Episode 436: Red-Eyed Tree Frog

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Thanks to Trech for suggesting this week’s topic, the red-eyed tree frog!

Further reading:

Tadpoles hatch in seconds to escape predator

The colorful red-eyed tree frog [photo by Geoff Gallice]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to have a short little episode about a little frog, suggested by Trech.

The frog in question is the red-eyed tree frog, which is native to Central America, including parts of Mexico, and northwestern South America. It lives in forests, always around water. You might be thinking, “of course, frogs live in water,” but remember that this is a tree frog. It lives in trees. But it still needs water for its babies, just not quite in the way most frogs do.

Before we learn about that, let’s learn about the frog itself. A big female can grow about 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm, while males are smaller. It’s a cute frog, of course, because frogs are always cute, but it’s also brightly colored. It’s bright green with red eyes, blue and yellow stripes on its sides, and orange feet.

Ordinarily, a frog with such bright colors would warn potential predators that it’s toxic, but the red-eyed tree frog isn’t toxic at all. Its bright colors have a different purpose. When it’s sitting on a leaf, the bright colors are hidden and only the frog’s smooth green back is showing, which makes it look like just another leaf. Only its eyes are bright, but it closes its eyes when it’s resting. But if a predator approaches, the frog opens its eyes suddenly and jumps up, revealing all those bright colors. The predator is startled, and maybe even hesitates because it thinks the frog might be toxic, and by the time the predator decides it should try eating the frog after all, the frog is long gone.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, the red-eyed tree frog can see through its eyelids. They’re actually not eyelids like we have, but a membrane that it can move over its eyes. The frog is nocturnal and eats insects like mosquitoes, crickets, and moths. It has a good sense of smell, which helps it find insects in the dark.

The tree frog also has suction cups on its toes that help it stay put on smooth leaves. During the day it sticks itself to the underside of a leaf to sleep where it’s more hidden. The female also lays her eggs on the underside of a leaf. This protects them from heavy rain, since the frogs breed during the rainy season, and it also helps hide them from predators. The female chooses a leaf that’s growing above water, and if the leaf isn’t very big she’ll lay eggs on both sides of it and fold the leaf to help hide all the eggs. The eggs stick to the leaf with a type of jelly that also helps keep them from drying out.

The eggs hatch in about a week, but they can hatch a few days early if a predator approaches. The embryonic tadpoles in their eggs can sense vibrations, and if a predator like a snake shakes the leaf as it approaches the eggs, the tadpoles can hatch within seconds. They drop straight down into the water below the leaf.

Hatching early when in danger is called phenotypic plasticity, and it’s really rare. It’s especially unusual because the embryonic tadpoles can actually tell the difference between a typical predator of frog eggs and vibrations caused by other animals or the wind. They can hatch so quickly because the stress reaction causes the pre-tadpoles to secrete an enzyme from their little noses, which weakens the egg wall and allows them to push and wiggle their way out.

Tadpoles stay in the water for several weeks, or sometimes several months depending on conditions, during which time they eat algae and other tiny food in the water. As they grow bigger, the tadpoles can eat bigger food, including other tadpoles. They switch to tiny insects after they metamorphose into froglets.

At some point during its development, a red-eyed tree frog needs to eat enough food containing carotenoids in order to develop properly, and in order to develop brightly colored skin as an adult. The red-eyed tree frog is a popular pet, but captive-bred frogs sometimes aren’t as brightly colored because they didn’t get enough of the right foods as young frogs.

During breeding season, a male will claim a small branch and jump and bounce around on it, both to call attention to himself and to shake other males off the branch. He also croaks loudly to attract a mate. This is what he sounds like:

[frog call]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 435: The Narwhal and the Unicorn

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Thanks to Owen and Aksel, and Dylan and Emily for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Where did the unicorn myth come from?

The narwhal is my favorite whale:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to look at an animal suggested by Owen and Aksel, and a related suggestion by Dylan and Emily.

Owen and Aksel suggested we talk about the narwhal, which we haven’t really discussed since episode 5 even though it’s one of my favorite animals. Dylan and Emily suggested we learn about animals that might have inspired legends of the unicorn. These two topics are definitely linked!

The narwhal is a toothed whale, but it doesn’t have very many teeth—in fact, most narwhals don’t have any teeth at all. It swallows its food whole and doesn’t need to chew, mostly small fish but also squid and other small animals. Male narwhals do have one tooth, a tusk that can be almost 10 feet long, or over 3 meters. The tusk is a spiral shape, developed from what would have been the left canine tooth, but instead of growing downward like a regular tooth, it grows forward, directly through the front of the lip. A lot of times people get confused and think the tusk is a horn that grows from the narwhal’s forehead, and that’s mainly because the narwhal is closely related to the unicorn legend.

That sounds weird at first, since the narwhal is a whale that can grow up to 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, and lives in cold waters of the Arctic Circle. The unicorn is supposed to be a horse-like animal with a spiral horn growing from its forehead, although it’s also sometimes depicted as more goatlike in appearance, with cloven hooves and a little beard. It also usually has a long tail with a tuft at the end like a donkey or zebra.

In the olden days in Europe, the unicorn’s single spiral horn was supposed to have curative properties. If you ground up a little bit of the horn, known as alicorn, people thought it acted as a medicine to cure you of poisoning or other ailments. The alicorn was actually the tusk of the narwhal, but traders claimed it was a unicorn horn because they could charge more for it. The legend of the unicorn having a long spiral horn doesn’t come from ancient stories, it comes from the appearance of the narwhal’s tusk.

The narwhal is as mysterious as the unicorn in its own way. In fact, the narwhal seems a lot less plausibly real than a unicorn and a lot of people actually don’t realize it’s a real animal.

The biggest question about the narwhal is what its tusk is used for. Most males have one, and occasionally a male will grow two tusks. Most females don’t have one, although about 15% of females will grow a tusk, usually smaller than the male’s. Females live longer than males on average, so obviously the tusk isn’t helping males survive. Most scientists assume that it’s just a way for males to attract mates.

But the narwhal’s tusk seems to be useful for more than just decoration. It contains high concentrations of nerve endings, and scientists think it might help the whale sense a lot of information about the water around it. Narwhals have been observed smacking fish with their tusks to stun them, so that the whale can slurp them up more easily. And even though it’s technically a tooth, the narwhal’s tusk can bend up to a foot, or about 30 cm, in any direction without breaking.

The narwhal is pale gray in color with darker gray or brown dapples, but like gray horses, many narwhals get paler as they age. Old individuals can appear pure white. This can make them easy to confuse with another small whale that’s closely related, the beluga, which shares other characteristics with the narwhal. The beluga is white, has a small rounded head and doesn’t have a dorsal fin, and has a neck so that it can bend it head around. Most whales have lost the ability to move their heads. The beluga also lives in the same areas as the narwhal and both are the only two living members of the family Monodontidae. They even interbreed very rarely. But only the narwhal has a tusk.

One of the reasons why so many people believe the unicorn is a real animal is because it’s mentioned in some English-language versions of the Bible. When the Old Testament was first translated from Hebrew into Greek, the translators weren’t sure what animal the re’em was. It appeared in the texts a number of times but wasn’t described. The translators settled on monokeros for their translation, which in English is unicorn. These days, Biblical scholars translate re’em as a wild ox, or aurochs. You can learn more about the aurochs in episode 58, about weird cattle.

So while the Greek translators didn’t know what the re’em was, why did they decide it was a unicorn? It’s possible they were drawing on the writings of Greek physician Ctesias, from the fourth century BCE. Ctesias described an animal from India he called a type of wild ass, which had “a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.” But it seems clear from his writing that he was describing a rhinoceros.

While the unicorn is mentioned in the Bible, it isn’t a specifically Christian legend. The karkadann is a huge monster in Muslim folk tradition, with a horn so big it could spear two or three elephants on it at the same time. In Siberia, some tribes told stories of a huge black ox with one horn, so big that when the animal was killed, the horn alone required its own sledge for transport. In some Chinese tales, the kilin was supposed to be a huge animal with one horn. For more information about the kilin, you can listen to episode 61.

It’s probable that all these stories stem from the rhinoceros, which we talked about in episode 346. Basically, it’s a big, heavy animal with relatively short legs, a big head that it carries low to the ground like a bison, and at least one horn that grows on its nose. It’s usually gray or gray-brown in color with very little hair, and its skin is tough. It eats plants.

The rhinoceros is actually most closely related to the horse and the tapir, which are odd-toed ungulates. The rhino has three toes on each foot, with a little hoof-like nail covering the front of each toe, but the bottom of the rhino’s foot is a big pad similar to the bottom of an elephant’s foot.

The rhino’s nose horn isn’t technically a horn because it doesn’t have a bony core. It’s made of long fibers of keratin all stuck together, and keratin is the same protein that forms fingernails and hair. It’s not an elegant spiral horn like the unicorn is supposed to have, and the rhino itself isn’t a delicate horse-like animal. It’s big and strong and can be extremely dangerous—but the original unicorn stories said it was a huge, fearsome beast.

In the 13th century, the Italian explorer Marco Polo visited Asia and saw a unicorn. He wrote later that “it is a hideous beast to look at, and in no way like what we think and say in our countries.” He probably saw a rhinoceros, so the unicorn legend and real life rhinos have been disappointing people for more than seven centuries.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 434: The Real Life Dragon

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Thanks to Jaxon for suggesting this week’s topic, Coelurosauravus!

Further reading:

Coelurosauravus

New Research Reveals Secrets of First-Ever Gliding Reptile

The modern Draco lizard glides on “wings” made from extended rib bones:

Coelurosauravus glided on wings that were completely different from any other wings known [art from the first link above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about an extinct animal suggested by Jaxon. It’s called Coelurosauravus and it lived around 255 million years ago in what is now Madagascar.

Coelurosauravus was a member of the Weigeltisauridae family, reptiles whose fossils have been found not just in Madagascar but in parts of Europe, and maybe even North America (although we’re not sure yet). They were gliding reptiles that probably lived in trees and ate insects and other small animals, sort of like modern gliding lizards. But while most gliding lizards are very small, Coelurosauravus grew over a foot long, or around 40 cm, and that’s nowhere near the weirdest thing about it.

To explain why Coelurosauravus was so very peculiar, we have to learn a little about other gliding reptiles. Back in episode 255 we learned about kuehneosaurids, and that’s a good place to start.

Kuehneosaurids lived around 225 million years ago in what is now England. This wasn’t all that long after Coelurosauravus lived and not that far away from where some of its relations lived, but the two weren’t related. Kuehneosaurus looked like a big lizard although this was before modern lizards evolved, but it was a reptile and it was even larger than Coelurosauravus. Kuehneosaurus grew about two feet long, or 70 cm, including a long tail, and probably lived in trees and ate insects.

Kuehneosaurus glided on sail-like structures on its sides that were made from extended ribs with skin stretched over them. Its wings weren’t all that big, although they were big enough that they could act as a parachute if the animal fell or jumped from a branch. Another gliding reptile, Kuehneosuchus, had wings that were much longer. In a study published in 2008, a team of scientists built models of kuehneosuchus and tested them in a wind tunnel used for aerospace engineering. It turned out to be quite stable in the air and could probably glide very well.

We don’t know a whole lot about the kuehneosaurids because we haven’t found very many fossils. We’re not even sure if the two species are closely related or not. We’re not even sure they’re not the same species. Individuals of both were uncovered in caves near Bristol in the 1950s, and some researchers speculate they were males and females of the same species. Despite the difference in wings, otherwise they’re extremely similar in a lot of ways.

Generally, researchers compare the kuehneosaurids to modern draco lizards, which we talked about in episode 237, even though they’re not related. Draco lizards are much smaller, only about 8 inches long including the tail, or 20 cm, and live throughout much of southeastern Asia. Many gliding animals, like the flying squirrel, have gliding membranes called patagia that stretch from the front legs to the back legs, but the draco lizard is different. It has greatly elongated ribs that it can extend like wings, and the skin between the ribs acts as a patagium. This skin is usually yellow or brown so that the lizard looks like a falling leaf when it’s gliding. Draco lizards can fold their wings down and extend them, which isn’t something the kuehneosaurids appear to have been able to do.

But now let’s return to Coelurosauravus. It too had wing-like structures on its sides that consisted of skin stretched over bony struts. But in this case, the bones weren’t elongated ribs.

Coelurosauravus had about 30 pairs of long, flexible bones that extended from the sides of its belly, and it could open and close its wings like draco lizards do. Scientists think the bones developed from osteoderms, which are bony structures that many animals have on their skin, that act as a sort of built-in armor. As far as we know, no other animal in the entire history of life on earth has developed what are basically wings from osteoderms.

Coelurosauravus had long, slender legs with sharp claws that it used to climb around in trees, and a long tail to help it keep its balance as it climbed. Its head was decorated with a bony frill that had spikes along the edges. The frill might have been brightly colored, a way to attract mates or intimidate potential predators, and it might also have been an attachment site for strong jaw muscles.

In other words, Coelurosauravus had four legs, two wings, and horns on its head. This little reptile was basically a dragon.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 433: Flamingos and Two Weird Friends

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Thanks to Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about three remarkable wading birds. Two of them are pink!

Bird sounds taken from the excellent website xeno-canto.

The goliath heron is as tall as people [picture by Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland – Goliath Heron (Ardea goliath), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12223810]:

The roseate spoonbill has a bill shaped like a spoon, you may notice [picture by Photo Dante – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42301356]:

Flamingos really do look like those lawn ornaments [picture by Valdiney Pimenta – Flamingos, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6233369]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about three large birds with long legs that spend a lot of time wading through shallow water, suggested by Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon.

Wading birds tend to share traits even if they’re not closely related, because of convergent evolution. In order to wade in water deep enough to find food, a wading bird needs long legs. Then it also needs a long neck so it can reach its food more easily. A long beak helps to grab small animals too. Having big feet with long toes also helps it keep its footing in soft mud.

Let’s start with Ryder’s suggestion, the goliath heron. It’s the biggest heron alive today, standing up to 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters. That’s as tall as a person! It only weighs about 11 lbs at most, though, or 5 kg, but its wingspan is over 7 ½ feet across, or 2.3 meters. It’s a big, elegant bird with a mostly gray and brown body, but a chestnut brown head and neck with black and white streaks on its throat and chest.

The goliath heron lives throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, meaning south of the Sahara Desert, anywhere it can find water. It’s happy on the edge of a lake or river, in a swamp or other wetlands, around the edges of a water hole, or even along the coast of the ocean. It usually stands very still in the water, looking down. When a fish swims close enough, the heron stabs it with its bill, pulls it out of the water, and either holds it for a while until the bird is ready to swallow the fish, or sometimes it will even set the fish down on land or floating vegetation for a while. It’s not usually in a big hurry to swallow its meal. Sometimes that means other birds steal the fish, especially eagles and pelicans, but the goliath heron is so big and its beak is so sharp that most of the time, other birds and animals leave it alone.

The goliath heron will also eat frogs, lizards, and other small animals when it can, but it prefers nice big fish. It can catch much bigger fish than other wading birds, and eating big fish is naturally more energy efficient than eating small ones. If a goliath heron only catches two big fish a day, it’s had enough to eat without having to expend a lot of energy hunting.

This is what a goliath heron sounds like:

[goliath heron call]

Alexandria’s suggestion, the roseate spoonbill, is also a big wading bird, but it’s very different from the goliath heron. For one thing, it’s pink and white and has a long bill that’s flattened and spoon-shaped at the end. It’s only about half the size of a goliath heron, with a wingspan over 4 feet across, or 1.3 meters, and a height of about 2 ½ feet, or 80 cm. That’s still a big bird! It mostly lives in South America east of the Andes mountain range, but it’s also found in coastal areas in Central America up through the most southern parts of North America.

Unlike the goliath heron, which is solitary, the roseate spoonbill is social and spends time in small flocks as it hunts for food. It likes shallow coastal water, swamps, and other wetlands where it can find it preferred food. That isn’t fish, although it will eat little fish like minnows when it catches them. It mainly eats crustaceans like crabs and crayfish, along with frogs, aquatic insects, and mollusks, and some seeds and other plant material. Since most of its food lives on the floor of the waterway or hidden in mud or water plants, the spoonbill usually can’t see its prey. It depends on the sensitive nerves in its bill to know the difference between, say, a crab and a crab-shaped rock. It walks through shallow water, sweeping its bill back and forth through the mud at the bottom, and grabs any little animal it can. Other birds like egrets will sometimes follow foraging spoonbills so they can catch any animals that the spoonbills miss.

Baby spoonbills are born with ordinary pointy bills, but as the chicks mature, the ends of their beaks flatten and become more and more spoon-shaped. If the goliath heron’s bill is like a pair of kitchen knives, the spoonbill’s beak is like a set of salad tongs that can scoop up lots of salad and dressing at once.

The roseate spoonbill gets its pink coloration from the food it eats. A lot of crustaceans contain carotenoid pigments, which the spoonbill absorbs and expresses in its feathers.

There are other spoonbills in the world, but the roseate spoonbill is the only one found in the Americas. The other five species live in Africa and Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand, and much of Europe and Asia. All the other species are white with black, yellow, or pink facial markings. Only the roseate spoonbill is all pink.

This is what the roseate spoonbill sounds like:

[roseate spoonbill call]

Simon’s suggestion is another pink bird that you’ve undoubtedly heard of, the flamingo! It lives in parts of South America, Central and southern North America, Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, and southwest Asia. The two most well-known and widespread species are the greater and lesser flamingos. The greater flamingo is the biggest, standing over 4 ½ feet tall, or 1.4 meters. That’s still not as tall as the goliath heron, although it’s close. Its wingspan can be five feet across, or 1.5 meters.

The flamingo is kind of a weird bird, even by wading bird standards. It rests by standing on one leg, which it can do without falling over and without expending any energy to keep itself upright. It can even sleep while standing on one leg. People are really good at walking on long legs, but it’s a lot harder for us to stand on one leg without swaying and eventually falling over when our muscles tire. On the other hand, we weigh a lot more than a flamingo, which is barely over 7 ½ lbs in weight, or 3.5 kg.

The most unusual aspect of the flamingo is its beak. It’s thick and famously bent downward halfway along its length, so that it’s shaped sort of like a boomerang. There’s really no way to describe it as a type of kitchen implement unless it’s a strainer basket, because that’s how the flamingo uses its beak.

The flamingo eats tiny animals like brine shrimp and other small crustaceans, insect larvae, and even algae, and it catches all these tiny foods by sifting them from the water with its beak. The beak is lined with lamellae, which look like little hairs or the teeth of a comb, and its tongue is rough. It lowers its head on its long neck until its head is actually upside down, scoops its beak back and forth through the water, and uses its tongue to push the water out through the lamellae. Whatever algae or tiny animals are left in its mouth, it swallows.

Flamingos are extremely social and live in huge flocks, sometimes consisting of thousands of birds. The female only lays a single egg in her mud nest, and both parents take care of the baby by feeding it crop milk. This isn’t actually milk but is a nutritious substance produced by glands in the throat and crop. Emperor penguins, pigeons, and doves are the only other birds known that produce crop milk for their babies. Flamingo chicks have ordinary straight beaks that develop the bend as they grow older.

Like the roseate spoonbill, the flamingo’s pink coloration is due to its diet. The algae it eats contains a lot of carotenoids, as do the brine shrimp it eats. The American flamingo tends to be the pinkest overall, but all flamingos are pink if they’re eating enough foods that contain these carotenoids.

This is what an American flamingo flock sounds like:

[flamingo call]

There are lots more wading birds than the ones we’ve covered here, and not all of them have long legs and long necks. Just, you know, the best ones do.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 432: The Fossa and Other Animals of Madagascar

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This week we learn about the fossa and a few other animals of Madagascar, a suggestion by Pranav!

Further reading:

The stories people tell, and how they can contribute to our understanding of megafaunal decline and extinction in Madagascar

The fossa!

The votsotsa is a rodent, not a rabbit! [photo by Andrey Giljov – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113271739]:

The golden mantella frog is sometimes golden, but sometimes red:

The nano-chameleon may be the smallest reptile in the world:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a very old Pranav suggestion, animals of Madagascar!

The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa. About 88 million years ago, it broke off from every other landmass in the world, specifically the supercontinent Gondwana. The continent we now call Africa separated from Gondwana even earlier, around 165 million years ago. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and even though it’s relatively close to Africa these days, many of its animals and plants are much different from those in Africa and other parts of the world because they’ve been evolving separately for 88 million years.

But at various times in the past, some animals from Africa were able to reach Madagascar. We’re still not completely sure how this happened. Madagascar is 250 miles away from Africa, or 400 kilometers, and these days the prevailing ocean currents push floating debris away from the island. In the past, though, the currents might have been different and some animals could have arrived on floating debris washed out to sea during storms. During times when the ocean levels were overall lower, islands that are underwater now might have been above the surface and allowed animals to travel from island to island until they reached Madagascar.

We’re not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2,500 years ago and possibly as much as 9,500 years ago or even earlier. It’s likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live. By 1,500 years ago people were definitely living on the island.

Let’s start with the fossa, an animal we’ve only talked about on the podcast once before, and then only in passing. It resembles a type of cat about the size of a cougar, although its legs are short in comparison to a similarly-sized cat. Its tail is almost as long as its body, and if you include its tail, it can grow around five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It’s reddish-brown with a paler belly. Its head is small with a short muzzle, rounded ears, and big eyes.

But the fossa isn’t a felid. It resembles a really big mustelid in many ways, especially a mongoose, and some studies suggest it’s most closely related to the mongoose. Really, though, it’s not closely related to anything living today. It spends a lot of time in trees, where it uses its long tail to help it balance. It even has semi-retractable claws. It eats lemurs and other mammals, birds, insects, crabs, lizards, and even fruit.

There used to be an even bigger fossa called the giant fossa, although we don’t know much about it. We only know about it from some subfossil remains found in caves. We’re not sure how big it was compared to the fossa living today, but it was definitely bigger and stronger and might have grown 7 feet long including its tail, or a little over 2 meters. There used to be much bigger lemurs living on Madagascar that have also gone extinct, so the giant fossa probably evolved to prey on them.

Most scientists estimate that the giant fossa went extinct at least 700 years ago, but some think it might have survived in remote areas of Madagascar until much more recently. There are even modern sightings of unusually large fossas, sometimes reported as twice the size of a regular fossa.

One interesting thing about the fossa is that its anus is hidden most of the time by a little fold of skin called an anal pouch, sort of like built-in underwear.

One animal most people outside of Madagascar have never heard of is the votsotsa, also called the Malagascar giant rat or the giant jumping rat since it’s a rodent that is especially known for its ability to jump. It actually looks a lot like a rabbit in size and shape, including its long ears, but it has a long tail. It’s gray or brown in color and grows about a foot long, or 30 cm, with a tail that can be up to 10 inches long, or 25 cm.

The votsotsa mates for life and both parents raise the single baby the mother gives birth to once or twice a year. It’s a nocturnal animal that spends the day in its burrow, which can be as much as 16 feet long, or 5 meters, with multiple exits. It eats nuts and seeds, fruit, leaves, and other plant material, along with insects and other small animals.

Lots of bats live on Madagascar, including the Madagascar flying fox. It’s a fruit-eating bat that’s brown or golden-brown in color with gray or black wings, and it’s the biggest bat native to the island. It has a wingspan of more than four feet across, or 125 cm. Like other species of flying fox, it lives in colonies of up to a thousand individuals that roost together in trees during the day. It mostly forages in the evenings, searching for fruit like figs. It eats flowers and sometimes leaves as well as fruit, and it may even be a pollinator for the kapok tree’s flowers.

Naturally, Madagascar also has a lot of reptiles, amphibians, and other non-mammalian animals. For instance, the golden mantella frog. It’s a little frog that’s only found in a few small areas, and measures around 20 millimeters long snout to vent. Some individuals are golden yellow while others are bright orange or red. As you may remember from our many previous episodes about frogs, such bright colors act as a warning to potential predators, to let them know that the frog is toxic. It absorbs toxins from some of the insects it eats. It’s active during the day in summertime, and in winter it spends most of the time hiding and doing nothing, which is the best way to spend the winter.

There are also lots of chameleons on Madagascar, including one called the nano-chameleon. It gets its name from its size, which is extremely small. It’s the smallest chameleon in the world, only 29 mm long at the very most, which is barely more than an inch long. Males are smaller than females, usually around 22 mm. It was described in 2021 and is brownish-grey with pale yellow or yellow-brown markings. Chameleons are famous for changing color, but the nano-chameleon doesn’t. It also mostly lives on the ground, where it hunts tiny insects and other invertebrates. Some scientists think it may be the smallest reptile in the world.

The female Darwin’s bark spider is about the same size as the female nano-chameleon, if you don’t count the spider’s legs. Males are much smaller. Darwin’s bark spider is a type of orb-weaver, which is the kind of spider that spins large webs that look like Halloween decorations. It was described in 2010 after first being discovered by scientists in 2009, which is surprising because it builds the largest orb webs known. Some webs can be over 30 square feet in size, or 2.8 square meters.

The silk is the strongest biological material ever studied, twice as strong as any other spider silk studied. The spider builds its web over water, because it eats a lot of mayflies and other insects that are attracted to water. It also eats a lot of dragonflies, and dragonflies are quite large and strong insects that don’t usually get caught in spiderwebs.

The people of Madagascar are considered very poor compared to other countries, after almost a century of French colonization and the resulting instability after it regained independence in 1960. A lot of animals that were once considered to be forbidden to bother, for religious and cultural reasons, now end up killed so people can eat them instead of starving. Mining and slash-and-burn agriculture has also contributed to pollution, habitat loss, and other factors that aren’t good for the animals of Madagascar or its people. Luckily, eco-tourism, where people visit the island to experience its beauty and see animals and plants found nowhere else on earth, is becoming more common. Hopefully that will help improve conditions for the people who live there and for the animals too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 431: The New Dire Wolf

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Thanks to Jayson for suggesting this week’s topic, the new “dire wolf”! Also, possibly the same but maybe a different Jayson is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team, who are on their way to the Science Olympiad Nationals! They’re almost to their funding goal if you can help out.

Further reading:

Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction

The story of dire wolves goes beyond de-extinction

These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals

Dire Wolves Split from Living Canids 5.7 Million Years Ago: Study

This prehistoric monster is the largest dog that ever lived and was able to crush bone with its deadly teeth – but was wiped out by cats

“Dire wolf” puppies:

An artist’s interpretation of the dire wolf (red coats) and grey wolves (grey coats) [taken from fourth link above]:

The “mammoth fur” mice:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a suggestion from Jayson, who wants to learn about the so-called “new” dire wolf.

Before we get started, a big shout-out to another Jayson, or maybe the same one I’m honestly not sure, who is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team. They’ve advanced to the nationals! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to donate a little to help them with their travel expenses. This is a local team to me so I’m especially proud of them, and not to brag, but I’ve actually met Jayson and his sister and they’re both smart, awesome kids.

Now, let’s find out about this new dire wolf that was announced last month. In early April 2025, a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences made the extraordinary claim that they had produced three dire wolf puppies. Since dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago, this is a really big deal.

Before we get into the details of Colossal’s claim, let’s refresh our memory about the dire wolf. We talked about it in episode 207, so I’ve taken a lot of my information from that episode.

According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. Sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North American population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and some of those eventually migrated into North America too.

By the time the gray wolf and coyote populated North America, a little over one million years ago, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, the species avoided each other and didn’t interbreed. We’ve talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at that point.

The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn’t have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals.

The dire wolf went extinct around 13,000 years ago, but Colossal now claims that they’re no longer extinct. There are now exactly three dire wolves in the world, two males and a female, born to two different dogs who acted as surrogate mothers. But are these really dire wolves, or are they something else?

Colossal’s scientists claim that the 2021 Nature study that determined gray wolves and dire wolves weren’t closely related and couldn’t interbreed was based on poor-quality DNA studies. They redid the genetic scans and determined that dire wolves were more wolf-like than the 2021 study thought. But the 2021 study was published in the foremost peer-reviewed journal in the scientific world. Colossal’s study hasn’t been published at all.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In other words, until a study is published in a respected peer-reviewed journal that contradicts the 2021 Nature study, all the genetic evidence we have now points to dire wolves and gray wolves being extremely genetically different.

Colossal’s scientists made 20 edits to 14 gray wolf genes to make the puppies more similar to dire wolves in size, with white coats even though there’s no evidence that real dire wolves were white. Colossal claims that the genomes of grey wolves and dire wolves are 99.5% identical, but those 20 changes are out of 12,235,000 genetic differences. Genetically these puppies are just modern grey wolves.

The biggest problem with the claim that the puppies are actually dire wolves is that it implies that bringing back an extinct species is really easy. Not only can this make people think that extinction isn’t a big deal after all, it also ignores the issues that make animals go extinct in the first place, especially recently, like pollution, habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, and over-hunting or capture of wild animals to sell as exotic pets.

In the very first, very terrible Strange Animals Podcast episode, I talked about the quagga, a species of zebra from South Africa that went extinct very recently due to human causes. I was excited about the de-extinction attempts for that species, which mostly involved breeding zebras with the most quagga genetic material to select for quagga-like traits. I still think this is a good project, since the quagga’s ecosystem is still in place and still has a quagga-shaped hole in it. Colossal has also done good work with red wolves in North America, helping to keep that critically endangered species genetically healthy.

Also in an early episode, I talked about Colossal’s de-extinction plans for the mammoth. I was all for that too, tongue-in-cheek, because I said I wanted a pet mammoth. Now I’ve changed my mind. Awesome as it would be to see real live mammoths, there’s not any real habitat left for them. Between climate change, habitat loss due to human activity, and more than ten thousand years of evolution of other animals to move into the mammoth’s empty ecological niche, where does Colossal plan to put its mammoths? We don’t even have safe habitats for elephants anymore, which are still around.

Earlier this year, Colossal announced another genetically modified animal, mice with long golden-brown fur inspired by woolly mammoth fur. Mammoths were highly adapted for cold far beyond long fur, while modern elephants are highly adapted for hot climates. If Colossal’s mammoths are anything like its so-called dire wolves, they’ll be editing genes to change appearance, not anything else. That’s unethical, basically taking an endangered heat-adapted animal, giving it a heavy coat, and sticking it into a cold climate. It will have no herd mates and no knowledge of how to survive in the wild in a climate it was never intended to live in, meaning it will be dependent on human help. Once the novelty of “oh look, a furry elephant” wears off, and Colossal either goes out of business or moves on to the next big thing, what will happen to the mammoth?

That’s one of the concerns about the new dire wolves. They don’t have a wolf family. They’re completely dependent on humans and will never be able to survive in the wild, even if they were allowed to try.

Let’s return to extinct canids to finish on a brighter note, something that Richard from NC brought to my attention recently. It’s an animal called epicyon, a canid that may have lived as recently as 5 million years ago in North America. It’s the largest canid ever discovered, around 3 feet tall, or 90 cm, at the shoulder and as much as 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. It probably weighed as much as a small bear, and it was strong and powerful so that it was probably more bear-like or lion-like in body shape than wolf-like.

It had a short, powerful muzzle and strong jaws with huge teeth meant for crushing bone, similar to modern hyenas. It wasn’t anywhere near as fast a runner as modern wolves, but it could probably move pretty fast when it needed to. Some scientists think it was a pack animal, but it may have been an ambush predator instead of hunting in packs like wolves and other modern canids do.

Epicyon probably preyed on megaherbivores like camels, horses, pronghorn, rhinoceroses, and peccaries, all of which were common in North America several million years ago. It probably also scavenged a lot of its food, since it could break bones other animals couldn’t. We’re not sure why epicyon went extinct, but some scientists suggest it was out-competed by saber-tooth cats and more modern canids–including the dire wolf.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 430: The Fake and the Real Coelacanth

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This week we examine two recent articles about coelacanth discoveries. Which one is real and which one is fake?!

Further reading:

Fake California Coelacanth

First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia

A real coelacanth photo:

A fake coelacanth photo (or at least the article is a fake) [photo taken from the first article linked above]:

A real coelacanth photo [photo from the second article linked above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

I had another episode planned for this week, but then I read an article by geologist Sharon Hill and decided the topic she researched was so important we need to cover it here. No, it’s not the dire wolf—that’s next week. It’s the coelacanth.

We talked about the coelocanth way back in episode two, with updates in a few later episodes. Because episode two is so old that it’s dropped off the podcast feed, and to listen to it you have to actually go to the podcast’s website, I’m going to quote from it extensively here.

In December of 1938, a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay Lattimer got a message from a friend of hers, a fisherman named Hendrick Goosen, who had just arrived with a new catch. Lattimer was on the lookout for specimens for her tiny museum, and Goosen was happy to let her have anything interesting. Lattimer went down to the dock. Then she noticed THE FISH.

It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, blueish with shimmery silvery markings, with strange lobed fins and scales like armored plates. She described it as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. She didn’t know what it was, but she wanted it. She took the fish back to the museum in a taxi and went through her reference books to identify it.

Imagine it. She’s flipped through a couple of books but nothing looks even remotely like her fish. Then she turns a page and there’s a picture of the fish–but it’s extinct. It’s been extinct for some 66 million years. But it’s also a very recently alive fish resting on ice in the back of her museum.

Lattimer sketched the fish and sent the drawing and a description to a professor at Rhodes University, J.L.B. Smith. But Smith was on Christmas break and didn’t get her message until January 3rd. In the meantime, Lattimer’s museum director told her the fish was a grouper and not worth the ice it was lying on.

December is the middle of summer in South Africa, so to keep the fish from rotting away, she had it mounted. Then Smith sent her a near-hysterical cable that read, “MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS.” Oops.

Smith got a little obsessed about finding another coelacanth. He offered huge rewards for a specimen. But it wasn’t until December of 1952 that a pair of local fishermen on the island of Anjuan, about halfway between Tanzania and Madagascar, turned up with a fish they called the gombessa. It was a second coelacanth.

Everyone was happy. The fishermen got a huge reward—a hundred British pounds—and Smith had an intact coelacanth. He actually cried when he saw it.

Most people have heard of the coelacanth because its discovery is such a great story. But why is the fish such a big deal?

The coelacanth isn’t just a fish that was supposed to be extinct and was discovered alive and well, although that’s pretty awesome. It’s a strange fish, more closely related to mammals and reptiles than it is to ordinary ray-finned fish. The only living fish even slightly like it is the lungfish, which we talked about in episode 55.

While the coelacanth is unique in a lot of ways, it’s those lobed fins that are really exciting. It’s not a stretch to say its paired fins look like nubby legs with frills instead of digits. Until DNA sequencing in 2013, many researchers thought the coelacanth was a sort of missing link between water-dwelling animals and those that first developed the ability to walk on land. As it happens, the lungfish turns out to be closer to that stage than the coelacanth, and both the lungfish and the coelacanth had already split off from the shared ancestor of marine and terrestrial organisms when they evolved around 400 million years ago. But for scientists in the mid-20th century, studying a fish that looked like it had little legs must have been electrifying.

But this fish story isn’t over yet. In 1997, a marine biologist on honeymoon in Indonesia found a coelacanth in a local market. And it was a different species of coelacanth. Can you imagine a better wedding gift?

Coelacanths are placid fish who do a lot of drifting, although their eight marvelous fins make them very maneuverable. They stay close to the coast and prefer rocky areas. They especially love underwater caves. They hunt for smaller fish and cephalopods like squid at night and rest in caves or hidden among rocks during the day. Sometimes sharks eat them, but for the most part coelacanths lead comfortable lives, floating around eating stuff. Sometimes they float around tail up or even upside down because they just don’t care.

Coelacanths have since been discovered in the western Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar, and a few other places. I finished episode two by saying, “So far, living coelacanths have mostly been found off the coast of Africa, but they’re much more widely spread in the fossil record. Rumors of coelacanths in other places, like the Gulf of Mexico or around Easter Island, keep popping up. Maybe one day another population of these awesome fish will be discovered.”

And in late April 2025, it seemed that my hope had come true. An article was released by a website called Animals Around the Globe, detailing a new discovery of a coelacanth off the coast of San Diego, California!

Now, I missed that article but Sharon Hill didn’t. She’s a geologist whose work I follow and mention here occasionally. She likes to post about cryptids and other mysteries and dig into the real science behind reports, and she suspected right away that there was something fake about the San Diego coelacanth. There’s a link in the show notes to her article, which is worth reading. For one thing, she explains how she did the research to determine whether the article was real.

Her first step was to look for other articles about the finding. Animals Around the Globe isn’t a scientific site, just a blog that posts about animals. A new species of coelacanth, especially one found in North America, would be a HUGE big deal in the scientific community, so there should be lots of articles about it. But Sharon didn’t find anything.

Her next step was to contact the two institutions referenced in the article, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Scripps wrote back first and said the article was a fake. Sharon suspects the article was AI generated. The blog that posted it gets money from advertising, and the more people click through to read the article, the more money they make. That’s why I’m not linking to that article from the show notes.

As it happens, on the same day that that article was published, another article about the coelacanth was published, this one in Nature Scientific Reports. It’s titled “First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia,” and I do link to it in the show notes because it’s a real sighting and an article written by real scientists, not AI.

In October 2024 a team of scientists were doing deep diving off the coast of North Maluku, Indonesia, on a submerged volcanic slope where they suspected coelacanths were living. It was a dangerous dive because they had to descend so deep, so it required them to use a decompression stage on the way back to the surface. A pair of divers were on their way to the decompression site when they saw a big fish hovering over a boulder. It was a coelacanth that they estimated as being about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters!

It swam away slowly, but the next morning the divers returned and saw it again. Because coelacanths are gray with a pattern of white dots, and each dot pattern is unique, they knew it was the same fish. They were able to get more photos and video. The most important thing, though, is that while coelacanths have been found in other parts of Indonesia, they hadn’t been found in this particular area. Live individuals also hadn’t ever been seen by actual divers, just ROVs.

The more we know about these amazing fish, the better they can be protected. Fake articles only bring confusion and doubt.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 429: Foxes!

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Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week’s topic, foxes!

Further reading:

Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow

Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox

The red fox:

A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]:

The extremely fluffy Arctic fox:

The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we’ll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee.

Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they’re not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that’s called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically.

The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It’s common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It’s also been introduced in Australia, where it’s an invasive species. It’s a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle.

There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It’s smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick.

The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it’s one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50.

For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It’s fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow.

Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox’s muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat.

During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it’s white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it’s rare. The Arctic fox’s fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet.

The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what’s left from a polar bear’s meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes, it will poke its nose into the snow quickly to grab the little animal, an activity called mousing. A study from 2024 revealed that the fox’s snout shape helps keep it from getting injured in deep and compacted snow.

The grey fox lives throughout North and Central America, although it’s less common than it used to be due to habitat loss and hunting by humans. It’s a grizzled gray in color with reddish or tan legs, and a black stripe down its tail ending in a black tail tip.

It’s actually not that closely related to what are called true foxes. Its pupils are rounded like a dog’s instead of slit like other foxes, which have eyes that resemble cats’ eyes. The grey fox also has hooked claws that allow it to climb trees like a cat, and when it’s in a tree it can climb around in it just fine. A vixen may make her den in the hollow part of a tree to have her babies, sometimes as much as 30 feet, or 9 meters, above the ground, although most of the time gray foxes den on the ground, in a burrow, hollow log, or even in an abandoned human building.

The gray fox is small, not much bigger than a domestic cat, and it eats a lot of the same things that coyotes eat. If a coyote feels like a grey fox is encroaching on its territory, the coyote will kill the fox. Naturally, foxes are cautious around coyotes as a result. A study published in 2021 discovered that in areas where black bears live alongside coyotes and gray foxes, the foxes spend a lot of time hanging out near bears. In winter when the bears are hibernating, the foxes leave because coyotes will move into the area until the bears re-emerge in spring. Coyotes are afraid of bears, so the presence of bears protects the foxes as long as the fox doesn’t annoy the bear. I feel like this would make a great basis for a cartoon.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 428: The Most Venomous Snake!

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Thanks to Nora and BlueTheChicken for suggesting the inland taipan this week!

The inland taipan in its summer colors [picture by AllenMcC. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4442037]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have a suggestion by Nora and BluetheChicken, who both wanted to learn about the inland taipan. Is it really the most venomous snake in the world? Let’s find out, from a safe distance.

The inland taipan is native to some parts of Australia, specifically in dry areas around the border of Queensland and South Australia. In the summer it’s lighter in color, tan or yellowy-brown, and in winter it’s dark brown or black with a lighter belly. Its head is usually darker in color than the rest of its body, and even in summer it usually has darker scales that make a zig-zaggy pattern on its back and sides. It can grow more than eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. It eats small animals, especially Dasyurids, which are members of the family Dasyuridae.

Dasyurids are marsupials and include larger animals like the Tasmanian devil and the quoll, but those particular species don’t live where the inland taipan does. The inland taipan mainly eats species that are often referred to as marsupial mice and marsupial rats, although they’re not related to rodents at all. It also eats introduced placental mammals like actual rats and house mice.

The inland taipan was described in 1879 from two specimens captured in northwestern Victoria. Then it wasn’t seen again by scientists until 1972, when someone in Queensland sent a snake head to the herpetologist Jeanette Covacevich. Most people would consider that a threat, but she was delighted to get a mystery snake head in the mail. She grabbed a colleague and they hurried to Queensland to look for the snake. They found 13 of them, and to their utter delight, they turned out to be the long-lost inland taipan! Part of the reason it wasn’t rediscovered sooner is that everyone thought it lived in Victoria, when it’s actually still not been seen in that state since 1879.

The inland taipan is often called the fierce snake because if it feels threatened, it will strike repeatedly and very fast. Its venom is incredibly toxic and takes effect incredibly quickly. It’s a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions, paralysis, kidney failure, cerebral hemorrhage, heart failure, and lots more horrible symptoms. People have died from the venom, but unless you keep an inland taipan in captivity and handle it a lot, you don’t have to worry about one biting you. It’s very shy in the wild and will hide in rock crevices or cracks in dry soil rather than attack, plus it lives in remote areas of Australia that most people never visit. Even in captivity it’s usually calm and not aggressive, which leads to reptile keepers and scientists not always taking the correct precautions for handling it. Luckily, with quick treatment and antivenin, most people recover from an inland taipan bite.

So is it the most venomous snake in the world? The inland taipan’s venom hasn’t been fully studied yet, and scientists haven’t fully studied the venom of many other snakes either, but as far as we know right now, yes. The inland taipan is the most venomous snake known, even compared to sea snakes.

You may be wondering if anything would dare eat the inland taipan since it’s so venomous. A big perentie monitor lizard, which we talked about in episode 384, will eat lots of different snakes, including the inland taipan. A snake called the mulga, also referred to as the king brown snake, will eat the inland taipan. The mulga usually only eats small snakes, but it’s immune to the venom of most Australian snakes and can grow up to 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters. The mulga lives throughout most of Australia and is venomous itself. Even though its venom isn’t all that toxic, it will bite repeatedly and even chew to inject even more venom. Honestly, I would much rather run into an inland taipan, if you ask me.

Because it’s so venomous, and so hard to find in the wild anyway, the best place to see an inland taipan is at a public zoo, where you can admire it in an environment that’s safe for you and safe for the snake.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 427: The Other Cephalopods

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Further reading:

Reconstructing fossil cephalopods: Endoceras

Retro vs Modern #17: Ammonites

Hammering Away at Hamites

An endocerid [picture by Entelognathus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111981757]:

An ammonite fossil:

A hamite ammonoid that looks a lot like a paperclip [picture by Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34882102]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

When you think about cephalopods, if that’s a word you know, you probably think of octopuses and squid, maybe cuttlefish. But those aren’t the only cephalopods, and in particular in the past, there used to be even more cephalopods that are even weirder than the ones we have today.

Cephalopods are in the family Mollusca along with snails and clams, and many other animals. The first ancestral cephalopods date back to the Cambrian, and naturally we don’t know a whole lot about them since that was around 500 million years ago. We have fossilized shells that were only a few centimeters long at most, although none of the specimens we’ve found are complete. By about 475 million years ago, these early cephalopod ancestors had mostly died out but had given rise to some amazing animals called Endocerids.

Endocerids had shells that were mostly cone-shaped, like one of those pointy-ended ice cream cones but mostly larger and not as tasty. Most were pretty small, usually only a few feet long, or less than a meter, but some were really big. The largest Endoceras giganteum fossil we have is just under 10 feet long, or 3 meters, and it isn’t complete. Some scientists estimate that it might have been almost 19 feet long, or about 5.75 meters, when it was alive.

But that’s just the long, conical shell. What did the animal that lived in the shell look like? We don’t know, but scientists speculate that it had a squid-like body. The head and arms were outside of the shell’s opening, while the main part of the body was protected by the front part of the shell. We know it had arms because we have arm impressions in sections of fossilized sea floor that show ten arms that are all about the same length. We don’t know if the arms had suckers the way many modern cephalopods do, and some scientists suggest it had ridges on the undersides of the arms that helped it grab prey, the way modern nautiluses do. It also had a hood-shaped structure on top of its head called an operculum, which is also seen in nautiluses. This probably allowed Endoceras giganteum to pull its head and arms into its shell and use the operculum to block the shell’s entrance.

We don’t know what colors the shells were, but some specimens seem to show a mottled or spotted pattern. The interior of Endoceras giganteum’s shell was made up of chambers, some of which were filled with calcium deposits that helped balance the body weight, so the animal didn’t have trouble dragging it around.

3D models of the shells show that they could easily stick straight up in the water, but we also have trace fossils that show drag marks of the shell through sediment. Scientists think Endoceras was mainly an ambush predator, sitting quietly until a small animal got too close. Then it would grab it with its arms. It could also crawl around to find a better spot to hunt, and younger individuals that had smaller shells were probably a lot more active.

We talked about ammonites way back in episode 86. Ammonites were really common in the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years, only going extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. Some ammonites lived at the bottom of the ocean in shallow water, but many swam or floated throughout the ocean. Many ammonite fossils look like snail shells, but the shell contains sections inside called chambers. The largest chamber, at the end of the shell, was for the ammonite’s body, except for a thin tube that extended through the smaller inner chambers, which allowed the animal to pump water or air into and out of the chambers in order to make itself more or less buoyant in the water.

While many ammonites were no larger than modern snails, many others were bigger than your hand, sometimes twice the size of your hand even if you have really big hands. But during the Jurassic and part of the Cretaceous, some ammonites got even bigger. One species grew almost two feet across, or 53 cm. Another grew some 4 ½ feet across, or 137 cm, and one species grew as much as 6 ½ feet across, or 2 meters. It was found in Germany in 1895 and dates to about 78 million years ago–and it wasn’t actually a complete fossil. Researchers estimate that in life it would have been something like 8 and a half feet across, or 2.55 meters.

Ammonites look a lot like a modern cephalopod called the nautilus, so much so that I thought for a long time that they were the same animal and they were all extinct. Imagine my surprise when I started researching episode 86! But although nautiluses look similar, it turns out they’re not all that closely related to ammonites. Ammonites were probably more closely related to squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish than to modern nautiluses.

Until very recently, we had no idea what the ammonite’s body looked like, just its shell. Scientists hypothesized that they had ten arms. Then, in 2021, three years after episode 86 because I have been making this podcast for a really long time, scientists found a partial fossil of an ammonite’s body. That was followed by two more discoveries of ammonite bodies, so we know a lot more about it now. We now know that ammonites resembled squid with shells a lot more than they resembled nautiluses. We still don’t know how many arms they had, but they do appear to have had two feeding tentacles like squid have, with hook-like structures that would help the ammonite hold onto wiggly prey.

Not all ammonoids had shells that resembled a snail’s spiral shell. Heteromorph ammonites had a wide variety of shell shapes. They were extremely common starting around 200 million years ago, so common that they’re used as index fossils to help scientists determine how old a particular segment of rock is. Some of the shells look a lot like ram horns, loosely coiled with ribs on the upper surface, while others were almost straight.

Baculites are a genus of ammonoid that had straight or only gently curved shells, sort of like Endocerids but living about 300 million years later and only very distantly related to them. The longest baculite shell found so far was about 6 and a half feet long, or 2 meters. Nipponites were a more complicated shape, as though a ram’s horn somehow got twisted up and crumpled into a lopsided ball. Turrilites grew in a tight spiral but with the coils on top of each other like a spiral staircase. But the best to my mind are the hamites, because some of them had shells shaped like paper clips.

We don’t know much about heteromorph ammonites, and scientists aren’t even sure how they moved around and found food. Their shell shapes would have made them slow swimmers. Many scientists now think they floated around in the water and caught tiny food as they encountered it. They even survived the end-cretaceous extinction event, although they only lived for about half a million years afterwards.

Let’s finish with a living animal, the Dana octopus squid. It’s a squid but as an adult it doesn’t have the two feeding tentacles that most squid have. It just has eight arms, which is why it’s called the octopus squid. The Dana octopus squid is a deep-sea animal that can grow quite large, although it doesn’t have very long arms. The largest specimen measured was 7 and a half feet long including its arms, or 2.3 meters, but most of that length was the mantle. The arms are only about two feet long, or 61 cm.

Because it lives in deep water, we don’t know very much about the Dana octopus squid. We know it’s eaten by sperm whales, sharks, and other large animals, and occasionally part of a dead one will wash ashore. In 2005 a team of Japanese researchers filmed a living Dana octopus squid in deep water and discovered something surprising. The undersides of the squid’s arms contain photophores that can emit light, which is pretty common in deep-sea animals. The squid’s photophores are the largest known, and now we know why.

The video showed the squid attacking the bait, and before it did, its photophores flashed extremely bright. It was so bright that the scientists think the light disorients the squid’s prey as well as allowing the squid to get a good look at where its prey is. Even better, young Dana octopus squid have been observed flashing their photophores at large predators and swimming toward them in a mock attack, startling and even scaring away a much larger animal.

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Thanks for listening!