ate, but some paleontologists hypothesize it might have mostly eaten fruit and other plant material. It probably spent a lot of time on the ground looking for food and hanging out in its flock, sort of like geese do today. We have a pretty good idea of what the crest looked like because a few specimens have soft tissue impressions left by the crest when the animal died and fell into mud. The complete crest was like a big sail, although there’s no evidence that it helped the animal fly. What we don’t know is what color the crest was, but researchers have long assumed it was brightly colored and probably patterned to attract a mate. In an article published in Nature in April of 2022, a team of paleontologists from Brazil and Belgium announced that they’ve found some amazing details in a newly discovered Tupandactylus skull. Tupandactylus had feathers. They discovered the feathers at the bottom of the crest, some of them fluffy and some of them longer and more like modern bird feathers. And that’s not all. The feathers are so well preserved that under electron microscopes, the team found preserved melanosomes, which are pigment granules. We still don’t know what colors the feathers were, but they were definitely different colors because the melanosomes are different shapes, and in bird feathers different melanosome shapes correspond to different colors. Simple feather fibers have also been found on the jaws, which suggests that Tupandactylus might have had feathers over much of its body. That means other pterosaurs probably did too. There are actually two species of Tupandactylus known, T. imperator and T. navigans. T. navigans is smaller and has a smaller, less extravagant crest. Some researchers suggest the two species might actually be the same species, with sexually dimorphic males and females (meaning they look different). Maybe one day we’ll find out for sure. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

It’s our 500th episode! Wow! Thanks to Rosie, Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Crikey! Newly Discovered Snake Species Named After Steve Irwin Steve Irwin’s Treesnail A young Steve Irwin’s tree snail [photo taken from link above]: A marbled lungfish: A fennec, smallest and cutest of all foxes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a brand new episode, because it’s episode 500! Congratulations to me and to you too, listening to the 500 th episode of a podcast! That doesn’t happen very often! Despite the big 5-0-0, I’m going to treat this like a regular episode. Thanks to Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, Remy and Julien, and Rosie for their suggestions this week! We’ll start with Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, who live in Australia. A while back now they got to visit the Australia Zoo, which is run by the Irwin family. Steve Irwin was a conservationist, science educator, and wildlife rehabilitator, also known as the Crocodile Hunter for his work relocating crocodiles who were endangering people, and vice versa. He died tragically young in 2006 but his wife and children continue his work. Michelle pointed out that Irwin has been honored by scientists who have named newly discovered animals for him, so let’s learn about a few of them! The most recent one is a type of wolf snake discovered on the Great Nicobar Island off the coast of India and described in 2025, Lycodon irwini . It’s mostly black in color with a slender body, and can grow as much as 47 inches long, or 119 cm. That’s almost four feet long! Luckily it’s non-venomous, plus it has only been found on that one island in evergreen forests, so you’re not likely to run across one by accident. It probably eats small animals like frogs, but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet. Back in 1990, Steve Irwin caught a strange turtle while fishing with his father, Bob, who was also a conservationist. Between them, the two men knew a whole lot about Australian wildlife but they didn’t know what the turtle was. They sent pictures to a turtle expert, who determined that yes, it was a species new to science. It was described in 1997 and named Irwin’s turtle, Elseya irwini . Irwin’s turtle has a black and yellow carapace and lives in the lower part of the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. The female also has a light-colored head and other pale spots on the body. Like some other turtles, it can absorb oxygen from the water through its cloaca, which is often referred to as its butt. A chamber at the end of the cloaca contains structures that act like gills and absorb oxygen. This allows it to stay underwater longer, and in fact it can’t survive in water that doesn’t contain enough oxygen. As a result, Irwin’s turtle is endangered due to habitat loss, especially from pollution and the damming of its river home. It used to be common but its numbers are in decline. The Australia Zoo started a captive breeding program to help conserve the species, and in 2023 they succeeded in hatching the very first Irwin’s turtle babies ever bred in captivity. The last one is my favorite, a land snail named after Steve Irwin. It was described as a new species in 2009, only a few years after Irwin died, and was named Crikey steveirwini . It’s the only species in the genus Crikey. It only lives in high altitudes in the tropical rainforests of northeastern Queensland. It’s rare and not much is known about it, because it’s so hard to find and so small. It has a cone-shaped shell that’s striped with spiral bands of brown, yellow-brown, and white, and it only grows 15 mm long at most. Next, brothers Remy and Julien wanted to learn about the African lungfish. Lungfish are fascinating fish, because as you can probably guess from the name, they have gills but they also have lungs, and the fish needs both to get enough oxygen. Four species of lungfish live in Africa, all belonging to the family Protopteridae. They’re eel-like in shape although they’re not closely related to eels at all, with soft scales, and a dorsal fin that continues down the fish’s back and continues around the end of the tail, since the dorsal fin and tail fin are actually fused into one big fin. Its only other fins are the pectoral and pelvic, which are very thin and are more like flexible legs than actual fins. The lungfish can actually crawl along the bottom of the swamp or lake with its fins, although it can also swim like an eel. While the African lungfish does have gills, they’re small and are mostly associated with eliminating carbon dioxide instead of absorbing oxygen. The lungs do most of the work. The fish surfaces periodically to gulp fresh air into its lungs. It’s one of the few fish that can drown if it can’t surface for air. African lungfish eat insect larvae, especially of aquatic insects, crustaceans, mollusks, small fish, and frogs, but it can also sometimes eat seeds and other plant material. It usually lives in shallow water like swamps and small rivers, where there’s not a lot of oxygen in the water. In many cases, its waterways dry up periodically, but the fish can still survive. As its water gets lower and lower, the lungfish digs into the mud and curls up, then secretes a thick mucus that helps retain moisture and stops its body from drying out. Its metabolism slows way down so it doesn’t need to breathe very often, and it doesn’t need to eat. It can survive this way for up to four years, although it usually only has to stay in its cocoon for a few months, until the rains return and its waterways fill up again. The smallest species of African lungfish is the East African lungfish, which only grows about 17 inches long, or 44 cm, while the largest is the marbled lungfish that can grow a whopping six and a half feet long, or two meters. Lastly, Rosie suggested we learn about the fennec fox, which lives in northern Africa. It’s the smallest fox in the world, barely eight inches tall at the shoulder, or 20 cm, but it has incredibly large ears. Its ears can be as much as six inches long, or 15 cm. Part of the reason its ears are so big is so it can hear insects and other small animals moving around underground, but they’re also big because they help dissipate heat from the fox’s body into the air. Since the fennec lives in deserts, that’s only one of many adaptations it has to the heat and lack of water. For instance, the fennec gets most of its water through the food it eats. It’s also a nocturnal animal. The pads of its paws are protected by long, coarse hairs that grow between the pads, so hot sand won’t burn its toe beans. The hair also gives the fox better traction in loose sand. The fennec’s fur is a pale sandy color with a black tip to the tail, and it has dark eyes. It eats rodents, birds and their eggs, insects, scorpions, and other small animals, as well as fruit and other plant material. It can jump really far, some four feet in one bound, or 120 cm. Not only can it run really fast, it can change directions really quickly too. This helps it escape predators and catch prey. Fennecs can be social animals and like to play, even as adults. Pairs mate for life and both parents take care of the babies. A fennec’s burrow can be very large and may even link up to neighboring fennec family burrow, so neighbors can visit each other without going out into the heat of the day. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. Thanks for listening! Thanks to those of you who backed my recent crowdfunding campaign! Right now the Small Mysteries book isn’t available yet, but in the Halloween episode in October, I’ll make sure to put a link where you can buy the ebook.

Further reading: Cambrian Explosion Month #18: Stem-Gnathifera Ambiguous Amiskwia Amiskwia, possibly [picture taken from above link]: Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for May 2025! We’ve talked about a lot of strange and mysterious animals from the Cambrian in past episodes, especially episode 69, but I don’t think we’ve learned about Amiskwia yet. For a long time it was another mystery animal from the Burgess Shale and a few other places, dating back as much as 518 million years ago, but as of only a few years ago the mystery seems to be solved, at least mostly. Amiskwia grew about an inch long, or 2.5 cm, which actually made it one of the larger animals that lived in the Cambrian. It probably looked superficially like a slug, with a slightly flattened body and a pair of short tentacles on its head. It had a paddle-shaped tail and two flaps on its sides that probably acted as fins to help it swim. Its mouth was on the underside of its head and was surprisingly complicated, with two pairs of plates with little spikes on them. We even know about its internal anatomy, since some of the Amiskwia fossils are so well preserved that its insides can be studied too. It had a brain and a simple digestive tract. Amiskwia was described in 1911 by Charles Walcott, who described a lot of the Burgess Shale fossils. Walcott classified it as a type of arrow worm. When scientists gave it a closer look later, not everyone agreed it was related to modern arrow worms. Some suggested it might be a type of ribbon worm, or maybe an early mollusk, while others argued that it was so different from known animals that it belonged in its own phylum. A 2019 study suggested that Amiskwia’s weird mouth plates matched up with the mouth plates in a living animal, and a 2022 follow-up study confirmed the 2019 findings. Not everyone agrees, but as of now, Amiskwia is considered an ancestral gnathiferan. There! Mystery solved! Wait, what do you mean you don’t know what a gnathiferan is? As everyone knows, especially me, I definitely didn’t just learn about this type of animal myself just now, gnathiferans include a lot of different animals with complex jaws—not like your own jaws, but with little plates and spikes and moving parts made of chitin. Most gnathiferans are tiny, microscopic or barely a few millimeters long, so Amiskwia was a giant in comparison. Arrow worms are also generally considered to be gnathiferans, so Wolcott wasn’t too far off in his description of Amiskwia. We don’t know what Amiskwia ate, but it could probably swim pretty well and most likely hunted other animals or scavenged already dead ones. Scientists think it probably spent most of its time swimming well above the sea floor, which is why it’s a relatively rare fossil. Another Cambrian mystery animal that lived even earlier than Amiskwia, around 520 million years ago, and which is probably related to it, is Timorebestia. Its fossils were discovered in Greenland and only described in 2024. It had a pair of long tentacles or antennae, a rounded paddle-like tail, and fins on each side of its wide, flattened body. Its tentacles were around half the length of its body–and if Amiskwia was a giant compared to modern gnathiferans, Timorebestia was a colossus! It grew almost 8 inches long, or over 20 cm, not even counting its tentacles! Some Timorebestia specimens are so well preserved that scientists can identify what they ate right before they died, and it looks like they mostly ate small arthropods. Timorebestia was probably the biggest and strongest predator in the area when it was alive, one of the earliest apex predators discovered. Another similar animal was Nectocaris, which has been discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada and other Cambrian fossil sites in China and Australia. It was flattened and had a pair of tentacles on its head, and a fin on both sides of its body–but it had a lot of features not found in Amiskwia and Timorebestia, including eyes. It also seems to have had a tube or funnel of some kind that emerged from the underside of the body near the head. It might have been a proboscis of some kind, but some scientists think it was a funnel like the ones found in modern squid, used to jet through the water quickly. Many scientists even think Nectocaris was a precursor to squid and other cephalopods, but other scientists disagree. Some specimens are about one inch long, or around 3 cm, while others are around 4 inches long, or about 10 cm. This might mean there were two species, or that the small ones were juveniles, or that males and females were different sizes. We just don’t know. Small animals, especially ones with mostly soft bodies, don’t fossilize as often as larger and more robust animals. We’re very lucky that we have so many beautifully detailed Cambrian fossils, since so many modern gnathiferans and their close relations aren’t otherwise found in the fossil record at all. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: https://sharonahill.substack.com/ https://metazoan.net/54-octlantis/ https://metazoan.net/109-octopolis-and-octlantis/ Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses The gloomy octopus [photo by Niki Hubbard – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/118664956, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123044473]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like April Fools Day, which is April first. I especially don’t like it when someone makes an April fools day post online and just leaves it there afterwards. It’s too easy for other people to stumble across it and think it’s real. This goes double for strange animal and cryptid reports. I subscribe to geologist Sharon Hill’s Pop Goes the Cryptid articles, and on March 31 she talked about a hoax called the North American Pine Squid. It got popular around Halloween of 2024. It’s said to be a black squid or octopus that lives in pine trees in remote, heavily forested places like the Pacific northwest and the Appalachian mountains. Most of the time it eats small animals like birds and squirrels, along with pine cones, but if someone walks underneath its tree, the pine squid grabs the person, pulls them up into the tree, and they’re never seen again. But you don’t have to worry, because the pine squid isn’t a real animal. It’s also not even a new story. It’s based on another hoax called the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, which dates back to 1998. In the case of the tree octopus, it wasn’t created as a hoax or an April fool’s joke but as a study about whether children can tell if a website is reliable or not. The researchers made a page with information about a type of octopus that lived in the ocean but that also climbed trees. Then they asked several classrooms of children around age 11, from different schools in different countries, to read the page, look at the pictures provided, and answer some questions. The study found that most of the children thought the page contained reliable information. Only a few figured out that the tree octopus wasn’t real. The study has been used repeatedly to argue that children need more lessons in how to evaluate a website to know if it contains reliable information, and of course that’s always a good thing. But it makes me a little angry too, because how were the kids supposed to know that octopuses can’t climb trees? There are so many amazing and strange animals out there, a tree octopus sounds perfectly normal if you don’t know very much about octopuses. So I argue that kids should be taught about everything , and taught in as interesting a way as possible so that they remember it better. The same goes for adults. But this episode isn’t actually about April fools day, tree octopuses, or pine squids. It is about a type of octopus, and what I’m going to tell you is so weird that I have to reassure you that it’s actually true. It’s not a hoax or an April fools joke or anything like that. It’s about the gloomy octopus and the underwater cities some populations have created, referred to as Octopolis and Octlantis. I swear I’m not making this up! The gloomy octopus lives off the eastern coast of Australia and the northern coast of New Zealand. It’s mainly brown and gray, but it has orange on the undersides of its arms, and it’s covered in little bumps that help camouflage it. Its eyes are white. On average, it has an armspan of about 6 ½ feet, or 2 meters, with females generally larger than males. Like many other octopuses, when the female lays her eggs, she stops eating completely and protects the eggs until they hatch. After they hatch, she dies. The gloomy octopus lives in shallow warm water and especially likes places with lots of rocks, seagrass, reefs, and other places where it can hide. It spends a lot of time in a den it digs into the sea floor, only coming out at night to hunt. It especially likes scallops, but it will eat pretty much anything it can catch, including sea snails, crabs, seahorses, and even other gloomy octopuses. It usually brings its food back to its den to eat. The gloomy octopus was thought to be a solitary animal until 2009. That’s when a biologist named Matt Lawrence was exploring Jervis Bay in New South Wales. In this particular part of the bay, the sand is silty and there are a lot of predators, so it’s not great for the gloomy octopus. But not only did Lawrence find a gloomy octopus there, he found 16 of them living in close proximity. The octopuses’ dens were very close to each other, surrounding a human-made object that’s so encrusted with sea life that it can’t be identified. Scientists think it was a piece that fell off a boat at some point. Even more interesting, there are so many shells around, especially scallop shells, that instead of making dens in the sand, the octopuses are basically making dens in huge piles of scallop shells. The octopuses spend time moving the shells to improve their dens. In other words, Lawrence had found an octopus city. Admittedly, it’s a very small city by human standards, with only 16 residents identified at any given time, but for a supposedly solitary animal, that’s pretty amazing. The site was nicknamed Octopolis, and scientists think the presence of the piece of boat actually started the site. When it fell into the sand, it provided a great place for a gloomy octopus to hide. Since gloomy octopuses bring mollusks back to the den to eat, naturally they discard the shells near their dens. Once enough discarded shells had piled up, it provided better building material for another den. Another octopus moved in as the first one’s neighbor, which meant twice as many shells being discarded. Pretty soon another octopus joined the first ones, and eventually there were 16 separate dens in a little community. Then, in 2017, another octopus city was discovered not far from Octopolis. Instead of a human-made object at its center, it has a few rocks sticking up in the middle of the city, which has been nicknamed Octlantis. Observations of the octopuses living in these communities are surprising. The octopuses come out during the day even though ordinarily the gloomy octopus is most active at night, especially around dawn and dusk. They interact with each other in various ways, sometimes fighting, sometimes pairing off to mate, sometimes sneaking into another octopus’s den and trying to take it over. It might not be full of underwater skyscrapers and underwater scallop vendors on busy corners, but there’s a lot of hustle and bustle in these cities. When biologists revisited Octopolis in 2023, they only found three octopuses. Octlantis had a little more activity and a few more octopuses, but nothing like its busy 2017 numbers. But this doesn’t mean that the cities are deserted. Low Octopolis populations were also discovered in 2010 and 2013, but a high population in between. The biologists also noted that the presence of sharks caused the octopuses to move, and in 2023 a shark was hanging around Octopolis. Another reason for the changing population sizes at the sites is that gloomy octopuses don’t live very long. A three-year-old gloomy octopus is really old, since most die before they reach their first birthday. The octopuses spotted in Octopolis and Octlantis in 2023 might be as much as 14 generations removed from the ones seen in 2009. Young octopuses have to continually repopulate the cities as the older ones die off, and that might take longer some years than others. Just because we know about Octopolis and Octlantis doesn’t mean those are the only two octopus cities in existence. There are probably a lot more. Scientists just haven’t noticed them yet. In years where sharks are spending too much time in Octopolis, the octopuses might just move to a city we don’t know about. Octopolis and Octlantis might even be really small in comparison to some cities. If you’re a diver around Australia or New Zealand, keep a sharp eye out for an octopus city. You might be the first human to visit New Octleans. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Megarachne as we know it now: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Megarachne is only known from two specimens, neither of which is complete, which adds to the confusion. It lived around 300 million years ago in what is now South America. It was described in 1980 from the first specimen discovered and was named Megarachne, which means big spider. The scientist who described it thought it was a type of primitive spider related to modern tarantulas, but much bigger. He estimated its legspan was 20 inches, or 50 cm, with a body length of just over 13 inches, or 34 cm. That made it the largest spider ever known by a lot. Other palaeontologists, especially arachnologists who specialize in spiders and their relations, weren’t convinced Megarachne was a spider. But it wasn’t until 2005 when a more complete specimen was discovered that anyone could say for sure what it was. The second specimen made it clear that it wasn’t a spider at all but a sea scorpion, or eurypterid, and not an especially large one compared to some. It probably grew to 21 inches long, or 54 cm. But by then, Megarachne had gotten really popular as a giant spider. It was in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters , although the producers changed its name to Mesothelae right before it aired, which was just after the new findings about Megarachne came out. Mesothelae is a suborder of big spiders from parts of Asia that retain many traits of ancestral spiders. It was a valiant attempt by the BBC to make the documentary less incorrect, but of course the spider they were talking about still wasn’t a spider and no spider known has ever grown that large. But while Megarachne isn’t a giant spider, and isn’t even a very big eurypterid, it is important since not very many eurypterids are known from South America. It also appears to be closely related to Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, similar-looking euripterids from North America and Europe. But some researchers think it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. Instead of three similar creatures living in different areas, they think there’s something else going on. Eurypterids were arthropods, the phylum that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton that they molt periodically as they grow, and many arthropods have complicated life stages compared to other animals. When a shark hatches, it looks like a miniature adult and just grows larger as it gets older, but when an arthropod hatches, it usually doesn’t look anything like its adult form. Some arthropods go through many stages of life before reaching the adult body plan. Crustaceans have numerous larval stages, for instance, that often look very different from the adult. Some researchers think that Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus were all the same animal, and that the differences are due to it being in three different stages of development when it died and was preserved. We don’t have any way to know if this was correct, of course, not until we hopefully find more fossil remains. Other eurypterids did appear to go through some physical changes during maturation, as far as researchers can tell with the remains we have, but Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus belonged to a different family from other eurypterids and are much rarer. They might have been quite different developmentally. We can also look at the living relations to see how likely it is that eurypterids had different larval stages where they looked different from the adult form. Eurypterids were probably most closely related to horseshoe crabs, although not everyone agrees. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years and are really neat animals that we’re lucky to still have in the world. The horseshoe crab hatches into a larva that looks a lot like a trilobite. It does indeed go through physical changes as it grows and molts over the course of three years, so it’s reasonable to assume that eurypterids did too. On the other hand, some researchers think eurypterids were more closely related to modern scorpions. Scorpions actually give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, and the female carries the babies on her back for several days up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once the babies have their first molt they look a lot more like miniature adults and pretty soon are able to leave their mother and hunt on their own. So again, it’s possible that eurypterids had a system more like this instead of like the horseshoe crab’s. While we’re talking about scorpions, did you know that scorpions glow blue-green in ultraviolet light? The scorpion’s exoskeleton contains fluorescent chemicals, but we’re not sure why. Scorpions do have incredibly light sensitive eyes, and can navigate at night using only starlight. Their eyes can’t form sharp images like ours can, though. And scorpions have a lot of eyes. Spiders have four pairs of eyes, but some scorpions have more than that. All species have a pair on top of the cephalothorax, which corresponds to the head, and more on the sides of the cephalothorax. Some species have up to five pairs of eyes in addition to the ones on top of the head. Twelve eyes seems like overkill but it works for the scorpion. Eurypterids had both compound eyes and simple eyes. That’s all we know about Megarachne right now, at least until we find more fossilized specimens. Let’s hope we do, and while we’re at it, let’s hope we find some more fossilized giant spiders because that would be cool. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: How did a tiny bee get to French Polynesia? Eight new species help solve a scientific mystery Secrets in the canopy: Scientists discover 8 striking new bee species in the Pacific Canopy specialist Hylaeus bees highlight sampling biases and resolve Michener’s mystery Scientists discover endoparasitic marine tapeworm trapped in Cretaceous amber Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for August 2024! It’s the start of Invertebrate August, so we have two invertebrate mysteries to discuss today, one mostly solved and one not. Let’s start with the solved mystery, about a tiny bee. In 1934, three tiny bee specimens were collected in French Polynesia, specifically on a particular type of flower in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The bees really were tiny, only 4 mm long. They weren’t described until 1965, when they were placed in the genus Hylaeus. This is a really big genus with over 500 species that live throughout the world, but the species most closely related to the newly described Tuamotu’s masked bee lives in Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. In case you’re kind of hazy on geography, like me, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand are part of what’s called Oceania, a giant chunk of the Pacific Ocean where there’s not a whole lot of land. I mean, except for Australia, which is big. The Tuamotu Archipelago is also part of Oceania, and part of French Polynesia, but it’s really remote. It consists of a spread-out collection of 78 low islands, many of them too tiny to support humans, none of them with a source of fresh water except for rain. They’re tropical and quite beautiful, with many unique animals and plants living on and around them. They’re also almost 2,500 miles, or 4,000 km away from the places where the tiny bee’s closest relatives live. Even in 1965, scientists had questions about the tiny bee. How did 4mm bees get to such remote islands, and were they even still around? The bees hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1934. Since the Tuamotu Archipelago has suffered from European explorers and missionaries bringing invasive species to some islands, colonization by France, and nuclear weapons testing, scientists worried the bee had gone extinct and that they would never solve the mystery of how it got there in the first place. Bees are attracted to flowers, and the three 1934 specimens were discovered on flowers, so naturally scientists had been looking for the bees on flowers. But it turns out that in the Polynesian islands, bees mostly hang out in the treetops. Once scientists figured this out, they began discovering new species of bee—eight of them in fact, collected between 2014 and 2019 from various islands in Fiji, Micronesia, and French Polynesia. All eight species are closely related to Tuamotu’s masked bee, so scientists now have a pretty good idea of how it traveled thousands of miles to get to its French Polynesian home. Its ancestors island-hopped. There are more than 1,700 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of them barely known to humans. Researchers think there are probably a lot more species of bee to be discovered in the treetops of Pacific islands, now that they know where to look. With luck, they’ll be able to find Tuamotu’s masked bee too, quietly living out its bee life above the scientists’ heads. Next, let’s discuss our unsolved mystery. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin, is the gift that just keeps on giving to the scientific world, and our mystery involves a flatworm found in amber. The amber comes from Myanmar and dates to about 99 million years ago. In addition to bits of inorganic matter like tiny pebbles and sand grains, most organisms found in amber from this site are insects and roundworms, animals you’d expect to find on and around trees. The team examining this particular piece of amber found lots of interesting things, but then they discovered this one. The flatworm is about 10mm long and it’s beautifully preserved, which means the scientists were able to compare it to modern flatworms to see what it might be most closely related to. It’s most similar to a parasitic flatworm found in shark intestines. You know, an animal not typically found in trees. (I stole that joke from paleontologist Kenneth De Baets, by the way. Credit where credit’s due.) It isn’t a complete worm but a partial one, basically a tentacle with little hooks to keep it in place in the host animal’s digestive system. The modern worm is classified as a type of tapeworm, and tapeworms are distressingly common parasites. If you’ve ever adopted a rescue cat or dog, you’ve probably had to have it treated for a tapeworm infestation. Luckily, tapeworms are also very specific about which species they parasitize, so you can’t get tapeworms from a pet. (It’s still icky.) Fish get tapeworms too, after eating marine invertebrates carrying various kinds of tapeworm larvae. The question is, how did a parasitic worm found in fish end up in amber? Occasionally there is rare amber found that fell into water and trapped water organisms, but this particular amber wasn’t associated with water. Other items found in the same piece of amber included sand grains, tiny hairlike structures found on some ferns, and the nymph of a scale insect. The team suggests that the tree where the amber came from grew near a beach and that a dead shark washed ashore. While scavengers were picking through the carcass, a piece of worm somehow got separated from the body and ended up in a tree. Possibly a scavenger grabbed a big yummy mouthful of rotting shark guts and either climbed or flew up into a tree to eat it, and part of the worm fell out and landed in a blob of amber. Because tapeworms are endoparasites, meaning they live inside their hosts, and because they’re soft-bodied and fragile, it’s very rare that one is preserved. Pretty much the only other preserved tapeworm specimen we have isn’t a tapeworm itself but some eggs found in fossilized shark dung, dated to 270 million year ago. Scientists aren’t even completely sure the eggs are from a flatworm since they’re not that well preserved. So it’s fantastic that this particular specimen was so well preserved, and that it made its way into the hands of scientists! Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Gauguin’s Magical Mystery Koao Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The French painter Paul Gauguin moved to the island of Hiva Oa in 1901, less than two years before he died. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a volcanic archipelago in Polynesia in the South Pacific. It’s extremely remote, only slightly closer to Mexico than it is to New Zealand, although Hawaii is even closer. During his short time on Hiva Oa, Gauguin produced quite a few paintings, including a famous one whose title translates to “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.” It depicts a dancer and magician named Haapuani and represents the fast-vanishing local culture. One of the details of the painting is a bird on the ground next to a small dog. But no one can identify the bird in the painting. The bird is mostly blue but with green face and wings, and the small dog appears to be biting its wing or back. It’s about the size of a chicken, although details aren’t especially clear due to Gauguin’s painting style. The bill is a brownish-red and is thick and pointed. The eye is the same brown-red. No one paid much attention to the bird in the painting until a man named Thor Heyerdahl published a book about the Marquesas in 1974. He was most well known for his adventures sailing a balsawood boat, the Kon-Tiki , from South America to the Polynesian islands in 1947. In 1937, though, the most notable thing Heyerdahl did was see an unusual bird that he mentioned in his book. He wrote that the bird had no wings and ran extremely fast when he startled it. It vanished into a thick bank of ferns and although he tried to catch another glimpse of it, it was gone. He later said it was about the size of a long-legged gull. A French explorer also wrote about this bird in 1957, although he didn’t see it himself. He said the people who lived on the island called the bird koao, which meant “burrow bird” since it was supposed to hide in burrows. It was about the size of a rooster, purplish in color with a yellow bill, and while it only had little wings, its legs were long and it was a fast runner. By 1979, researchers investigating the koao were told that it had gone extinct from overhunting, specifically by the French colonizers of Hiva Oa. Other researchers learned that the bird was supposed to have red eyes and was the size of a duck. The ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy thought the bird sounded like a type of rail. Rails are relatively small birds that mostly stay on the ground. Even rail species that can fly are weak flyers, while many species are flightless. The family is a large one and includes birds like the American coot, the takahē of New Zealand, the common moorhen that lives throughout much of western Europe, South Asia, and parts of Africa, and the spotless crake that’s common throughout much of the South Pacific. Barloy suggested in 1979 that the koao might be a spotless crake. The spotless crake is bluish-gray with reddish-brown back and wings, a black bill, red eyes, and pale orangey legs that are long for its size. It’s shy and mostly crepuscular, but when it’s out in daylight it never goes far from vegetation where it can hide. It prefers freshwater wetlands but will also live in forests as long as it has plenty of groundcover for shelter. It eats insects, worms, crustaceans, and even carrion, as well as plant material like seeds and fruit. It can fly but it would much rather run away from danger. This doesn’t really fit with what we know of the koao. For one thing, the spotless crake is much smaller than a duck or rooster, smaller even than a crow. It doesn’t match the size or coloration of Gauguin’s mystery bird or the reports of the koao. Even Barloy later decided he was wrong and suggested the koao might be a different type of rail, maybe even an unknown species of takahē. The takahē is dark blue with a greenish back, and its heavy beak and strong legs are red. This is much more similar to the bird Gauguin painted. The takahē was considered extinct until a small population was rediscovered in 1948, and while it’s flightless, its ancestors weren’t. Like New Zealand, many remote islands–including Hiva Oa–have no native mammals except bats. As a result, many island birds don’t need to fly because their predators are other birds like eagles. It’s easy to hide from an eagle if you’re foraging under cover of thick plants. Without the bird itself or its remains, identifying it was impossible. Gauguin was a post-Impressionist painter who influenced later artists of the avant-garde movement, so his paintings aren’t photo-realistic. He was just making art, not illustrating a scientific treatise. The details of his painted bird might not be totally accurate and aren’t specific enough to help with an identification. All we know is that the koao looks like a type of rail and doesn’t match any known species of bird. So we’re back where we started. But new species of rail keep being discovered in Polynesian islands, most from subfossil remains found during archaeological excavations. In 2007 three new species of extinct rail were described from remains a few hundred years old, while a fourth specimen consisted of only two bones, not enough to identify as a new species. Those two mystery bones were found on Hiva Oa. These findings show that many more species of rail and other birds once lived on the islands, probably driven to extinction by introduced rats and other non-native animals. A rail described in 1988 from 600-year-old remains, Porpyrio paepae , sometimes called the Marquesas swamphen, may be the koao. It lived on Hiva Oa and another nearby island and was closely related to the takahē. French biochemist Michel Raynal has researched the koao extensively since 1980 and suggests that Gauguin witnessed a dog catch a koao in 1902. That would explain why the dog in his painting is biting the bird’s back or wing. If the bird Heyerdahl saw in 1937 was also a koao, we can determine that it was still alive at that time. The koao may be extinct now, but at least we have a painting of it. That’s more than we have for most extinct animals. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: New species of extinct vampire-squid-like cephalopod When teeth grow on the body Fossil shark turns into mystery pterosaur Scientists Had Never Seen This Elusive Whale Alive—Until Now Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This month I wasn’t sure what to cover in this episode, so I decided to just click on four random bookmarks of scientific articles that I’ve had waiting for attention, and we’ll discuss them. We haven’t done a four articles episode in a long time! The first article is from March 2022, and it’s about the discovery of an ancient cephalopod. Cephalopods include octopuses and squid. Octopuses famously have eight arms, while squid have eight arms and two feeding tentacles. Despite its name, the deep-sea vampire squid is actually more closely related to octopuses than to squid, and a newly discovered fossil is an ancestor to both. The fossil is 328 million years old and was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 1988 but was only studied recently. Fossils of soft-bodied animals are incredibly rare, and this one is remarkably well-preserved. All of the animal’s arms are preserved, including the suckers, but instead of eight arms, it had ten. Scientists have long suspected that the ancestors of modern octopuses and vampire squid had ten arms. The vampire squid has eight arms and two feeding filaments that are vestigial arms. But this is the first fossil found that shows ten arms. The fossil is of an animal with a torpedo-like body shaped like a modern squid. Two of its arms appear to be elongated compared to its other arms. It’s about 4 and a half inches long including its arms, or 12 cm. That’s pretty much all we know about it now, but hopefully the fossil will reveal more information as it continues to be studied. Our next article is from October 2017 and is intriguingly titled “When teeth grow on the body.” It sounds horrific, but it’s actually a study of certain catfish that grow bony plates with tiny teeth on their bodies as defense. Catfish don’t have scales, but some species of denticulate catfish that live in South America grow bony plates that act like armor. Many of these plates are covered in thin little teeth–actual teeth, including enamel and dentin, with pulp inside. They’re called extra-oral teeth, dermal denticles, or odontodes, and the study determined that they appeared about 120 million years ago in ancient catfish that hadn’t yet evolved the bony plates. The teeth regrow when they’re lost, and in some species, males grow larger teeth than females and use them to fight other males. Imagine biting someone without needing to open your mouth. Our next article is from November 2020, about more fossils. The fossils were discovered in a collection at the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton in England, and were originally found in the latter half of the 19th century by miners. A PhD student at the University of Portsmouth was studying fossilized shark spines from the collection when he realized they weren’t actually shark spines. Instead, they were jaw fragments from pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that filled many ecological niches that birds fill today. One of the species identified from the collection is called Ornithostoma, which means bird mouth, an animal that lived in the early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago, in what is now Europe. We know very little about it except that it didn’t have teeth, but it probably ate fish. But there were some other jaw fragments that didn’t belong to Ornithostoma, and in fact don’t match up to any known pterosaur jaws. It may belong to a new species, but the fossils are so fragmentary that there’s no way to know for sure. The rocks that the fossils came from were completely destroyed more than a century ago during phosphate mining, so unless more fragments are found in other collections, we may never learn more about this mystery pterosaur. Our last article is from July 2022, and I have no idea why I haven’t talked about it on the podcast before now. It’s about Sato’s beaked whale, also called kurotsuchi. It’s a type of four-toothed whale with a short beak, and it’s dark gray and can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. It was only identified in 2016 as being different from the two other known species of four-toothed whales, after careful analysis, including DNA analysis, of dead individuals that had been found washed ashore. Until the summer of 2021, no one had ever seen a living Sato’s beaked whale. Then some researchers studying orcas spotted 14 of the beaked whales swimming together between Hokkaido, Japan and the Kuril Islands. The scientists recognized that these were unusual whales and they were able to get a small skin sample from one. Genetic testing confirmed that they were indeed Sato’s beaked whales. Researchers think the whales may spend at least part of the year in tropical waters, since that’s where cookie cutter sharks live and the whales show circular bite scars from cookie cutter sharks. Not much is known about most species of beaked whale, and Sato’s beaked whale is especially mysterious. But at least we know it’s alive and well right now. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Yes, this is a NEW episode! Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions this week. (Actual episode starts at 3 minutes 28 seconds.) Find the Backerkit campaign here ! Further reading: Nix Illlustration: Esconichthys The southern hognose snake [picture by Caudatejake – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: A beach wolf spider [photo by Memer15151 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Oviraptor may have looked kind of like this when alive [art by PaleoNeolitic – Own work, CC BY 4.0]: Two halves of an esconichthys fossil: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Oh, hi! This is a brand new episode, earlier than I expected! I noticed recently that one of the Patreon episodes I’d scheduled for September is one that I’d already run in the main feed a few years ago. I decided to just make a new episode for this week and move the episode that would have run this week to that September slot, because I have an announcement! For our five-year anniversary I published the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World , with a lot of the entries taken from episodes but also some new topics added. I always intended to do a follow-up for our ten-year anniversary, and have even done a lot of work on it. It’s called Small Mysteries , focusing on smaller mystery animals that don’t get a lot of attention. It’s about half the length of Beyond Bigfoot, all or almost all chapters taken from the podcast. But at this point, I don’t think I have time to finish it. I’m staying very busy and happy, with a part-time job taking care of people’s pets while they’re on vacation, and I’m also writing fiction again. But since that book is half-done, and a lot of people might want a copy even if I don’t add much more to it, I’m going to make it available as an ebook only. Do you remember last time I made a crowdfunding campaign, and the people who backed the campaign got a copy of the book as soon as it was published? I’m doing that again, but NOT for Small Mysteries . It’s for a different book, called The Moonhound , a cozy fantasy set in an alternate reality Smoky Mountains. The main character is a rabbit who moves to the mountains and meets a possum, and they have adventures. Even if this doesn’t interest you, there’s a $1 backer tier and if you click that, you have the option to add the Small Mysteries ebook for $2. That means the book is $3. Does that make sense? I feel like it’s confusing. The campaign starts on July 15, 2026 and runs through August 15, 2026. If you’re listening to the episode before July 15, 2026, you can click through the link in the show notes and follow the campaign, so that you get an email when it goes live. If it’s between July 15 and August 15, 2026, click the link in the show notes and there’s the campaign! If it’s after August 15, 2026, see if there’s a link in the show notes that will take you to a place where you can buy the ebook. Okay, that took way too long, so let’s get to this week’s episode! We have some suggestions that have come in recently, so we’ll cover a few of those animals, and we’ll finish up with a small fossil mystery in honor of the book. Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions! A quick shout-out to Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions too. I’ll get to those in the 500 th episode that will run at the end of August. We’ll start with Viki’s suggestion, the hognose snake. The name hognose is used for various species of snake, most of them in North and South America, but some in Madagascar. It’s a common snake in many parts of North America, so since we talked about the eastern hognose back in episode 81, let’s talk about the southern hognose in this episode. It’s found along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, including parts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida, and because it has a restricted range where people like to live too, it’s vulnerable to habitat loss. It used to live in other states too but its range has shrunk considerably since it was first described in 1766. The southern hognose grows about two feet long, or 61 cm, and like other hognose snakes, its nose turns up like a little pig’s snout. The shape of its nose actually may help it dig into leaf litter and dirt to hide. Some individuals are brown or gray, some are red or yellowish. It has darker blotches on its upper side and adults have white bellies. It has a big head that makes some people believe it’s venomous, but it’s actually harmless to humans and most animals. The only animals that really need to worry about the hognose are amphibians, like toads, frogs, and salamanders, although it will also eat lizards, small mammals like mice, and even large insects. It especially likes to eat toads, and while some toads are toxic, the hognose snake is resistant to toad toxins. A toad will frequently puff itself up to make it appear larger and make it hard for a snake to swallow, but the hognose has a solution for that too. It has big teeth at the rear of its upper jaws, like fangs in the back of its mouth. It uses those teeth to puncture puffed-up toads so they deflate, just like a horrible balloon. But the most memorable thing about the hognose is what it does when it feels threatened. Phase one is aggression. The snake will flatten its neck to look more threatening, raise its head like a cobra, and hiss and strike—but without biting. It’s just trying to scare you away. If that doesn’t work, the snake puts phase two into effect. It will flop down and roll onto its back like it’s dead, its tongue hanging out of its mouth. It even emits a foul musky smell from its cloaca. If you call its bluff and roll drama queen snake onto its belly, it will turn onto its back again, because it’s really insistent that it’s dead. Since we’ve already scared away a lot of people who don’t like snakes, let’s learn about a spider next. Grace suggested we talk about the wolf spider, and also wonders if wolf spiders live in northern California. Wolf spiders are common throughout the world, and while they look scary, they bite people very rarely and their venom is weak, no worse than a bee sting. The wolf spider with the biggest legspan is Hogna ingens , with a legspan less than 5 inches across, or 12 cm. It lives on one island in the Maderia archipelago, and is a beautiful soft gray with white stripes on the legs. The Carolina wolf spider is the most common one found in North America. A big female can have a legspan of four inches, or 10 cm, but its body is not much more than an inch long, or 35 mm, and the spider actually weighs less than an ounce. That’s barely 28 grams, or just a little heavier than five sheets of printer paper. The wolf spider is a hunting spider, mostly solitary, and most species don’t spin webs. When a female lays her eggs, she attaches the egg case to the underside of her abdomen so she can take them with her while she hunts insects. When the eggs hatch, the teensy babies ride around on the top of her abdomen for a few weeks until they’re big enough to not need their mother’s protection. Some species of wolf spider will dig a burrow to rest in, and will jump out and grab any insect that happens by, while other species of wolf spider rest in rock crevices and other small spaces. Males are smaller than females and often have flashier patterns. The Carolina wolf spider is mainly gray or brown with darker and lighter longitudinal stripes down the head and body. Most species of wolf spider won’t come into your house, but if you do have a wolf spider in your house, you should actually consider yourself lucky. They love to eat cockroaches and ants, which are house pests. The wolf spider hunts mostly by sight and has good vision, and its eyes will even demonstrate eyeshine of various colors, depending on species, if you shine a flashlight around in the dark. Maybe don’t do that if you’re afraid of spiders. And yes, there are wolf spiders in northern California, because there are wolf spiders in just about every part of the world except for Antarctica! Northern California actually has at least six species of wolf spider. One species does actually build a web, and there’s even a species that lives on the beach. That’s the beach wolf spider, which is a pale sandy color with darker and lighter stripes to help it blend in with sand and pebbles. It’s quite small but it moves really fast, and it’s mostly nocturnal. It lives not just in northern California but throughout beaches in North and Central America. Next, Eesa sent a list of suggested animals, including oviraptor. I could have sworn we already covered oviraptor, but we haven’t! It’s a really interesting dinosaur, so let’s take a look now. Oviraptor is a name that means “egg thief,” and it got this name because it was found near fossilized eggs. It lived in what is now Asia about 75 million years ago, and the first specimen was found in Mongolia (still my favorite country) back in 1923. The partial specimen was found lying across a nest of dinosaur eggs. When the dinosaur was described in 1924, it was given the name egg thief because the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn assumed it died while robbing a nest to eat the eggs. But even Osborn wrote that he might be wrong about the dinosaur, and in the 1990s new discoveries of oviraptor nesting sites proved this was the case. Oviraptor wasn’t stealing eggs, it was protecting them, because they were its own eggs. It probably actually ate fruit, seeds, and other plant material, along with small animals like lizards. Oviraptor was a small dinosaur that was a little more than six feet long, or about 2 meters, and was the height of a medium to large dog. It walked on its hind legs. It had feathers on its arms and tail, and probably also had feathers over much of its body. It didn’t have teeth but it did have a beak that would have probablylooked a lot like a parrot’s beak. Its arms had three small claws but probably looked a lot like a wing in many ways, although scientists don’t think oviraptor could fly. In other words, oviraptor probably looked a lot like a big, weird chicken, and like a chicken and many other birds, scientists think it sat on its eggs to keep them warm. When a bird incubates its eggs, it’s not like you dropping down to sit on a chair. The bird’s feet are typically on either side of the eggs, and the bird squats down carefully so that its underside makes gentle contact with the eggs without crushing them. Female chickens and many other birds have a spot on the lower breast that doesn’t have any feathers, called a brood patch, which contains extra blood vessels just under the skin. This helps keep the eggs warm and is a soft part of the hen’s body, which helps cushion the eggs. We don’t know, but it’s possible oviraptor had something similar to a brood patch, and its feathered arms and tail also helped protect the eggs from cold air and rain. We now have numerous specimens that died while sitting on nests, probably buried in sandstorms, so we know that oviraptor basically brooded its nest the way modern birds do. Finally, let’s finish with our small mystery fossil. It’s called Esconichthys apopyris and it lived about 308 million years ago in what is now the state of Illinois in North America. 308 million years ago, Illinois was a tropical area and partly covered by a warm, shallow sea. In a particular place known as the Mazon Creek formation, for a few million years conditions were just right to preserve dead animals and plants in astounding detail. A river carried dead plant materials and mud into an estuary along the ocean’s edge, where it sank and settled to the bottom of the sea floor. When an animal died, if 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 also present in the mud, which formed a mineral called siderite. This mineral encased the dead animal and slowed decay long enough for a detailed impression of the body to form in the mud. 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 the area, even though soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossil evidence. Mazon Creek is where the Tully monster lived, which we talked about in episode 339, but the Tully monster isn’t the only mystery animal discovered there. Another one was Esconichthys. We have lots of Esconichthys fossils, partly because it seems to have been extremely common, but also because it was a vertebrate. That means it had a notochord, a type of backbone. Most of the fossils we have are body impressions, so we do know a lot about what Esconichthys looked like when it was alive. What we don’t know is what it actually was. Esconichthys was named for the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois, ESCONI, and the latter half of its name means fish. But it doesn’t actually seem to have been a fish, even a larval fish. It grew up to about 3 inches long, or 8 cm, and had a pair of very obvious eyes, two pairs of feathery external gills, and a single fin on the underside of its tail. It didn’t have legs or any other fins. Some individuals had wide-set eyes, others had eyes that are close together, which may indicate two separate species, but we don’t know. Esconichthys fossils are sometimes referred to as ghosts, because the limbless body with two dots for eyes does kind of look like a cartoon ghost. Other people call Esconichthys fossils grasshoppers or blades. This is because the animal’s gills were quite long and are often preserved pointing away from the rest of the body, or sometimes the rear of the body is folded upward. This can make it look roughly like a grasshopper or a pocket knife with one blade unfolded. Esconichthys has been proposed as a larval lungfish or a larval amphibian, but it doesn’t really match either animal group. It’s the most common fossil found at the Mazon Creek formation by far, preserved in amazing detail, but scientists still have no idea what it is or what it might be related to. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. Thanks for listening!

Further reading: Giant early whale Basilosaurus hunted the calves of other whales Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s look at some extinct whale ancestors this month, basilosaurids. We talked about the ancestors of whales in episode 72, about weird whales. After mosasaurs went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, basilosaurids evolved to fill the ecological niche they left. Mosasaurs were big marine reptiles while basilosaurids were big marine mammals, but in many ways basilosaurids looked more like mosasaurs than they did modern whales. Basilosaurids differed from their ancestors in that they were fully aquatic. They didn’t come out of the water at all and probably couldn’t. They did still have hind legs, but they were tiny and scientists think the animal probably only used the legs to help stay in place while mating. The hind legs were really small in comparison to the body, only 14 inches long, or 35 cm, in a 52-foot specimen, or 16 meters. Tyrannosaurus rex would look at that and say, “you’ve got really small legs, bruh.” Its front legs were larger and more flipper-like, although it still had an elbow joint that modern whales have lost, although modern seals still have an elbow joint. The reason Basilosaurids have a name that sounds an awful lot like a dinosaur name is because the person who described the first one scientifically thought it was a reptile. That was a man named Richard Harlan, an early paleontologist, who thought the fossils he was sent belonged to a marine reptile, possibly a mosasaur relation. In 1839 he named it Basilosaurus, which means “king lizard.” Then he took the fossils to another Richard, Richard Owen, who gave them a second look. Owen pointed out that the teeth didn’t look anything like reptile teeth and that the animal was probably some kind of whale. He and Harlan decided to rename the animal Zeuglodon, but it was too late! The first name was published, and Basilosaurus stayed king lizard despite not being a reptile. That didn’t stop many paleontologists from using Zeuglodon instead for quite a while, which has caused all kinds of confusion. Fossils of that particular species are especially common in the southern United States, so common in some places that the fossilized vertebrae were sometimes used as house supports. We talked about Basilosaurus in the paleontological frauds episode, because bones from six different basilosaurs formed the fake sea serpent skeleton exhibited around the United States and Europe in 1845. Basilosaurus did look a little bit like a sea serpent in that it was very long and relatively slender, and its body wasn’t rigid like a modern whale’s. It grew up to 66 feet long, or 20 meters, and probably longer, and is sometimes described as eel-like. It probably had small flukes at the end of the tail, but it didn’t swim like a modern whale. Its vertebrae were large, hollow, and filled with fluid. This made Basilosaurus buoyant but probably also meant it had trouble diving very deeply. There are only two species in the genus Basilosaurus, although there are lots of other Basilosaurids in other genera. The other Basilosaurus was slightly smaller and is most well known from an incredible bone bed in Egypt called Wadi al Hitan. Around 35 million years ago, Wadi al Hitan was a shallow coastal area full of life. It wouldn’t have looked all that weird to us at first glance, because a lot of the animals and plants that lived there were early relations of the ones that are still around today. These included sea cows that ate marine plants, various crocodilians, sea turtles, sea snakes, lots of birds, including pelicans, and lots of fish, including sawfish, sharks, and rays. There was even a kind of elephant living along the coast of this warm, shallow sea, Moeritherium, which probably looked more like a hippo or tapir than an elephant. There were also whales, specifically a type of dolphin-like animal called Dorudon. Dorudon was also a basilosaurid, but it only grew about 16 feet long, or 5 meters. It ate fish and other small animals and probably looked a lot like a miniature Basilosaurus—in fact, it was initially thought to be a juvenile Basilosaurus when it was first discovered. Dorudon may actually be a direct ancestor of modern whales, although we don’t know for sure. Paleontologists think Dorudon used Wadi al Hitan as a calving ground. About half of the Dorudon fossils found there are of calves. But there are also fossils of Basilosaurus, and it was there to hunt. In 2016, a complete skeleton of a Basilosaurus was discovered at Wadi al Hitan. Complete skeletons are incredibly rare in the fossil record, and this one was beautifully preserved. It even had the remains of its last meals preserved in the space that had once been its stomach, the first time preserved stomach contents had ever been found associated with a basilosaurus. Paleontologists knew Basilosaurus was a meat-eater because of its teeth, but they assumed it probably mostly ate fish. There were remains of a big fish in the stomach, but there were also remains of two young Dorudons. The remains are in pieces with bite marks on the skulls, which suggests that basilosaurus hunted like orcas do, where they bite the skulls of humpback whale calves. Basilosaurids had small brains compared to modern whales and didn’t have the adaptations that would indicate it could echolocate. However, it did have a slightly asymmetrical skull, which is something needed for echolocation. Researchers think this was the first adaptation that later led to echolocation, and it probably helped the animal hear better underwater. Finally, one important thing. If a big basilosaurus fought a megalodon shark, who would win? The answer is, this would never happen because megalodon didn’t evolve until 23 million years ago while basilosaurids all died out by about 33 million years ago. Sorry, I’m no fun. Also, megalodon would have won because megalodon was a better swimmer. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: http://messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-equines.htm Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I stumbled across an interesting mystery animal recently and thought it would make a great topic for a Patreon episode. It’s supposed to be a hybrid animal, but as we’ll soon learn, it can’t possibly be what it’s said to be. The animal is called a jumar or jumart, or sometimes a kumrah. The oldest record of a jumar dates to 1546 but there are many other accounts up to the beginning of the 20th century. The jumar is supposed to be the hybrid offspring of a horse and a cow, usually a bull and a mare. Sometimes it was supposed to be the offspring of a bull and a donkey mare. Whatever its supposed origins, the jumar was said to look like a horse except for cow-like hindquarters and head, although with no horns. The hooves were usually solid like a horse’s hooves but occasionally cloven. A jumar was supposed to be stronger but smaller than an ordinary mule, which is a cross between a horse and a donkey. There are plenty of reports of jumars, including individuals examined by naturalists, so it’s obviously a real animal. Could it really be a horse-cow hybrid? How closely related are horses and cows, anyway? Not closely related AT ALL. The horse is almost as closely related to whales as it is to cows. They belong to totally different orders, and if you remember from the hybrids episode, it’s unusual for a hybrid to result from animals that share a genus, but extremely rare for animals that only share a family. Order is a step above family. There is literally no way that a horse and a cow could crossbreed successfully, but if somehow they did, the baby would not survive long enough to be born. So the jumar can’t be a horse-cow hybrid, but at the same time, the jumar was a real animal. So what was it? The first hint of a solution came from a French naturalist who lived in the 18th century. He wrote in 1771 about two dead jumars he bought and dissected. Both of them turned out to be ordinary mules. Specifically, they were hinnies, which are the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Most mules are offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Part of the reason that the hinny is a less common hybrid is because of the differences in chromosomes between horses and donkeys. Horses have 64 chromosomes, donkeys have 62. Mules and hinnies have 63 and are almost always sterile. In the case of a pair of animals with mismatched chromosomes, a baby is more likely to result when the father has the lower chromosome count, as is the case with the male donkey. A male horse has more chromosomes than a female donkey, so it’s less likely that a baby will result. Hinnies are almost always smaller than horses or mules because the mother donkey is a smaller animal than the mother horse. Like any other animal, mules are sometimes born with genetic issues that may affect their appearance. One relatively common issue is a type of dwarfism that can affect certain bones in the body, which makes the animal’s conformation look different from an ordinary mule’s. A disorder called chondrodysplasia, which can have a number of different causes, results in the upper portion of the animal’s skull being underdeveloped. This means its face appears dished like a cow’s face, its upper jaw may be much shorter than its lower jaw, and its eye sockets and forehead may look more cow-like too. It’s most likely, then, that jumars are just horses, mules, or hinnies with a genetic abnormality. That would also explain why no one talks about jumars anymore. These days if a weird-looking foal is born, the owner calls the vet, who recognizes a genetic issue right away. In the olden days people didn’t know what caused genetic issues and assumed it had something to do with parentage. If a mare had a baby that looked a little bit like a cow in some ways, that must be because its father was a bull. If you remember the Patreon episode we had a long time ago about horses with extra hooves on one or more feet, it’s probable that this is the trait leading to reports of jumars with cloven hooves. We even have one account from 1830 by a veterinarian who examined a jumar who had three legs with ordinary horse hooves but one leg with a cloven hoof that looked like a cow’s. That’s pretty much it for the jumar, but a quick reminder as we finish talking about hybrid horses and donkeys, if you cross a zebra with a donkey, the resulting offspring has stripes and is called a zedonk, my favorite word. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Faceless Fish and the deep-sea voyages that found it Long-Lost 'Faceless' Fish Shows Up Near Australia Ipnops: The faceless cusk [photo taken from the second article linked above]: A tripod fish: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s a fish episode! These are also deep-sea fish, and you know how much I love deep-sea animals. Let’s talk first about some fish in the family Ipnopidae, including one deep-sea fish with the pleasing name of Ipnops. We know of three species of ipnops so far, but there may be more that scientists just haven’t found yet. Some scientists think there’s actually only one species, since all three species look almost identical but just live in different parts of the deep sea. Ipnops is sometimes called the grideye spiderfish. If you don’t know what it looks like, you may think the word spider in its name is the weird part. It’s not, and in fact I’m not sure where that comes from. It could be that the fish’s transparent fins look kind of like spiderwebs. Other fish in its family are called spiderfish too but are also sometimes called lizardfish. It feels like someone was in a goofy mood when naming these fish and just started saying random animal names. Ipnops only grows a little over 6 inches long at most, or 16 cm. It’s slender for its size, although its head is wider than its body. Its head is black but the color fades on the body until the tail is light gray. No, the weird thing about ipnops is its eyes. It doesn’t precisely have eyes, certainly not eyeballs. Instead it just has a thin layer of retinal cells spread across a divot in the top of its head, also called a photosensitive membrane or plate. These plates show up as yellow against the black head. Researchers think the fish can’t see the way we think of seeing, but it can probably sense bioluminescent light. Since it lives at the bottom of the deep sea where little to no light penetrates from the surface, it makes sense that ipnops doesn’t really need eyes. We still don’t know very much about ipnops or most of its relatives. It eats small crustaceans and all individuals produce both eggs and sperm. Ipnops eggs hatch into tiny larval fish that live near the surface of the ocean and have extremely large ordinary eyeballs. How these eyeballs transform into a retinal membrane is a mystery known only to ipnops. The family that ipnops belongs to, Ipnopidae, includes many species that are called tripod fish, and tripod fish are very weird too even though they have regular eyeballs, usually tiny ones. There are quite a few tripodfish known, many of them only discovered recently by deep-sea rovers. Most are no larger than ipnops, but some have fins that are much longer than their body. This is the case for the tripod spiderfish—look, it’s another spiderfish—that lives at the bottom of the deep sea in many parts of the world. It’s been found at a depth of almost 3 miles, or 4,700 meters, which is so deep that it’s also sometimes called the abyssal spiderfish, although that’s also a name given to a different type of tripod fish that’s closely related. It’s big compared to many of its close relations, up to 17 inches long, or 43 cm, but its fins can grow over a yard long, or about a meter. Its tail and pelvic fins have elongated rays that allow it to stand on the bottom of the ocean, and since the bottom of the ocean is usually pretty oozy and muddy, it needs the fins to be really long so it doesn’t end up sinking into the ooze. It also has little pads on the end of the fins that help keep it from sinking. Scientists think the struts that lengthen the rays can be stiffened so that the fish can stand on them for long periods of time, but when the fish needs to swim, it can loosen the struts so they’re flexible. If you’re not familiar with the word tripod, it means ‘three feet’ or ‘three legs.’ You’ve probably seen one before because that’s the thing that people use to prop up a camera. A camera tripod has three long legs that you can adjust so that your camera sits at just the right height to take good pictures, and it’s sturdy so the camera won’t shake. This is exactly how the tripodfish uses its elongated fins except that it’s not taking pictures. It’s just trying to find food. It stands motionless facing into the current, and spreads its pectoral fins out. It can’t see in the darkness of its deep-sea home, but it feels small fish or crustaceans that come near and stumble into its fins. It uses the pectoral fins to guide the animal toward its mouth, and then it goes chomp with its needle-like teeth. Like ipnops, the tripodfish produces both eggs and sperm and can fertilize its own eggs if it can’t find a mate. This is important in the deep sea, especially when your main way of finding food is standing completely still for very long periods of time. Another weird fish isn’t related to the family Ipnopidae. It’s called the faceless cusk or faceless cusk-eel, because its body is shaped sort of like an eel’s. Like ipnops, its body is slender but its head is larger, and in fact quite a lot larger in the case of the faceless cusk. Its head is rounded and bulbous, and the fish looks at first glance like it doesn’t have any of the ordinary sensory organs we expect to find on a face, except for nostrils. The faceless cusk’s mouth is tiny and is on the underside of its head, with the head actually drooping down so that it hides the mouth. It has eyes, but they’re covered in skin and only visible in small individuals. It has a pale body but black fins and it can grow more than 18 inches long, or over 46 cm. The faceless cusk is a deep-sea fish and was discovered in 1874. This was when the HMS Challenger expedition brought one up in its dredging nets from a depth of about two and a half miles down, or over 4 km. After that it wasn’t seen again until 1951, when a different scientific expedition collected five individuals. In 2017, yet another scientific expedition, this one off the eastern coast of Australia, found a weird-looking fish that looked like it didn’t have a proper face. The scientists could tell it was a type of cusk-eel, but not one they’d ever heard of. It wasn’t until one of the expedition members was flipping through an old book about the Challenger expedition that they realized this fish was already known to science. We know almost nothing about the faceless cusk. We don’t even know what it eats or how it finds its food. It lives near the bottom of the sea where the water is barely above freezing temperature. The deepest-living fish ever discovered is a different species of cusk-eel. It’s been found living in the Puerto Rico Trench over 5 miles below the ocean’s surface, or 8 km. It’s called Abyssobrotula galatheae and it typically only grows about 6 inches long, or 15 cm. It resembles the faceless cusk in many ways even though they belong to different genera. It has tiny eyes that are covered with skin and probably don’t function, its mouth is also tiny and is underneath its head, and its head is oversized compared to its slender body and droops to hide the mouth. It’s mostly yellowish in color. We know a little more about Abyssobrotula than we do the faceless cusk. It eats polychaete worms along with small crustaceans, which it finds on the ocean floor. Even though its mouth is quite small, it has lots of pointy teeth that help keep its prey from escaping once it bites down. Because the faceless cusk is so similar, it’s probable that it eats the same type of food. The great thing about the fish we’ve talked about today is that they’re not especially spectacular. They’re just regular fish doing regular fish things, they just happen to be adapted to the deep sea. Because the deep sea is such an extreme environment in many ways, the fish evolve to look and act very different from the fish we’re used to seeing. If we lived in the deep sea ourselves, we’d probably look at a trout and think it was the weirdest fish we’d ever seen. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: https://elephantartgallery.com/blogs/meet Desmond Morris with his favorite Congo painting: Peter/Pierre Brassau and some of his paintings: The so-called donkey painting, and I described it wrong in the episode: Pockets at work: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the early days of the podcast I did an episode about animal musicians, which for a long time was my favorite episode. Today let’s visit a similar topic, animals who are visual artists. Back in the 1950s through the 60s, researchers studying how humans make art studied monkeys and apes who were taught how to use a brush and paints. The studies caught the public’s fancy and it became something of a fad to own a piece of art created by an animal—whether it was a monkey or ape, an elephant, or some other animal. One of the earliest big name animal artists was a chimpanzee named Congo. Zoologist Desmond Morris, who was studying creativity in apes and humans, and who was also an artist himself, offered Congo a pencil and paper when he was two years old in 1956. Congo enjoyed drawing and especially liked to draw circles. When Morris eventually gave the chimp paints, Congo was even more enthusiastic. But while he was considered a novelty, he only had one art exhibition while he was alive, a 1957 event arranged by Morris. It wasn’t until 2005 that the remaining paintings were exhibited, along with the art of some other apes, and some of them sold for thousands of dollars. A new exhibit appeared in December of 2019 in the Mayor Gallery in London. One interesting thing is that Morris worked with several apes to see how they drew and painted, but only Congo showed enthusiasm and skill for art. Congo died of tuberculosis in 1964 when he was only ten years old. Also in 1964, a French avant-garde artist named Pierre Brassau exhibited four of his paintings at an art show in Sweden. No one knew who Brassau was, but his paintings were critically acclaimed—except for one critic who wrote, “Only an ape could have done this.” Ahem, yes. That is correct. The artist turned out to be a West African chimpanzee named Peter who lived in a zoo in Sweden. The whole thing started with a Swedish journalist who apparently wasn’t much of a fan of modern art. The journalist persuaded a zookeeper to give Peter a canvas, paints, and brush. At first Peter just ate the paint, but eventually he started making marks on the canvas. The journalist ultimately chose four of the paintings and submitted them to the exhibition under the name Pierre Brassau. One of the paintings sold for the equivalent of about $750 today. But animal artists making modern art isn’t limited to the 1950s and 60s. In 1905 a painting by an unknown artist, J.R. Boronali, went on display in a Parisian salon. It didn’t cause any kind of stir, though, because it was nothing special, until 1910 when word got out that the painting had been made by a donkey. According to the story, an art critic tied a paintbrush to the donkey’s tail and fed the donkey carrots, which made it wag its tail, which dabbed paint on a canvas. I’ve seen the painting, though, and it seems clear that a human artist prepped the canvas by slapping a coat of background paint on it that resembles a red sea and blue sky. There are some dabs and blobs of paint over that in yellow and red, presumably from the donkey. In this case, of course, the donkey wasn’t trying to paint a picture and didn’t even know what was going on behind it, just that it was getting lots of carrots. An avant-garde Russian school of art named itself The Donkey’s Tail in 1912 as a result, though, so that’s pretty neat. More recently, a capuchin monkey named Pockets has become a big-name artist in the animal world. Pockets was donated to a Canadian animal sanctuary after his owner finally realized that capuchin monkeys are wild animals and don’t actually make very good pets. One of the volunteers at the sanctuary gave Pockets the nickname Warhol because of his white hair, which reminded her of the artist Andy Warhol. That gave her the idea to give Pockets some paints and see what he would do with them. It turns out that Pockets really likes to paint. In 2011 the sanctuary held an exhibit of his paintings to help raise money, and since then his paintings have been exhibited in art shows around the world. He’s collaborated with a human artist, who basically paints something and then gives the canvas to Pockets to add to it. His art recently appeared on the cover of an album released by a member of Depeche Mode too. Not all animal artists are apes or monkeys, though. Bini the Bunny stars in a lot of videos where he plays basketball, dances, plays the guitar, and does a lot of other things you would not expect a bunny to do. He also paints. Bini, of course, has been trained to make certain movements, including picking up a paintbrush in his mouth and moving it upward with the paint-covered bristles sometimes touching a canvas, but sometimes not. Bini isn’t choosing what paint colors to use and doesn’t even really look at the canvas while he’s working. He’s cute, but he’s not making art spontaneously the way Pockets and his predecessors do. Elephants also make art, holding a paintbrush with the tip of the trunk. The most famous elephant artist was named Ruby, an Asian elephant who lived at the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona in the United States, although she was born in Thailand in 1973. When her keepers saw her using a stick to draw in the dirt, they gave her painting supplies to see what she would do with them. Ruby enjoyed painting, choosing her colors carefully, and some of her paintings sold for as much as $25,000. Ruby died from complications of a failed pregnancy in 1998, sadly. So many artists die young. Sometimes you’ll see videos of elephants painting a picture of an elephant, but these aren’t spontaneously created. The elephant has always been taught to make the same brush strokes, and sometimes the training is cruel. An authentic elephant painting looks abstract, with lines and dots that the elephant places in a shape it finds pleasing, not to resemble something specific. This is the same with ape and monkey artists too. If you listened to the episode about animal musicians, you will probably remember the Thai Elephant Orchestra. Well, the same conservation center that hosts the elephant orchestra also has some elephant artists. The Elephant Art Gallery sells paintings made by various of the elephants who live in the sanctuary. They’re allowed to choose their own paints and decide if they want to paint at all that day. Elephants who don’t show interest in learning to paint don’t have to try, and instead get to do different activities. The main difference between human art and art made by non-human animals is that humans naturally create representational art without being taught. Little kids draw wobbly stick people with big smiles and no one has to show them how. Humans can make abstract art, of course, but a skilled abstract artist chooses colors, textures, and patterns carefully to invoke a feeling in the people who look at the finished painting. This is different from a little kid finger-painting who is just having fun making a mess, although of course you can make art with finger paints too. Animals never create representational art spontaneously, and we can’t know if their choice of colors, textures, and patterns is intended to invoke a particular feeling because we can’t ask them. (I mean, we can ask them but they wouldn’t understand the question and we wouldn’t get an answer.) But it does seem obvious that animals who enjoy painting and who make deliberate marks on paper or canvas are taking pleasure from the process of creation. And when you come right down to it, that’s the most important thing about making art. Finally, you may remember the court case about the monkey selfie from 2014. Nature photographer David Slater was taking pictures in a nature reserve in Indonesia when he stepped away from his camera, which was set up on a tripod. A Celebes crested macaque monkey investigated the camera and ended up taking a number of photos, one of which was a selfie that became almost instantly famous online. Slater tried to claim copyright to get paid for the photograph as it became more and more popular. In August of 2014 the United States Copyright Office decided that the owner of camera equipment can’t claim copyright for a photo taken by an animal. Neither can the owner of an animal who takes a photograph or otherwise produces artwork. Only a human can hold copyright, but if the human doesn’t actually create the art, they don’t get the copyright. Hey, this would be a great day to make a drawing or a painting! Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Is the Javan tiger Panthera tigris sondaica extant? DNA analysis of a recent hair sample The Sunda tiger [photo by Alfonsopazphoto - Own workAnimaisFotos, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16029853]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re going to learn about a mystery tiger this month, but first we have to learn about the place where it’s supposed to live. Java is a large island that was formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago, and it’s been home to humans and our ancestors for over a million years. Its soil is rich and the climate is tropical, but the island’s ecosystems include tall mountains, savannas, rainforests, and mangrove forests. Naturally, lots and lots of animals live on Java that are found nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people live on Java too, which means that many animals and their habitats are threatened by habitat loss and pollution. Many animals have gone extinct in the last few hundred years. That includes the Java tiger. The Java tiger was small compared to tigers in other areas, although even a small tiger is a big animal. A big male tiger can grow about ten feet long, or 3 meters, and the Java tiger could grow about 8 feet long, or almost two and a half meters. The Java tiger was lightly built, though, and rarely weighed much more than 300 pounds, or about 140 kilograms. Despite its relatively small size, it was extremely strong and had paws as big as the much larger Bengal tiger. It also had lots of thin stripes. Originally scientists thought the Java tiger was a separate subspecies of tiger, but in 2017 it was reclassified as a population of Sunda tigers that have only been isolated from other populations for around 12,000 years. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important, though. It showed differences from other Sunda tigers that weren’t yet significant enough to warrant it being a separate subspecies, but which definitely indicated it was on its way to evolving into a separate subspecies. Unfortunately, the Java tiger’s habitat was largely destroyed to make way for farming and logging, and as a result its usual prey animals became rare or went extinct. People would also poison or shoot any tiger they could. It only survived in a few small nature preserves, but the last tiger footprints were spotted in 1989 and since then, no tigers have been officially seen on Java. A 1999 expedition that set up camera traps in hopes of spotting a few tigers mostly got photos of poachers hunting in what was supposed to be a protected area. The Java tiger was declared extinct. Rumors persisted that tigers still lived on Java, though. Sometimes I think people claim to see recently extinct animals as a way to feel less guilty about humans having driven an animal to extinction. But in 2019 someone saw a tiger outside a village in western Java and reported the sighting to some local foresters. The foresters investigated and discovered footprints, claw marks, and a single hair on a fence. The foresters collected the hair carefully and gave it to a team of geologists who were working in the area. The geologists sent it to the West Java Nature Conservation Authority, which sent it for genetic analysis. They also sent some tiger hairs from other types of tigers to compare it to, including hairs from a museum specimen of a tiger killed on Java in 1930. The hair discovered in 2019 was definitely from a tiger, and its genetic signature most closely matched the genetic signature of the 1930 Java tiger specimen. This doesn’t 100% mean the Java tiger isn’t extinct, but it does mean that there’s hope that it’s still around. Java is part of Indonesia these days, and a few days ago as this episode goes live, the Indonesian government announced a plan to search for signs of the tiger, with an expedition getting underway soon to place camera traps. Conservationists are hoping that the tiger is discovered, which will allow it to be protected. The Sunda tiger is critically endangered, only surviving in the wild on the island of Sumatra, with possibly fewer than 400 of them left alive. Another population of Sunda tigers, the Bali tiger, was declared extinct in the 1940s. A few hundred captive tigers living in zoos around the world show congenital health issues as a result of inbreeding. If the Java tiger is still alive, it could mean the difference between extinction and survival of the entire Sunda tiger subspecies. Fingers crossed that the camera traps reveal a healthy, safe population of tigers on Java! Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: What gives bees their sweet tooth? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Right before I left on my trip to Belize a few months ago, my aunt Janice gave me a magazine to read on the plane, the Autumn 2021 copy of LivingBird. It’s about birds and birdwatching. I actually forgot to take it with me and it was in my car the whole time I was gone, but when I got home I took it in to read. One article caught my eye, titled “Investigating the Sweet Tooth of Songbirds.” Literally the same day that I read that article, I stumbled across another article on ScienceDaily titled “What gives bees their sweet tooth?” And a podcast episode idea was born! You may have heard that domestic cats can’t taste sweetness, and that’s true. When your pet cat wants to drink the milk in a bowl of sugary cereal, it’s not the sugar they care about because they can’t taste it. Also, milk isn’t good for cats and even if they can’t taste the sugar, it can end up giving them cavities. The question is, why don’t cats taste sweetness? And what other animals can’t taste it either? Carnivores like cats don’t need to taste sweet flavors because it’s just not present in meat, which is what carnivores eat. You can test this easily if you put two saucers on the floor for your cat, one with a small amount of unseasoned chicken and a sugar cube in the other. I guarantee you the cat will eat the chicken and play with the sugar cube, which will get sugar all over the floor so maybe don’t do that after all. This is where I share with you, for no reason, that when I was in elementary school I used to eat sugar cubes while pretending I was a horse. Horses can taste sweet flavors like sugar because they’re herbivores. Herbivores eat plants, and in fact herbivores have a whole lot of taste buds so that they can easily tell what kind of plants they’re eating. Bitter tasting plants might be toxic while sweet ones provide lots of energy. Herbivores are also keenly attuned to the taste of salt since their diet is typically low in salt and they need to seek it out. Humans are omnivores, and omnivores eat pretty much anything. Like our great ape cousins, we also evolved to eat a lot of fruit. Ripe fruit tastes sweet so we really like our sweet foods. Omnivores like dogs, pigs, and bears also like sweet foods because they’re high in calories and therefore provide a lot of energy. But how does an animal lose an entire sense of taste? It’s not like all tigers woke up one day and boom, the ability to taste sweetness was gone. It happens gradually as the genes responsible for an animal’s sense of taste mutate over many generations. Let’s take as our example the bottlenose dolphin. The ancestors of the dolphin and other cetaceans were terrestrial animals related to the ancestors of modern even-toed ungulates like hippos, camels, deer, and pigs, and were probably either herbivores or omnivores. But as the dolphin’s ancestors evolved over millions of years, they shifted to a fully marine lifestyle and a fully carnivorous diet. Over the thousands and thousands of generations, the genes that control the ability to taste sweetness mutated so much that they’re now useless, but since the dolphin doesn’t need to taste sweetness the mutations don’t matter. In the case of the bottlenose dolphin and other cetaceans, in fact, they also can’t taste bitterness or umami. Umami is what helps you taste the difference between chicken and turkey, steak and pork, tuna and trout. Basically it’s the flavor of meat or savory foods, including cheeses. You can taste the difference between cheddar and Swiss because of the umami receptors in your taste buds, which are determined by genes. But the dolphin eats nothing but meat! Why would it lose the ability to taste meat? Researchers think it’s because the dolphin swallows fish and other animals whole, without chewing. Cetaceans and other marine carnivores like sea lions that swallow their food whole actually have almost no taste buds at all. If you’re wondering what happens when an animal that can’t taste sweetness has to adapt to a diet where tasting sweet foods is important, that’s exactly what happened with songbirds. The ancestors of birds lost the ability to taste sweetness millions of years ago when they were dinosaurs. Then, well, you know what happened to the non-avian dinosaurs. Suddenly the ancestors of modern birds had a lot of available ecological niches to take advantage of and they evolved rapidly to fill them. This included small birds who eat berries and nectar. Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of songbirds regained the ability to taste sweetness around 30 million years ago in Australia. The same thing happened in hummingbirds at about the same time. In both cases, the genes that control the ability to taste umami evolved to taste sweetness instead—but songbirds and hummingbirds adapted different umami genes. That’s what you call a subtle case of convergent evolution. Songbirds and hummingbirds adapted to a diet high in sugar because it’s a good source of energy and easily found in flowers. In turn, flowers needed to be pollinated and have their seeds spread around, so they evolved to provide even more sugars in nectar and berries. But birds aren’t the only animals that pollinate flowers and are attracted to nectar. Insects can all detect sweetness. However, bees are exceptionally attuned to sweetness and have two taste neurons instead of one per taste bud. Insects don’t have taste buds the same way we do, of course. In mammals, reptiles, and birds, taste buds are located on the tongue, in a few parts of the mouth, and at the top of the throat. In insects, taste receptors can be in any number of places. They’re on an insect’s mouthparts but often also on their feet, legs, and antennae. Some amphibians have taste receptors on the body as well as concentrated in the mouth, and many fish have taste receptors all over their body. Catfish in particular have the most taste buds known, up to 175,000. Humans have about 10,000. Cats only have about 500. Before you start feeling sorry for your cat for not being able to taste sweet foods and not having a great sense of taste in general, cats have a taste receptor we don’t. It’s the water sense. To us, a nice cold glass of water tastes refreshing but doesn’t really have a flavor. A cat or dog, and many other animals whose diet is mostly meat even if they aren’t specifically carnivores, have the ability to taste water in a way we can’t even imagine. Because meat is high in salt content, having taste buds attuned to water helps the animal drink enough water to process all that salt. If you gave me the choice, I’d choose sweetness over the ability to taste water. But my cats would probably disagree. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html The black-naped pheasant-pigeon: Confuciusornis: Show transcript: We’re going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately. The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to the back of the neck, and this bird does have a black neck. It’s a dark blue-black all over, in fact, with reddish-brown wings, a red bill, red eyes, and long yellow legs. It looks almost identical to the other three species of pheasant-pigeons known, although some scientists think they’re subspecies. Those three are the white-naped, the green-naped, and the grey-naped pheasant-pigeons, and if you’re wondering if the spot of color on the back of the neck is the easiest way to tell these birds apart, you are exactly right. All four species are native to parts of New Guinea or small islands nearby. Pheasant-pigeons look a lot like pheasants and are about the size of a chicken, although they’re actually pigeons. They live in forests and eat seeds and fruit, and while they can fly they spend almost all of the time on the ground. We don’t know a whole lot about them because they’re so secretive and hard to spot in the wild, although the white-naped and green-naped birds are sometimes kept in zoos. In the case of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, all scientists knew about it was from two specimens collected in 1882. It hadn’t been seen since...until September of 2022. A team of scientists visited Fergusson Island off the east coast of Papua New Guinea in September, as part of a worldwide collaboration of scientists called The Search for Lost Birds. This is similar to the Search for Lost Frogs that has been active for over a decade, discovering lots of new amphibians and rediscovering even more. The 2022 search was actually a follow-up to a 2019 expedition that had failed to find the bird, although it did make other discoveries. In 2022, the team brought more people and equipment, determined to make the best effort possible to find the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. They consulted with local hunters to find the best places to search, and talked to lots of residents to see if anyone had seen one, and spent day after day hiking through forested mountains. For weeks they had no luck. Then, in a remote mountain village, they finally met some people who were familiar with the bird. One man led them to the right part of the forest and they set up camera traps, but at that point they only had a few days left before they had to leave the island. When they checked the pictures captured by the camera traps, though, they’d found it! Two of the cameras had taken pictures and video of what were definitely black-naped pheasant-pigeons, and since the cameras were several kilometers apart the pictures were probably of different individuals. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon wasn’t extinct, which means it can be protected. Habitat loss, especially from commercial logging, and feral domestic cats are the two main threats to birds in the area. The other bird we’re going to talk about today hasn’t been seen in even longer: 119 million years, in fact. The article about this fossil was only released a few days ago as this episode goes live. You can check the show notes for links to this article and a good one about the pheasant-pigeon too. Paleontologists discovered the bird’s fossil remains in northeastern China, in fossil beds that contain incredibly well-preserved animals and plants. The Jiufotang Formation in China dates to the early Cretaceous, between about 122 and 119 million years ago, and researchers think it’s from an area that was once a shallow lake surrounded by forests. Every so often, a nearby volcano would erupt and the resulting ash would fall into the lake, causing anoxic conditions that helped preserve animals that died and sank into the mud at the bottom of the lake. There are lots of fish, pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs among the fossils discovered, most of them small but a few quite large. This includes a type of tyrannosaur that probably grew around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. A few early mammals have been discovered too. In one case, the remains of 40 individual birds were found on one big slab of stone, and scientists think an entire flock of birds was killed by a volcanic ashfall or poisonous gases from the volcano. The newly described fossil we’re talking about today was almost complete and almost completely articulated, preserved with the impression of feathers around its body. The bird has been named Confuciusornis shifan and was a little smaller than a modern crow. It had a toothless beak and a short tail, although it probably had long tail feathers. Other Confuciusornis species have been discovered with the impressions of long tail plumes. All of the Confuciusornis fossils discovered so far were birds that could fly well but probably nowhere near as well as any bird today. But C. shifan had an adaptation in its wings not seen in any other bird, living or extinct. It had a small extra bone in the wing that acted like a cushion and probably helped the wings withstand the stresses of flight. The most interesting thing about the different Confuciusornis species is that if we could go back in time and see them when they were alive, they probably wouldn’t have looked unusual to most people, except to bird experts who would instantly freak out. For the most part, they just looked like birds. Some specimens show preserved melanosomes under electron microscopy that indicate the feathers were various colors including white, brown, red, and black. There’s even evidence of a pattern of spots and streaks on some feathers. Their feet were adapted for perching the way many modern songbird feet are. But Confuciusornis wasn’t a direct ancestor of modern birds as far as we know. Even though we have lots of beautifully preserved Confuciusornis fossils, the fossils can only tell us so much. We have a pretty good idea of what the birds looked like, but we don’t know much about how they lived. One specimen was found with the remains of a tiny fish inside its body, so researchers think the birds may have eaten fish or might have just been omnivores that weren’t picky about what they ate. One specimen was found with an egg beside it that was the right size to have fit through its pelvic opening, but we can’t know for sure if the egg belonged to the bird or was from another bird and just happened to have settled near the dead bird when it fell in the water. Still, even though we only have fossil remains, that’s much better than having no knowledge of these early birds at all. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading: Rare pterosaur fossil reveals crocodilian bite 76m years ago Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a type of pterosaur that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now Canada, and we’ll specifically learn about an individual young pterosaur that had a very bad day, a bad day that’s preserved in the fossil record. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, but weren’t actually dinosaurs. Some of them got as big as small airplanes while some were barely the size of chickens. Cryodrakon was one of the biggest ones, with an estimated wingspan of 33 feet, or 10 meters, for an adult animal—maybe even bigger. We don’t know the adults’ size for sure because we only have a few fossils of adult Cryodrakons, and those are incomplete. Mostly we have fossils of young individuals. The older juveniles had a wingspan of around 16 feet, or 5 meters, which is still pretty darn big. Cryodrakon was the first pterosaur discovered in Canada, with fossils found in Alberta in 1972. Since then more fossils have been discovered in the same province, especially in what’s called the Dinosaur Park Formation. Like other pterosaurs in the family Azhdarchidae, Cryodrakon had long legs and a very long neck with long jaws. Most scientists think it spent a lot of time on land, hunting small animals. It could fold the longest part of its wings up out of the way in order to walk on all fours. A flying animal’s wing, whether it’s a pterosaur or a bird or a bat, is a modified arm. Insects are different because they’re invertebrates. In bats, the fingers are elongated with strong skin stretched between them to form a wing. In birds, the fingers are fused into a sort of stump and most of the flying surface is feathers. In pterosaurs, one or two fingers were elongated like a bat’s, but the other fingers were short and blunt. These are the fingers that azhdarchids could walk on when the rest of the fingers, and therefore the wing, was folded up so it wouldn’t get in the way. We know it’s possible for a winged animal to walk this way because vampire bats do it just fine, and they’re able to run around quite fast on the ground. An adult Cryodrakon walking on all fours would have been about as tall as a modern giraffe because of its long neck. Its neck was strong and its head large, so it could easily grab a little running dinosaur and swallow it whole, maybe giving it a good chomp with its toothless jaws first. While azhdarchids probably couldn’t run, because the hind legs weren’t very strong and the feet were small, it could probably walk pretty quickly. And, of course, it could fly extremely well. Scientists think it launched into the air by pushing off the ground with its wings, not its back legs. In older episodes we’ve talked about some other species of pterosaur from this same family, especially Quetzalcoatlus, a genus of exceptionally large pterosaurs discovered in North America. The largest individuals may have had a wingspan potentially more than 36 feet, or 11 meters. But in 2002 a remarkably complete pterosaur fossil was discovered in Romania, and while we don’t have the complete wing bones, estimates suggest this new species might even be larger than Quetzalcoatlus. Some estimates put its wingspan at 39 feet across, or 12 meters. It had a shorter neck than other azhdarchids but a massive head. Its neck was about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, while its skull was at least that long and possibly as much as 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. The Romanian specimen was named Hatzegopteryx but the specimen has been nicknamed Dracula (also the name of my cat). Some scientists initially argued that Dracula was just an especially big Quetzalcoatlus, but while it was probably a close relative, it’s too different to be the same species. Despite their huge size, pterosaur bones were delicate because the animals had to be light enough to fly. That means they had air pockets or spongy internal structures in their bones, and that means their bones were much less likely to preserve. The most likely reason we have so many more fossils from young pterosaurs than old ones is because many species of pterosaur appear to have nested together. It’s a sad fact of life for wild animals that many young ones don’t survive, so the fossils of young pterosaurs probably come from nesting areas. And that brings us to our young Cryodrakon who had a terminally bad day. In 2023, researchers found a neck bone of a cryodrakon that had a puncture right through it. The hole in the bone is about 4 mm across and circular, and the scientists who examined it think it’s from a crocodilian tooth. We don’t know if the baby pterosaur was chomped to death by a crocodilian or if it was already dead and the crocodilian was scavenging it. That’s not even the only Cryodrakon fossil that shows tooth marks. In 1995 the fossils of a young animal were found in a scattered state, with tooth marks on some of the bones. Even better from a scientific standpoint, but definitely not from a cryodrakon standpoint, a little piece of chipped-off tooth was found embedded in one of the bones. Researchers think the tooth comes from a small dromaeosaurid dinosaur found in the same area, Saurornitholestes. It only stood about two feet tall, or 60 cm, so if it was running around biting baby cryodrakons, I hope it was really fast. The mother pterosaur would eat a dinosaur that size like a potato chip. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

The sewellel is a little rodent: The superflea is a big flea (left, compared to a regular flea, right): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a rodent you may never have heard of, unless you live where it does, and a parasite that makes that rodent its host. It’s not an ordinary parasite, but don’t worry, it’s not icky. You can continue to snack. The rodent is called the sewellel, Aplodontia rufa. It’s also called the mountain beaver even though it doesn’t always live in the mountains and it isn’t a beaver. It doesn’t even look like a beaver. For one thing, it only has a little nub of a tail and it only grows around 20 inches long, or 50 cm. It has small eyes and ears, short legs, a chunky body, and long claws. This body shape should give you a hint about its lifestyle: the sewellel is a digger, although it can also swim just fine and can even climb small trees to eat young twigs and leaves. The sewellel is an aplodont, a large group of rodents that have been common in Europe, Asia, and North America for 40 million years. But it’s the only one left. All the other aplodonts went extinct several million years ago at least. We’ve actually talked before about one of the sewellel’s extinct relations, the horned gopher (which was not a gopher), in the Patreon episode about animals with nose horns. The sewellel itself hasn’t been around all that long, only appearing in the fossil record a few million years ago. It lives in a small area of northwestern North America, in parts of British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon, and a few parts of California. It lives in forests where it doesn’t get too cold in the winter, since it doesn’t hibernate and isn’t as good at keeping itself warm as other rodents are. It also needs to drink more water than other rodents and prefers to live in wet climates as a result. In fact, the sewellel is sometimes referred to as a living fossil since it lacks many features that all other living rodents have. Its teeth resemble a simpler version of squirrel teeth, so some researchers think it may be most closely related to squirrels, but even if that’s the case, it isn’t very closely related. The sewellel’s ancestors were more adapted to live in trees and a study published in 2018 determined that it had a larger brain than the sewellel. Since the sewellel is nocturnal and spends most of its life underground, it doesn’t need to see very well, and the part of the brain that processes vision is much smaller than in its ancestors. The sewellel mostly eats ferns, although it also eats other plants, and some of its favorite plants are toxic to other animals. It’s a solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that digs deep, complex burrows, and it stays as close as possible to the burrow entrance so it can hide easily if it needs to. Everything eats the sewellel, from owls to coyotes to bobcats to eagles. And that brings us to the parasite associated with the sewellel. Many animals have parasites that are specific to that particular species. The Patreon episode about whale lice has some information about how specific this can get. The male sperm whale has a different species of louse than the species that lives on female sperm whales, for instance. Also, the whale louse isn’t a louse, it’s a type of crustacean. The sewellel’s parasite is a type of flea. Big deal, you say, fleas are all about the same. Are they, though? Because the sewellel’s flea is actually kind of a big deal. It is, in fact, the largest flea known, called the superflea. It can grow up to 8 mm long (and possibly longer, reports vary). I just measured, and that’s the length of my little fingernail, from the base to the quick. Most species of flea are 3 mm long at most. The superflea is only found on the sewellel. It looks like an ordinary flea except for its size, meaning it’s laterally flattened with legs that allow it to jump long distances. So why is it so big compared to other fleas, especially considering that it lives on an animal that’s about the size of a chonky cat? No one knows. No one has even the slightest idea why this flea is so big. There used to be even bigger fleas, some up to two cm long. That’s 20 mm, or just a little more than twice the length of the superflea. Of course, those 20 mm fleas lived 165 million years ago and probably lived on dinosaurs. Also, they couldn’t jump and instead of being flattened laterally, or side to side, like modern fleas, they were flattened dorsoventrally, or top to bottom. So they weren’t very much like modern fleas. That’s all we know about the superflea, but let’s have one last sewellel fact before we go. With all this talk of the sewellel being a primitive rodent whose closest relations are all extinct, you might think there’s nothing really special about it beyond its giant fleas. You would be wrong, though, because the sewellel’s front paws have opposable thumbs. It’s not as mobile as our opposable thumbs, but it allows the sewellel to manipulate food more easily. It will sometimes sit up on its big round bottom to eat, just like a really weird squirrel. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

The horned gopher: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This time we’re going to learn about some mammals with weird horns. Specifically, weird nose horns. Nose horns are properly called rostral horns, but that’s not as funny. We’ll start with a family of extinct rodents called horned gophers, or more properly, mylagaulids. The horned gopher wasn’t a gopher, but it probably looked similar to ground squirrels like prairie dogs and marmots. It lived in what is now North America around twenty million years ago, and it had a pair of short, broad horns that pointed upwards between the nose and eyes, like a rhino’s horns but side by side and made of bone, not keratin. It was big for a rodent, about a foot long, or 30 cm, and ate plants. So what did the horned gopher use its horns for? Both males and females had the horns and they’re too short and placed too far back for males to use them to fight each other. Horned gophers had poor eyesight so males probably weren’t trying to look and act flashy to attract females anyway. At first researchers thought the horns helped in digging burrows. The horned gopher primarily used what’s called the head-lift method of digging, which means it pushed its nose into the dirt, then lifted its head with powerful neck muscles to remove a chunk of soil—basically using its nose as a shovel. But its horns pointed straight up and were set too far back on the nose to help with digging. Most researchers today think the horns were used for defense. If a predator tried to grab the animal by the neck, it could snap its head back and stab the predator right in the face. The horned gopher had tiny eyes and front feet that resembled a mole’s, with long claws. Researchers think its ancestors probably spent most of the time underground, but that as it evolved to become larger, it also spent more time foraging above-ground. That led to more predators being able to attack it, so evolving horns as a defensive weapon helped it survive. While the horned gopher was distantly related to modern squirrels, its family is completely extinct these days. But it’s still the smallest known horned mammal that ever lived. The horned gopher is also the only horned mammal known that lived mostly underground in burrows. Almost. There was once a type of armadillo, naturally called the horned armadillo but more properly referred to as Peltephilus [pelta-FEElus], that had a pair of horns over its eyes but a little in front of them, close to where the horned gopher’s horns were. The horned armadillo’s horns developed from scutes on its head, and if you remember, scutes are bony plates embedded in the skin as armor. It might also have had a smaller pair of horns over its nostrils. It lived in what is now South America and went extinct around 11 million years ago. The horned armadillo dug burrows liked the horned gopher did, but it was much bigger than the horned gopher, with some species as much as five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Despite its size, it probably resembled the pink fairy armadillo in overall shape rather than the more common nine-banded armadillo that lives in parts of North America. It had a short tail and its rump was squared off instead of rounded. It also had big sharp teeth. It may have eaten insects, possibly digging up ant nests, but more likely it mostly ate roots and other plant parts. Arsinoitherium was another animal with nose horns, this one from Africa. It lived around 30 million years ago and was related to modern-day elephants, but it lived in swampy areas and tropical rainforests and ate plants. It probably looked a little like a rhinoceros and a little like a small elephant without a trunk. Different species were different sizes, but they were all pretty big, probably no smaller than about six feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.75 meters. And they had two pairs of horns, a little pair more like bumps over the eyes and two side-by-side forward-pointing giant nose horns that looked a lot like rhino horns but thicker. But they were real horns made of bone, not keratin, although they may have been covered in skin and hair like ossicones. You know, ossicones are those hornlike structures giraffes have. Brontotherium looked a lot like a rhinoceros too, but that’s because it was distantly related to the rhino, although it was more closely related to the horse. It lived in North America around 35 million years ago and was enormous, standing around 8 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.5 meters. It was a selective browser, probably preferring tender leaves to tough grass. It carried its massive head low like modern rhinos and buffalo do, and had a humped shoulder like both those animals where its massive neck muscles attached. And it had a pair of nose horns. Both males and females had the nose horns, but the males’ horns were much larger. The horns were blunt and shaped sort of like a V, and researchers are pretty sure males used them to fight each other. We have fossilized brontotherium rib bones that show an injury shaped just like the nose horns. The horns were probably also useful to fight predators. Even though brontotherium was related to the rhino, its horns were bone, not keratin. Our last nose horn animal lived in North America up to about five million years ago. The various species of Protoceratidae [pro-TOSS-e-rated-die] were hoofed animals that looked sort of like deer, but were more closely related to a living ungulate called the chevrotain, or mouse deer. Protoceratid probably ate grass and other plants and may have lived in herds. Males had a pair of ordinary horns that looked a lot like cow horns, and in some species females had the horns too, although they were smaller. But males also had a horn on the nose. And it was weird. Once again, the nose horn wasn’t like a rhino’s horn, which as we have established by now is made of keratin. And maybe I should have reminded you before now that keratin is the same protein that makes hair, fingernails, hooves, and things like that. Keratin also doesn’t fossilize. This nose horn was an actual horn made of bone, but researchers think it may have been covered with skin and fur like an ossicone. Different Protoceratidae had different nose horns. Syndyoceras had a pair of nose horns that were fused at the base, then split apart to form a V shape. It may also have had large nasal passages that made its muzzle look much bigger than the skull would suggest at first glance. Synthetoceras had a long nose horn that grew up and slightly forward but split into a Y at the tip. Kyptoceras had a pair of nose horns that pointed forward. Researchers think the males used these nose horns to fight each other, much like deer fight with their antlers today. One older Protoceratid that lived up to around 20 million years ago was called Protoceras, and males had three pairs of horns, although they probably resembled ossicones and were all covered in skin and hair. A small pair grew between the ears, another pair between the eyes and nose, and the largest pair grew on the nose. Females only had one smaller pair of horns between the ears, so the extra horns males had were probably for display. Some Protoceratidae also had a pair of fanglike canine teeth that they may have used to root around in dead leaves for plant material. Male chevrotains have fangs like this too, but they use them to fight each other since they don’t have horns. So basically, this is what we’ve learned from this episode: There used to be a lot more nose-horned animals than we have now, most of them lived in the Americas for some reason, and they were all awesome. Also, even though the first animal we think of when someone mentions nose horns is the rhino, the rhino’s keratin horns are actually unusual. Just be glad you’re not an intelligent birdlike creature from the far future trying to figure out what a rhinoceros actually looked like when it was alive. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!