Category Archives: Asia

Episode 389: Updates 7 and the Lava Bear

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It’s our annual updates episode! Thanks to Kelsey and Torin for the extra information about ultraviolet light, and thanks to Caleb for suggesting we learn more about the dingo!

Further reading:

At Least 125 Species of Mammals Glow under Ultraviolet Light, New Study Reveals

DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko

Bootlace Worm: Earth’s Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin

Non-stop flight: 4,200 km transatlantic flight of the Painted Lady butterfly mapped

Gigantopithecus Went Extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 Years Ago, New Study Says

First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered

Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction

Australian Dingoes Are Early Offshoot of Modern Breed Dogs, Study Shows

A (badly) stuffed lava bear:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about a mystery animal called the lava bear! As usual, a reminder that I don’t try to update everything we’ve ever talked about. That would be impossible. I just pick new information that is especially interesting.

After our episode about animals and ultraviolet light, I got a great email from Kelsey and Torin with some information I didn’t know. I got permission to quote the email, which I think you’ll find really interesting too:

“You said humans can’t see UV light, which is true, however humans can detect UV light via neuropsin (a non-visual photoreceptor in the retina). These detectors allow the body to be signaled that it’s time to do things like make sex-steroid hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. (Spending too much time indoors results in non-optimal hormone levels, lowered neurotransmitter production, etc.)

“Humans also have melanopsin detectors in the retina and skin. Melanopsin detectors respond to blue light. Artificial light (LEDs, flourescents, etc) after dark entering the eye or shining on the skin is sensed by these proteins as mid-day daylight. This results in an immediate drop in melatonin production when it should be increasing getting closer to bedtime.”

And that’s why you shouldn’t look at your phone at night, which I am super bad about doing.

Our first update is related to ultraviolet light. A study published in October of 2023 examined hundreds of mammals to see if any part of their bodies glowed in ultraviolet light, called fluorescence. More than 125 of them did! It was more common in nocturnal animals that lived on land or in trees, and light-colored fur and skin was more likely to fluoresce than darker fur or skin. The white stripes of a mountain zebra, for example, fluoresce while the black stripes don’t.

The study was only carried out on animals that were already dead, many of them taxidermied. To rule out that the fluorescence had something to do with chemicals used in taxidermy, they also tested specimens that had been flash-frozen after dying, and the results were the same. The study concluded that ultraviolet fluorescence is actually really common in mammals, we just didn’t know because we can’t see it. The glow is typically faint and may appear pink, green, or blue. Some other animals that fluoresce include bats, cats, flying squirrels, wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, polar bears, armadillos, red foxes, and even the dwarf spinner dolphin.

In episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species.

No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau.

In June of 2023, Delcourt’s gecko was finally genetically tested and determined to belong to a group of geckos from New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands east of Australia. Many of its close relations are large, although not as large as it is. It’s now been placed into its own genus.

Of course, this means that Delcourt’s gecko isn’t the identity of the kawekaweau, since it isn’t very closely related to the geckos of New Zealand, but it might mean the gecko still survives in remote parts of New Caledonia. It was probably nocturnal and lived in trees, hunting birds, lizards, and other small animals.

We talked about some really big worms in episode 289, but somehow I missed the longest worm of all. It’s called the bootlace worm and is a type of ribbon worm that lives off the coast of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain, and it’s one of the longest animals alive. The longest worm we talked about in episode 289 was an African giant earthworm, and one was measured in 1967 as 21 feet long, or 6.7 meters. The bootlace worm is only 5 to 10 mm wide, but it routinely grows between 15 and 50 feet long, or 5 to 15 meters, with one dead specimen that washed ashore in Scotland in 1864 measured as over 180 feet long, or 55 meters.

When it feels threatened, the bootlace worm releases thick mucus. The mucus smells bad to humans but it’s not toxic to us or other mammals, but a recent study revealed that it contains toxins that can kill crustaceans and even some insects.

We talked about the painted lady butterfly in episode 203, which was about insect migrations. The painted lady is a small, pretty butterfly that lives throughout much of the world, even the Arctic, but not South America for some reason. Some populations stay put year-round, but some migrate long distances. One population winters in tropical Africa and travels as far as the Arctic Circle during summer, a distance of 4,500 miles, or 7,200 km, which takes six generations. The butterflies who travel back to Africa fly at high altitude, unlike monarch butterflies that fly quite low to the ground most of the time. Unlike the monarch, painted ladies don’t always migrate every year.

In October of 2013, a researcher in a small country in South America called French Guiana found some painted lady butterflies on the beach. Gerard Talavera was visiting from Spain when he noticed the butterflies, and while he recognized them immediately, he knew they weren’t found in South America. But here they were! There were maybe a few dozen of them and he noticed that they all looked pretty raggedy, as though they’d flown a long way. He captured several to examine more closely.

A genetic study determined that the butterflies weren’t from North America but belonged to the groups found in Africa and Europe. The question was how did they get to South America? Talavera teamed up with scientists from lots of different disciplines to figure out the mystery. Their findings were only published last month, in June 2024.

The butterflies most likely rode a well-known wind current called the Saharan air layer, which blows enough dust from the Sahara to South America that it has an impact on the Amazon River basin. The trip from Africa to South America would have taken the butterflies 5 to 8 days, and they would have been able to glide most of the time, thus conserving energy. Until this study, no one realized the Saharan air layer could transport insects.

We talked about the giant great ape relation Gigantopithecus in episode 348, and only a few months later a new study found that it went extinct 100,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. The study tested the age of the cave soils where Gigantopithecus teeth have been discovered, to see how old it was, and tested the teeth again too. As we talked about in episode 348, Gigantopithecus ate fruit and other plant material, and because it was so big it would have needed a lot of it. It lived in thick forests, but as the overall climate changed around 700,000 years ago, the forest environment changed too. Other great apes living in Asia at the time were able to adapt to these changes, but Gigantopithecus couldn’t find enough food to sustain its population. It went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago according to the new study, which is actually later than I had in episode 348, where I wrote that it went extinct 350,000 years ago. Where did I get my information? I do not know.

The first footprints of a terror bird were discovered recently in Argentina, dating to 8 million years ago. We talked about terror birds in episode 202. The footprints were made by a medium-sized bird that was walking across a mudflat, and the track is beautifully preserved, which allows scientists to determine lots of new information, such as how fast the bird could run, how its toes would have helped it run or catch prey, and how heavy the bird was. We don’t know what species of terror bird made the tracks, but we know it was a terror bird.

We talked about the extinction of the mammoth in episode 256, especially the last population of mammoths to survive. They lived on Wrangel Island, a mountainous island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of western Siberia, which was cut off from the mainland about 10,000 years ago when ocean levels rose. Mammoths survived on the island until about 4,000 years ago, which is several hundred years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. It’s kind of weird to imagine ancient Egyptians building pyramids, and at the same time, mammoths were quietly living on Wrangel Island, and the Egyptians had no idea what mammoths were. And vice versa.

A 2017 genetic study stated that the last surviving mammoths were highly inbred and prone to multiple genetic issues as a result. But a study released in June of 2024 reevaluated the population’s genetic diversity and made a much different determination. The population did show inbreeding and low genetic diversity, but not to an extent that it would have affected the individuals’ health. The population was stable and healthy right to the end.

In that case, why did the last mammoths go extinct? Humans arrived on the island for the first time around 1700 BCE, but we don’t know if they encountered mammoths or, if they did, if they killed any. There’s no evidence either way. All we know is that whatever happened, it must have been widespread and cataclysmic to kill all several hundred of the mammoths on Wrangel Island.

We talked about the dingo in episode 232, about animals that are only semi-domesticated. That episode came out in 2021, and last year Caleb suggested we learn more about the dingo. I found a really interesting 2022 study that re-evaluated the dingo’s genome and made some interesting discoveries.

The dingo was probably brought to Australia by humans somewhere between 3,500 and 8,500 years ago, and after the thylacine was driven to extinction in the early 20th century, it became the continent’s apex predator. Genetic studies in the past have shown that it’s most closely related to the New Guinea singing dog, but the 2022 study compared the dingo’s genome to that of five modern dog breeds, the oldest known dog breed, the basenji, and the Greenland wolf.

The results show that the dingo is genetically in between wolves and dogs, an intermediary that shows us what the dog’s journey to domestication may have looked like. The study also discovered something else interesting. Domestic dogs have multiple copies of a gene that controls digestion, which allows them to eat a wide variety of foods. The dingo only has one copy of that gene, which means it can’t digest a lot of foods that other dogs can. Remember, the dingo has spent thousands of years adapting to eat the native animals of Australia. When white settlers arrived, they would kill dingoes because they thought their livestock was in danger from them. The study shows that the dingo has little to no interest in livestock because it would have trouble digesting, for instance, a lamb or calf. The animals most likely to be hurting livestock are domestic dogs that are allowed to run wild.

We’ll finish with a mystery animal called the lava bear. In the early 20th century, starting in 1917, a strange type of bear kept being seen in Oregon in the United States. Its fur was light brown like a grizzly bear’s, but otherwise it looked like a black bear—except for its size, which was very small. The largest was only about 18 inches tall at the back, or 46 cm, and it only weighed about 35 pounds, or 16 kg. That’s the size of an ordinary dog, not even a big dog. Ordinarily, a black bear can stand 3 feet tall at the back, or about 91 cm, and weighs around 175 pounds, or 79 kg, and a big male can be twice that weight and much taller.

The small bear was seen in desert, especially around old lava beds, which is where it gets its name. A shepherd shot one in 1917, thinking it was a bear cub, and when he retrieved the body he was surprised to find it was an adult. He had it taxidermied and photographs of it were published in the newspapers and a hunting magazine, which brought more hunters to the area.

People speculated that the animal might be an unknown species of bear, possibly related to the grizzly or black bear, and maybe even a new species of sun bear, a small bear native to Asia.

Over the next 17 years, many lava bears were killed by hunters and several were captured for exhibition. When scientists finally got a chance to examine one, they discovered that it was just a black bear. Its small size was due to malnutrition, since it lived in a harsh environment without a lot of food, and its light-colored fur was well within the range of fur color for an American black bear. Lava bears are still occasionally sited in the area around Fossil Lake.

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 387: The Link Between Fossils and Folklore

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Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode!

Further reading:

Paleontologists Debunk Popular Claim that Protoceratops Fossils Inspired Legend of Griffin

The Fossil Dragons of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland

The Lindworm statue:

A woolly rhinoceros skull:

A golden collar dated to the 4th century BCE, made by Greek artisans for the Scythians, discovered in Ukraine. The bottom row of figures shows griffins attacking horses:

The Cyclops and a (damaged, polished) elephant skull:

A camahueto statue [photo by De Rjcastillo – Trabajo propio, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145434346]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about the link between fossils and folklore, a topic inspired by a conversation I had with Richard from North Carolina.

We know that stories about monsters were sometimes inspired by fossils, and we even have an example from episode 53. That was way back in 2018, so let’s talk about it again.

In Klagenfurt in Austria there’s a statue of a dragon, called the lindorm or lindwurm, that was erected in 1593 to commemorate a local story. The story goes that a dragon lived near the lake and on foggy days would leap out of the fog and attack people. Sometimes people could hear its roaring over the noise of the river. Finally the duke had a tower built and filled it with brave knights. They fastened a barbed chain to a collar on a bull, and when the dragon came and swallowed the bull, the chain caught in its throat and tethered it to the tower. The knights came out and killed the dragon.

The original story probably dates to around the 12th century, but it was given new life in 1335 when a skull was found in a local gravel pit. It was clearly a dragon skull and in fact it’s still on display in a local museum. The monument’s artist based the shape of the dragon’s head on the skull. In 1935 the skull was identified as that of a woolly rhinoceros.

In 1989 a folklorist proposed that the legend of the griffin was inspired by protoceratops fossils. The griffin is a mythological creature that’s been depicted in art, writing, and folklore dating back at least 5,000 years, with early variations on the monster dating back as much as 8,000 years. The griffin these days is depicted as a mixture of a lion and an eagle. It has an eagle’s head, wings, and front legs, and it often has long ears, while the rest of its body is that of a lion.

The griffin isn’t a real animal and never was. It has six limbs, for one thing, four legs and two wings, and it also has a mixture of mammal and bird traits. I can confirm that it’s a lot of fun to draw, though, and lots of great stories and books have been written about it in modern times. Ancient depictions of a griffin-like monster have been found throughout much of eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and central Asia. Much of what we know about the griffin legend comes from ancient Greek and Roman stories, but they in turn got at least some of their stories from ancient Scythia. That’s important for the hypothesis that the griffin legend was inspired by protoceratops fossils.

Protoceratops lived between 75 and 71 million years ago and its fossils have been found in parts of China and Mongolia. It was a ceratopsian but it didn’t belong to the family Ceratopsidae, which includes Triceratops. It grew up to about 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, with a big skull and a neck frill, but while that sounds big, it actually was on the small size for a ceratopsian. At most it would have barely stood waist-high to an average human, so while it was heavy and compact, it was probably smaller, if not lighter, than a modern lion. It ate plants and while it had teeth, it also had a beak, sort of like a turtle’s beak.

Folklorist Adrienne Mayor published a number of papers and a book in the 1990s discussing the links between protoceratops fossils and the griffin legend. The fossils are fairly common in parts of Mongolia and China, and Mayor pointed out that the beak combined with four legs would have suggested a four-footed animal with a bird’s head. She suggested that the head frill might have been interpreted as wings.

As for the Scythians, which we talked about a few minutes ago, they were a nomadic people who ruled much of west and central Asia and part of eastern Europe up to about 300 BCE. They were skilled in metalworking and loved gold, so even though they didn’t have a system of writing, we have some of their metal artifacts found by archaeologists. The Scythians were so important to the ancient world that we know a lot about them from other cultures, especially the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Assyrians.

We know the griffin appeared in Scythian mythology because it’s depicted on some decorative metal items. We also have ancient stories about griffins loving gold and either battling people to steal gold, or mining gold that people stole from them, or some other variation. Scythians had elaborate trade routes that connected Asia and Europe, and as I mentioned, they were hugely influential. I mean, we’re still telling versions of monster stories that the Scythians probably came up with originally.

Mayor suggested that the Scythians found protoceratops fossils while prospecting for gold, thought they were the bones of the monster we now call a griffin, and spread stories about them throughout Eurasia. It sounds plausible, so much so that no one really investigated the story until recently.

Just last week as this episode goes live, a new study has been published by a team of paleontologists about the griffin-protoceratops connection. They worked with historians and archaeologists to determine when and where (and if) the Scythians might have discovered protoceratops fossils.

It turns out that they probably wouldn’t have, certainly not while prospecting or mining gold. Gold has never been found anywhere near protoceratops fossils, and in fact the known gold deposits in central Asia occur hundreds of kilometers away from the fossils found so far. Not only that, it would be very rare to find more than a little bit of fossilized bone sticking out of the rock in most cases.

The spread of the griffin in art doesn’t seem to have begun in central Asia, for that matter, and even the earliest artwork doesn’t seem to be very protoceratops-like. The head isn’t huge in comparison to the body, for instance. Early griffins were commonly depicted as lions with an eagle’s head, but sometimes they were depicted as eagles with a lion’s head.

That doesn’t mean that protoceratops fossils didn’t influence griffin mythology at some point, just that it didn’t seem to happen the way Mayor claimed it did.

Another common connection between a fossil and a mythical monster is likewise just speculation. The skulls of elephants and their ancestors have a big opening in the front that looks like a giant eyesocket, but which is where the trunk was located. The eyes are much smaller and more on the sides of the head, and the skull itself does somewhat resemble a really big human skull. The Cyclops, or Cyclopes, was a giant from ancient Greek myth with one eye in the middle of its face instead of the usual two eyes. Is there really a connection between some kind of elephant skull and the Cyclops?

The connection was first suggested in 1914 by a paleontologist named Othenio Abel, who suggested that skulls from dwarf elephants had inspired the myth. Before about 500 BCE, the ancient Greeks didn’t know what elephants were, and the dwarf elephants that once lived in the area went extinct about 20,000 years ago. Sicily and Malta in particular had been home to various species of dwarf elephant for half a million years, so it’s possible that elephant remains were occasionally discovered in the area. Our griffin-protoceratops friend Adrienne Mayor agrees, but there’s no proof either way of this happening.

Stories of dragons living on Mount Pilatus in Switzerland may have been inspired by the pterosaur fossils that are frequently found in the area. In 1649 a man named Christopher Schorer reported seeing a fiery dragon fly from a cave in the side of Mount Pilatus to another mountain, although he admitted that at first he thought it was a meteor. It was probably a meteor, in fact, but he convinced himself it had to be a dragon because they were known to live on the mountain. A so-called dragon skeleton found near the mountain in 1602 had reportedly been crushed flat by rocks during an earthquake, but once science caught up with the finding, it was determined to be a fossilized pterodactyl.

In many parts of the world, especially China, fossilized bones are called dragon bones, but the dragon as a mythological creature probably came first. This is probably the case for a lot of folklore monsters and animals. The story came first, and once fossils were found in the area, they were seen as proof that the story was true.

In Patagonia in South America, there’s a Chilote legend of a monster called the camahueto. When it’s grown it lives in the ocean, but it starts out life living underground. Eventually it picks a stormy night, and it emerges from the ground and rushes toward the ocean, destroying everything in its path. Its single horn may gouge a channel in the ground for a new stream to form, or it may actually live in a river as a young animal and migrate to the ocean as an adult.

An animal named Trigodon once lived in Patagonia. It was a notoungulate, part of an extinct order of hoofed animals that lived throughout South America. It was probably most closely related to rhinoceroses, horses, and other odd-toed ungulates, but it and its relatives are completely extinct with no living descendants.

Trigodon was big and heavy, probably resembling a rhinoceros in many ways, and that includes having a single short horn on its head. On its forehead, in fact, pointing straight forward. It probably wasn’t a true horn but it was a protuberance of the skull. We don’t know if it was covered with skin and hair like an ossicone, a keratin sheath like a true horn, or if it was more like a rhinoceros horn. It might have been something completely different that’s currently unknown among living animals.

Trigodon went extinct around 4 million years ago, as far as we know, but other notoungulates only went extinct around 12,000 years ago. We don’t know very much about most of them, but we do know that at least one other species had a forehead horn like Trigodon’s. It’s always possible that a rhinoceros-like one-horned animal was still alive when humans first settled Patagonia, and that it was so big and scary it inspired stories about the monster Camahueto, a bull with a single horn on its forehead.

Then again, consider the story about the camahueto. It lives underground or in rivers when it’s young, and travels to the sea only during a storm. That might just be a story used to explain earthquakes that open fissures in the ground, and other natural phenomena. Then again, it might have been inspired by fossilized trigodon skulls that are washed out of the ground by torrential rain or rivers. That’s just my theory, though, but it’s fun to speculate.

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 385: More Monitors

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Thanks to Cosmo and Zachary for suggesting this week’s monitor lizards!

Further reading:

No One Imagined Giant Lizard Nests Would Be This Weird

The Mighty Modifications of the Yellow-Spotted Goanna

The Asian water monitor:

A yellow-spotted goanna standing up [picture by Geowombats – https://www.flickr.com/photos/geowombats/136601260/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2595566]:

Show transcript:

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

Last week we had our big dragons episode where we learned about the Komodo dragon and some of its relations, including goannas. I forgot to thank Cosmo for suggesting the lace monitor, also called the tree goanna, in that episode, and I also forgot that Zachary had also suggested monitor lizards as a topic, so let’s learn about two more monitor lizards this week.

Cosmo is particularly interested in aquatic and semi-aquatic animals, and a lot of monitor lizards are semi-aquatic. Let’s learn about the Asian water monitor first, since it’s the second-largest lizard alive today, only smaller than the Komodo dragon.

The Asian water monitor is common in many parts of South and Southeast Asia, including India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, southern China, and many islands. A half dozen subspecies are currently recognized, although there may be more.

The largest water monitor ever reliably measured was 10 1/2 feet long, or 3.2 meters. It’s dark brown or black with yellow speckles and streaks, and young lizards have larger yellow spots and stripes. It lives wherever it can find fresh or brackish water, from lakes and rivers to swamps, ponds, and even sewers.

Like the crocodile, the Asian water monitor’s tail is flattened from side to side, called lateral compression, and it’s also very strong. It swims by tucking its legs against its sides and propelling itself through the water with its tail. It can dive deeply to find food, and while it prefers fresh water, it will swim in the ocean too. That’s why it’s found on so many islands.

Juvenile Asian water monitors spend most of the time in trees, but even a fully grown lizard will sometimes climb a tree to escape danger. Only saltwater crocodiles and humans kill the adults.

In some parts of its range, the water monitor is killed by humans for its meat and its skin, which is used as leather. In other parts of its range, it’s never bothered since it eats venomous snakes and animals that damage crops. It’s sometimes kept as a pet, although it can grow so big that many people who buy a baby water monitor eventually run out of room to keep it. That’s how so many have ended up in the waterways of Florida and other areas far outside of its natural range, from people letting pets go in the wild even though doing so is illegal and immoral.

While most of the time the water monitor isn’t dangerous to humans, if it feels threatened, it can be quite dangerous. Like the Komodo dragon and other monitor lizards, it’s venomous, plus its teeth are serrated, its jaws are strong, and it has sharp claws. It eats a lot of carrion, along with anything it can catch. A population in Java even enters caves to hunt bats that fall from the ceiling.

Zachary didn’t suggest a particular type of monitor lizard, so let’s learn about the yellow-spotted goanna. Goannas are a type of monitor lizard found in Australia, New Guinea, and some nearby areas. We talked about some of them last week, including Cosmos’s suggestion of the lace monitor, but after the episode was released I found an article I had saved over a year ago. It’s about the yellow-spotted goanna, and a remarkable discovery about how it takes care of its eggs.

The yellow-spotted goanna lives in parts of Australia and southern New Guinea, and a big male can grow up to five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It can swim and climb trees when it wants to, but mainly it stays on the ground, although it prefers to live near water if possible. It’s a fast runner and chases its prey instead of ambushing it. It eats small animals like rodents, birds, fish, insects, and reptiles, including other monitor lizards.

If you remember last week’s episode, the female tree goanna digs a hole into a termite nest to lay her eggs inside. The termites repair the hole in their nest, which means the eggs are nicely hidden from predators and protected from weather, and when the babies hatch they have lots of termites to eat. That’s weird enough, but the yellow-spotted goanna female has an even more interesting way of protecting her eggs.

The yellow-spotted goanna digs a big burrow to hide in, and it spends a lot of its time in the burrow when it’s not out hunting. Researchers assumed the female laid her eggs in the burrow, but every time they investigated a female’s burrow, it was empty.

In 2012, a herpetologist named Sam Doody hoped to figure out where the female hid her eggs. He thought the eggs might be buried inside the burrow. When a female left her burrow, he and his team examined the burrow carefully. Doody noticed that the dirt at the end of the burrow felt softer than the walls, and he dug into it carefully, convinced he would find the eggs right away.

Instead, he and his team kept digging, following the softer dirt. It took them hours and hours, since they had to be really careful, and the filled-in burrow just kept going. It descended five feet, or 1.5 meters, into the ground in a corkscrew shape, more properly called helical, and at the very bottom the team found a nest of ten eggs.

Since then, Doody and his colleagues have studied many other yellow-spotted goanna nests and they’re all helical in shape and as much as 13 feet deep, or 4 meters. The extreme depth is related to how long it takes the eggs to hatch, about 8 months. If the eggs were closer to the surface, they would get too hot and dry to hatch. There’s more moisture and a constant temperature deep underground.

It takes the female more than a week to dig her tunnel and the small nesting chamber at the bottom. She lays her eggs, then returns to the surface, letting the sandy soil collapse behind her to hide and protect the eggs. The females also frequently nest together, sometimes sharing a nesting chamber. Doody’s team once found a nesting chamber as big as a room of your home but only about as tall as a mattress, with more than 100 clutches of eggs laid in it. The females often re-use the same burrows year after year. When the eggs hatch, the baby lizards dig their way out of the nesting chamber–but they dig straight up instead of using the softer parts of the helical structure.

Other animals move into the loose soil of the nesting burrows, especially frogs. When excavating one burrow, Doody’s team found 418 frogs, along with numerous small reptiles, invertebrates, and even mammals, all of them spending the dry season comfortably inside the loose soil in the spiral burrow. I wonder if the mother lizard sometimes digs some of these frogs out to eat as a snack. Watch out, frogs!

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 384: Dragons Revisited

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This week we need to thanks a bunch of listeners for their suggestions: Bowie, Eilee, Pranav, and Yuzu!

Further reading:

Elaborate Komodo dragon armor defends against other dragons

Giant killer lizard fossil shines new light on early Australians

A New Origin for Dragon Folklore?

The Wyvern of Wonderland

The Komodo dragon:

The beautiful tree goanna:

The perentie:

Fossilized scale tree bark looks like reptile scales:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic we talked about back in episode 53. That episode was about dragons, including the Komodo dragon. Since then, Bowie has requested to learn more about the Komodo dragon and Eilee and Pranav both suggested an updated dragon episode. We also have a related suggestion from Yuzu, who wants to learn more about goannas in general.

We’ll start with the Komodo dragon, which gets its name because it’s a huge and terrifying monitor lizard. It can grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, which means it’s the biggest lizard alive today. It has serrated teeth that can be an inch long, or 2.5 cm, and its skin is covered with bony osteoderms that make it spiky and act as armor. Since the Komodo dragon is the apex predator in its habitat, it only needs armor to protect it from other Komodo dragons.

Fortunately for people who like to hike and have picnics in nature, the Komodo dragon only lives on four small islands in Indonesia in southeast Asia, including the island of Komodo. Young Komodo dragons have no armor and spend most of the time in trees, where they eat insects and other small animals. As the dragon gets older and heavier, it spends more and more time on the ground. Its armor develops at that point and is especially strong on the head. The only patches on the head that don’t have osteoderms are around the eyes and nostrils, the edges of the mouth, and over the pineal eye. That’s an organ on the top of the head that can sense light. Yes, it’s technically a third eye!

The Komodo dragon is an ambush predator. When an animal happens by, the dragon jumps at it and gives it a big bite from its serrated teeth. Not only are its teeth huge and dangerous, its saliva contains venom. It’s very good at killing even a large animal like a wild pig quickly, but if the animal gets away it often dies from venom, infection, and blood loss.

Like a lot of reptiles, the Komodo dragon can swallow food that’s a lot bigger than its mouth. The bones of its jaws are what’s called loosely articulated, meaning the joints can flex to allow the dragon to swallow a goat whole, for instance. Its stomach can also expand to hold a really big meal all at once. After a dragon has swallowed as much as it can hold, it lies around in the sun to digest its food. After its food is digested, which can take days, it horks up a big wad of whatever it can’t digest. This includes hair or feathers, horns, hooves, teeth, and so on, all glued together with mucus.

A Komodo dragon eats anything it can catch, and the bigger the dragon is, the bigger the animals it can catch. One thing Komodo dragons are just fine with eating are other Komodo dragons.

As we mentioned a few minutes ago, the Komodo dragon is a type of monitor lizard, and there are lots of monitor lizards that live throughout much of the warmest parts of the earth, including Australia. Yuzu suggested we talk about the goanna, which is the term for monitor lizards in the genus Varanus, although it’s also a term sometimes used for all monitor lizards. Goannas are more closely related to snakes than to other types of lizard.

Like the Komodo dragon, the goanna will eat pretty much any animal it can catch, and will also scavenge already dead animals. Smaller goannas mostly eat insects, especially the tiny goanna often called the short-tailed pygmy monitor or just the pygmy monitor. Its tail is actually pretty long for its size. It only grows about 8 inches long at most, or 20 cm, and babies are less than the length of your pinkie finger. It spends most of its time underground in a burrow, but comes out to hunt for grasshoppers and other insects, spiders, scorpions, and sometimes frogs and small snakes. Many species of goanna spend the hottest part of the day in a burrow, and some species will hibernate in winter.

Most goannas spend all their time on the ground unless they’re actually underground, but some live in trees. The tree goanna, also called the lace monitor or just lacy, can grow up to seven feet long, or over two meters, but is lightly built to climb around on tree branches looking for food. The tree goanna eats a whole lot of bird eggs, along with whatever animals it can catch in trees or on the ground. It eats a lot of carrion and will even get into trash cans if it smells food. When the female is ready to lay her eggs, she digs a hole in the side of a termite nest and lays them in the nest. The termites repair the hole, which hides the eggs, and when the babies hatch, they have lots of termites to eat. The mother goanna keeps watch on the termite nest and once her eggs hatch, she’ll dig into it again to let her babies out.

Genetic testing has discovered that the tree goanna is the closest living relative to the Komodo dragon, but another relative is the biggest goanna alive today in Australia. It’s called the perentie and it can definitely grow up to 8 and a half feet long, or 2.5 meters, and possibly close to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. That’s almost the length of the Komodo dragon.

Long as it is, the perentie isn’t very heavy for its size. It has big claws that allow it to dig quickly, so that if it feels threatened it can dig a burrow and hide in it in only a few minutes. It can also climb trees and is a fast runner. Sometimes it will rear up on its hind legs, propping itself up with its tail, to get a good look around. It’s covered with a maze-like pattern of spots and speckles, and it has a very long neck and a very long tail. Like most monitor lizards, its head is flattened so that it looks a little like a snake’s head. Also like other monitor lizards, it has a long forked tongue that it flicks in and out like a snake to detect the chemical signature of other animals nearby, sort of like smelling but with the tongue.

Also like other monitor lizards, the perentie has a venomous bite. Its venom isn’t all that strong, but you still wouldn’t want to get nipped by one. A big perentie will kill and eat just about anything it can catch, including wombats and small kangaroos. It’s not dangerous to humans, though, and in fact very few people in Australia have ever seen a perentie in the wild. It’s shy and lives in remote areas, mostly in the interior of the country over to the western coast.

There used to be a goanna in Australia that was even bigger than the perentie, but it went extinct around 50,000 years ago. We talked about it briefly in episode 325, but Pranav suggested we learn more about it. It’s called megalania and not only was it bigger than the perentie, it made the Komodo dragon look like a little baby lizard. Megalania may have grown as much as 23 feet long, or 7 meters, although most scientists these days think it wasn’t quite that big. The latest estimates are still pretty big, possibly 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters. It was also heavily built, more like the Komodo dragon than the perentie, so it may have weighed as much as a polar bear. That’s about 1200 pounds, or around 550 kg, but I thought the polar bear comparison was funny. We don’t know for sure how big megalania was because we don’t have a complete skeleton.

Megalania has been classified with the living goannas in the genus Varanus, so it was probably related to the Komodo dragon, although we don’t know exactly how closely. It was probably venomous, and we know its teeth were serrated like the Komodo dragon’s. It lived throughout much of eastern Australia and may have been even more widespread, we just don’t know because we don’t have very many fossils.

Megalania lived alongside another giant monitor lizard in what is now Queensland, the Komodo dragon. That’s right, the Komodo dragon once lived in Australia, although it went extinct there around 300,000 years ago. Megalania went extinct around the time that humans first arrived in Australia, so it’s very possible that the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal Australians encountered it. In 2015, a study was published detailing the discovery of a large goanna osteoderm from a cave system in Queensland. The osteoderm has been dated to about 50,000 years ago and probably belonged to megalania, and some scientists think humans may have been a factor in its extinction, along with climate change.

There are supposedly stories passed down for thousands of years among the Aboriginal Australian peoples that suggest meetings with megalania. I tried hard to find accounts of any of these stories to share, but the sources were always questionable. I did learn that European accounts of the Dreamtime, especially older ones, are inaccurate at best. European colonizers didn’t fully understand the Aboriginal cultures and in many cases weren’t interested in understanding them. They just wanted to collect stories that they would then change to fit the European worldview. This trend continues to the present day, with non-Aboriginal writers changing, misinterpreting, or even straight up inventing Dreamtime stories to fit their own interests. Sometimes that interest is cryptozoology. From what I was able to discover, there really is one aspect of the Dreaming that does apparently include a giant goanna, but that the traditions involved are especially sacred and not meant for outsiders to learn. So it’s none of our business.

As we discussed in episode 53, European stories about dragons were probably inspired by snakes, since early dragons were described as snake-like. Dragon stories in other parts of the world were probably inspired by various local reptiles such as crocodiles. Fossilized bones also played a part, since in the olden days no one knew what dinosaurs were. All anyone knew was that sometimes they found gigantic bones that seemed to be made of stone, and people made up stories to explain them.

Stories about giant reptiles are common throughout much of the world, and in 2020 a study was published suggesting that one of the reasons wasn’t an animal at all. It was a plant, specifically a 300 million year old plant called Lepidodendron, also called the scale tree.

The scale tree wasn’t actually a tree, but it was a really big plant that could grow 160 feet tall, or 50 meters. It’s been extinct for a long time, but it does have living relations called quillworts that kind of look like weird grass.

The scale tree gets its name from the diamond-shaped pattern on its trunk, which looks for all the world like reptile scales. These were just places where leaves once grew, but as the plant got taller, it shed its lower leaves as new ones grew from the top. Different species of the plant had different scale patterns. The study suggests that fossilized pieces of scale tree trunks inspired stories about giant reptiles. Since the plants grew throughout the supercontinent Pangaea and often ended up fossilized in coal beds, their fossils have been found in many different parts of the world.

Let’s finish with a dragon story from England, specifically the village of Sockburn in County Durham. It’s referred to as the Sockburn Worm, since “worm” used to mean any creature that was snakey or worm-shaped in appearance. It’s closely related to the story of the Lambton Worm that we talked about in episode 53.

Once upon a time in the olden days, maybe around 750 years ago, maybe longer ago, Sockburn and the farmland around it were terrorized by a dragon. The dragon had a poisonous breath and would eat anyone it came across, and killed and ate all the livestock it could find. No one could kill it.

Sir John Conyers was a knight who lived in the area and he decided he had to do something. He got dressed in his armor and went to the local church to pray, and said he would give up his only son’s life if it meant killing the dragon. Then he set out to find the dragon.

He didn’t so much find the dragon as the dragon found him. Instead of getting eaten, Sir John drew his magical sword and battled the dragon until finally he lopped its head off with one massive chop. Sir John survived and so did his son.

Centuries later, in 1855, a writer was inspired by the story and wrote a poem based on it. He eventually included the poem in a book called Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. You may know the poem “The Jabberwock,” and now you know the dragon story that inspired it.

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 381: Out of Place Birds

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Thanks to Richard from NC, Pranav, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

ABA Rare Bird Alert

One Reason Migrating Birds Get Lost Is Out of This World

Inside the Amazing Cross-Continent Saga of the Steller’s Sea-Eagle

A Vagrant European Robin Is Drawing Huge Crowds in China

Bird migration: When vagrants become pioneers

A red-cockaded woodpecker:

Steller’s Sea Eagle making a couple of bald eagles look small:

Steller’s sea eagle:

A whole lot of birders showed up to see a European robin that showed up in the Beijing Zoo [photo from the fourth article linked above]:

A robin:

Mandarin ducks:

Richard’s pipit [photo by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23214345]:

Show transcript:

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

We’re talking about some birds again this week, with a slightly mysterious twist. These are birds that have shown up in places where they shouldn’t be, sometimes way way far from home! Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode and suggesting one of the birds we’re going to talk about, and thanks to Pranav for suggesting we cover more out of place animals.

Last week we talked about some woodpeckers, and I said I thought there was another listener who had suggested the topic. Well, that was Alexandra! Let’s start today’s episode talking about the red-cockaded woodpecker, another bird Alexandra suggested.

The red-cockaded woodpecker is native to the coastal southeastern United States, where it lives in pine forests. It’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss since the pine forests get smaller every year, and not only does it need old-growth pine forests to survive, it also needs some of the trees to be affected by red heart fungus. The fungus softens the interior wood, which is otherwise very hard, and allows a woodpecker to excavate nesting holes in various trees that can be quite large. The female lays her eggs in the best nesting hole and she and her mate raise the babies together, helped by any of their children from previous nests who don’t have a mate of their own yet. When they don’t have babies, during the day the birds forage together, but at night they each hide in their own little nesting hole to sleep.

It’s a small bird that doesn’t migrate, which is why Beth Miller, a birder in Muskegon, Michigan, couldn’t identify it when she spotted it on July 1, 2022 in some pine trees near a golf course. She took lots of photos and a recording of its calls, which she posted in a birding group to ask for help. She knew the bird had to be a rare visitor of some kind, but when it was identified as a red-cockaded woodpecker, she and nine birder friends went back to the golf course to look for it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the bird again. It was the first time a red-cockaded woodpecker had ever been identified in Michigan, although individual birds do sometimes wander widely.

While bird migration isn’t fully understood, many birds use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way to new territories and back again later in the year. Humans can’t sense magnetic fields but birds can, and being able to sense Earth’s magnetic field helps birds navigate even at night or during weather that keeps them from being able to see landmarks.

But sometimes birds get lost, especially young birds who have never migrated before or a bird that gets caught in storm winds that blow it far off course. If a bird shows up somewhere far outside of its normal range, birdwatchers refer to it as a vagrant, and some birders will travel great distances to see vagrant birds.

One interesting note is that birds navigating by the earth’s magnetic field can get confused if the magnetic field is disrupted by geomagnetic storms, including solar flares, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections. Very recently as this episode goes live, the aurora has been occasionally visible across much of the world. The aurora is caused by charged particles from the sun reaching Earth’s atmosphere, causing a colorful glow or shimmer in the night sky, and it’s usually only visible at or near the poles. This month it was visible in places far away from the poles. Fortunately, a really strong geomagnetic storm like the ones this month can actually make it easier for birds to migrate. Instead of getting a scrambled sense of the earth’s magnetic field, a strong geomagnetic storm can temporarily knock out a bird’s ability to sense the magnetic field at all, and that means it uses landmarks, the position of the stars and sun, and other methods to find its way.

Sometimes a bird just flies the wrong way, like the Steller’s sea eagle that showed up in Alaska at the end of August 2020. Steller’s sea eagle is native to the coast of northeastern Asia and is increasingly threatened due to habitat loss, pollution, climate change, poaching, and overfishing, a real problem if you’re an eagle that eats a whole lot of fish. Only about 4,000 of the birds remain in the wild. It’s a huge eagle, one of the biggest in the world, with a big female having a wingspan over 8 feet across, or almost 2.5 meters. Some unverified reports indicate birds with a wingspan over 9 feet across, or 2.8 meters. It has a huge yellow bill and feet, and is black and white in color. It’s related to the bald eagle but is larger and heavier, and its head is black instead of white.

To an eagle as big as Steller’s sea eagle, the distance between the eastern coast of Russia and the western coast of Alaska is very small, so it’s not all that unusual for birders to see one in Alaska. The difference in 2020 is that the bird was far inland, not on the coast. Then, several months later, a Steller’s sea eagle was reported in Texas. Texas! Very far away from Alaska and the northeastern Asian coast.

No one could definitively say if the Texas bird was the same one seen in Alaska, but a few weeks before there had been a massive storm that could have blown the eagle to San Antonio. It was the first time a wild Steller’s sea eagle had been spotted in Texas.

But the bird wasn’t done traveling. In late June 2021, a ranger in eastern Canada spotted the sea eagle. It was seen by multiple birders and photographers, some of whom got pictures good enough to compare to the Alaska photos from the year before, and it was the same bird! A few months later it was spotted in Nova Scotia, Canada, and in mid-December 2021 it arrived in southern Massachusetts in the United States for a few days. By the end of 2021 it was in Maine.

Since then the eagle appears to divide its time between Maine in the northeastern United States and Newfoundland, Canada, not too far away.

Richard from NC suggested that sightings of Steller’s sea eagle might explain the mystery of Washington’s eagle. I go into detail about Washington’s eagle in the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book. There is a rare color morph of Steller’s sea eagle that is almost all black, which matches Audubon’s painting of Washington’s eagle, but Steller’s sea eagle always has a yellow bill, not a dark one as Audubon painted. Still, it’s a very interesting theory that matches a lot better than the theory that Washington’s eagle is just a big juvenile bald eagle.

Eagles are spectacular birds, but even an ordinary bird turns into a celebrity when it shows up somewhere far outside of its normal range. That’s what happened to a European robin at the beginning of 2019. We talked about the European robin back in episode 333. It’s a common bird throughout much of Europe and parts of Asia, but it’s only been documented in Beijing, China three times. The third time was when one showed up in the Beijing Zoo in 2019, at least 1,500 miles, or 2,400 km, away from its usual range. Birdwatching is an increasingly popular hobby in China, and hundreds of birders showed up at the zoo not to see the animals it has on display but to see a little robin that someone in England would barely glance at.

A few months before that, on the other side of the planet, a Mandarin duck showed up in Central Park in New York City. Birders showed up soon after to look at it. The Mandarin duck is a beautiful bird related to the wood duck native to North America, but it’s native to China and other parts of east Asia. The male has a red bill, rusty red face with white markings, and purplish feathers on his sides, while the female is softer and more muted in color. Both males and females have a purplish crest and the male also has a reddish crest on both of his wings that sticks up like a sail when his wings are folded.

In other words, the male in particular is a spectacular duck, and the duck that showed up at Central Park was a male in full breeding plumage, looking his best. Since Mandarin ducks are so attractive and increasingly threatened in the wild, many zoos and private owners keep them, and the Central Park duck did have a band on his leg that indicates he might have been an escaped bird. But no one ever claimed him and in March of 2019 he flew off for good.

Vagrant birds show up in weird places all the time, especially in spring and fall when most migratory birds are on the move. Sometimes a vagrant bird returns to the mistaken area in following years, brings its mate and offspring, and essentially founds a new migratory route. This is what scientists think has happened with several species of songbird that breed in Siberia and migrate to southeast Asia for the winter.

Richard’s pipit is a medium-sized songbird with long legs, a long tail, and a relatively long bill. It’s mainly brown and black, with lighter underparts. It looks like a stretched-out sparrow. It migrates to southern Siberia, Mongolia, and a few other parts of central Asia to nest during the summer, and flies back to India and other parts of southeast Asia to spend the winter. But a small population flies west instead of south and spends the winter in Spain, Italy, and surrounding areas instead of in India.

For a long time scientists thought the birds seen in Europe were just lost. They’re still quite rare in Europe compared to their high population in Asia. Then a team of scientists caught 81 of the birds, installed leg-bands on all of them and GPS loggers on seven of them, and released them again. The birds migrated north to breed, then returned to Europe instead of Asia to spend the winter, where some were caught again and their leg-bands recorded. So just remember that when a bird shows up where it’s not expected, it might not be as lost as people think.

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 379: Animals That Inspired Pokemon

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Thanks to Pranav, Isaac, and an anonymous listener for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some animals that inspired three Pokemon.

Sandshrew:

Possible Sandshrew inspirations:

Drowzee:

Possible Drowzee inspiration:

Fennekin:

Undoubted Fennekin inspiration:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to do something slightly different. At least two people and probably a lot more have suggested that we talk about some animals that were the inspiration for Pokemon, so I picked three that you might not know about. Thanks to Pranav and Isaac for their suggestions, and if you suggested the same topic at some point and I didn’t write it down, thank you too! Thanks also to an anonymous listener who suggested three of the animals we’ll talk about in this episode. I didn’t intend to cover three animals suggested by the same listener but it worked out that way, which is kind of neat.

Some of you may not be familiar with what Pokemon are. The word is a shortened version of the term “pocket monsters,” and it started as a video game where players catch various monsters and store them in little round cages called pokeballs. A lot of Pokemon are so cute you can’t really call them monsters, but they all have different abilities and can evolve into even more powerful versions with enough training. My only real experience with Pokemon is the game Pokemon Go that came out in 2016, although I don’t play it anymore, but the franchise has had multiple games, including a trading card game that is still really popular, TV shows, movies, and of course lots of toys.

Sometimes it’s easy to figure out what animal inspired a Pokemon. Rhyhorn obviously looks like a rhinoceros, Magikarp looks like a goldfish, and so on. But sometimes it’s not so obvious. Let’s start with Sandshrew.

Sandshrew is a sandy-brown color on its back with a lighter belly and muzzle, and prominent claws. Its tail is big and its ears are small. It’s covered with armor plates, and in some versions of Sandshrew, most notably the Pokemon TV show, it can curl up into a ball. What does that remind you of?

Some of you just said “armadillo” and others of you just said “pangolin.” Both were suggested a while back by an anonymous listener. The two animals aren’t related but they do share some physical similarities, like armored bodies and the ability to curl up into a ball to make their armor even more effective.

We talked about the pangolin in episode 65, about animals that eat ants. The pangolin is related to anteaters, and is sometimes even called the scaly anteater, but it’s not closely related to the armadillo. Their similarities are mainly due to convergent evolution.

The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and lives in burrows, and it uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell. It’s a good fit for Sandshrew and some species are even the same color as Sandshrew. It lives in southern Asia and much of sub-Sahara Africa, and all species are critically endangered.

Meanwhile, the armadillo is also a mammal that’s covered in armor except for its belly, but its armor is much different from the pangolin’s scales. The armor is made up of bands of hardened, bone-like skin covered with scutes, which are tiny flattened knobs of keratin. Ordinary skin connects the bands so that the animal can move around more easily. Some species roll up when threatened, but others rarely do. Instead they just run into the most thorny, prickly plants they can find. The armadillo’s armor protects it from being hurt by the thorns. Like the pangolin, it has sharp claws and can dig well to get at termites and other invertebrates, and like the pangolin it has poor eyesight but a good sense of smell. Its ears are small, its legs are short, and its tail is long but not as thick as the pangolin’s. Most species are grayish, pinkish, or brownish. It looks less like Sandshrew than the pangolin does, but it might have contributed to Sandshrew’s appearance and habits.

The armadillo lives in the Americas, mostly in South America but also Central and parts of North America. Many species are endangered.

Whichever animal you think inspired Sandshrew, I think we can agree that Sandshrew doesn’t have anything to do with actual shrews.

Our next Pokemon is Drowzee. Drowzee is a chonky, strong-looking monster who looks like it’s wearing gray pants but otherwise has ochre yellow skin. Its nose is drawn out into a short proboscis like a miniature elephant trunk, and it has three pointy toes on its hands and what look like cloven hooves on its feet. It doesn’t have a tail.

Drowzee is inspired by the tapir, probably the Asian tapir. The other tapirs alive today live in South and Central America, but the Asian tapir lives in lowland rainforests in parts of south Asia. It’s mostly white or pale gray with black or dark gray forequarters and legs. It’s also the largest species of tapir alive today, standing more than 3 and a half feet tall at the back, or 110 cm. Like other tapirs, it spends a lot of time in water, eating plants and staying cool.

The tapir looks kind of like a pig but it’s actually much more closely related to horses and rhinos. It has four toes on its front legs, three on its hind legs, and each toe has a large nail that looks like a little hoof. It also has a rounded body with a pronounced rump, a stubby little tail, and a long head with a short but prehensile trunk called a proboscis. It uses its proboscis to gather plants, and it can even use it as a snorkel when it’s underwater.

The Asian tapir isn’t a perfect match for Drowzee, but its two-part coloration and short proboscis are pretty close. As far as I know, the Asian tapir doesn’t make you fall asleep and then eat your dreams like Drowzee is supposed to do, but that’s an aspect of a monster in Japanese folklore. The baku is supposed to eat nightmares and traditionally it’s often described as being black and white like a panda, but often with tapir-like traits.

Our last Pokemon today is Fennekin, who is based on the fennec fox, also a suggestion by an anonymous listener. Fennekin is yellow-brown in color with white on its face, a red-orange tip to its tail and red-orange tufts in its gigantic ears.

The fennec fox lives in northern Africa and parts of Asia. Its fur is a pale sandy color with a black tip to the tail. Its eyes are dark and its ears are large. It stands only about 8 inches tall at the shoulder, or 20 cm, but its ears can be six inches long, or 15 cm. It eats rodents, birds and their eggs, insects, and other small animals, as well as fruit. It can jump really far, some four feet in one bound, or 120 cm. Because it lives in desert areas, it rarely needs to drink water. It gets most of its water through the food it eats, and researchers think it may also lap dew that gathers in the burrow where it spends the day.

Fennekin is a fire Pokemon, appropriate since it’s based on a desert animal. It’s also extra adorable, and so is the fennec fox.

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 377: The Giant-est Snake Ever

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Thanks to Max for suggesting Titanoboa!

Further reading:

Largest known madtsoiid snake from warm Eocene period of India suggests intercontinental Gondwana dispersal

This Nearly 50-Foot Snake Was One of the Largest to Slither on Earth

Meet Vasuki indicus, the ‘crocodile’ that was a 50ft snake

Titanoboa had really big bones compared to its modern relatives:

Vasuki had big bones too:

Show transcript:

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

Almost exactly two years ago now, Max emailed to suggest we talk about titanoboa. The problem was that we had covered titanoboa in episode 197, and even though there’s always something new to learn about an animal, in this case since titanoboa is extinct there wasn’t much more I could share until new studies were published about it. But as the years passed I felt worse and worse that Max was waiting so long. A lot of listeners have to wait a long time for their suggested episode, and I always feel bad. But still there were no new studies about titanoboa!

Why am I telling you all this? Because we’re finally going to talk about titanoboa today, even though by now Max is probably old and gray with great-grandkids. But we’re only going to talk about titanoboa to compare it to another extinct snake. That’s right. Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a snake that was even longer than titanoboa!

Let’s start with Titanoboa, because it’s now been a really long time since episode 197 and all I remember about it is that it’s extinct and was way bigger than any snake alive today. Its discovery is such a good story that I’m going to include it too.

In 1994, a geologist named Henry Garcia found an unusual-looking fossil in Colombia in South America, in an area that had been strip-mined for coal. Fifty-eight million years ago the region was a hot, swampy, tropical forest along the edge of a shallow sea.

Garcia thought he’d found a piece of fossilized tree. The coal company in charge of the mine displayed it in their office along with other fossils. There it sat until 2003, when palaeontologists arranged an expedition to the mine to look for fossil plants. A researcher named Scott Wing was invited to join the team, and while he was there he poked around among the fossils displayed by the mining company. The second he saw the so-called petrified branch he knew it wasn’t a plant. He sent photos to a colleague who said it looked like the jawbone of a land animal, probably something new to science.

In 2007, the fossil was sent for study, labeled as a crocodile bone. But the palaeontologists who examined the fossil in person immediately realized it wasn’t from a crocodile. It was a snake vertebra—but so enormous that they couldn’t believe their eyes. They immediately arranged an expedition to look for more of them, and they found them!

Palaeontologists have found fossilized remains from around 30 individual snakes, including young ones. The adult size is estimated to be 42 feet, or 13 meters. The largest living snakes are anacondas and reticulated pythons, with no verified measurements longer than about 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Titanoboa was probably twice that length.

Because titanoboa was so bulky and heavy, it would be more comfortable in the water where it could stay cool and have its weight supported. It lived in an area where the land was swampy with lots of huge rivers. Those rivers were full of gigantic fish and other animals, including a type of lungfish that grew nearly ten feet long, or 3 meters. Studies of titanoboa’s skull and teeth indicate that it probably mostly ate fish.

So if titanoboa was so huge that until literally a few days ago as this episode goes live, we thought it was the biggest snake that had ever existed, how big was this newly discovered snake? It’s called Vasuki indicus and while it wasn’t that much bigger than titanoboa, estimates so far suggest it could grow almost 50 feet long, or over 15 meters. It’s named after a giant serpent king called Vasuki from Hindu folklore, who symbolizes strength and prosperity.

Vasuki indicus was discovered in a mine in India in 2005. The original discovery consisted of 27 vertebrae, including some that were still articulated. That means they remained in place after the rest of the body decayed and were preserved that way, which helps palaeontologists better estimate the snake’s true size.

Like titanoboa, the fossils were misidentified at first. They were labeled as a known giant crocodile and set aside in the discoverer’s lab for decades. In 2022, paleontologist Debajit Datta joined the lab, and one of the things he wanted to study were these giant crocodile fossils. He started preparing them for study by removing the rock matrix from around them, and almost immediately realized they belonged to a snake, not a crocodile.

The fossils have been dated to about 47 million years ago in what is now India, in Asia. Titanoboa lived about 58 million years ago in what is now Colombia, in South America. The two snakes are related, although not closely, and this helps scientists determine how snakes spread across the world as the continents moved into their current positions.

Both snakes lived in what were then very similar habitats, a tropical, swampy area near the coast. The researchers think Vasuki spent most of its time on land, unlike titanoboa. It wasn’t as bulky as titanoboa and could probably maneuver on land a lot more easily.

Until titanoboa was described in 2009, a snake called Gigantophis was thought to be the largest snake that ever lived. It lived around 40 million years ago in what is now the northern Sahara desert and could grow over 35 feet long, or almost 11 meters. It turns out that Vasuki was closely related to gigantophis.

As it stands now, until more fossils are found and more studies are conducted and published, Vasuki is estimated to be slightly longer than titanoboa at maximum, making it the longest snake known, but titanoboa is still estimated to be the heaviest snake known. So they both win the largest snake award, but the real winner is us.

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 372: Mystery Bovids

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Thanks to Will and Måns for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some mystery bovids, or cows and cow relations!

Further reading:

A Book of Creatures: Songòmby

Kouprey: The Ultimate Mystery Mammal

A musk ox (top) and a wild yak (bottom):

A young kouprey bull from the 1930s:

Sculpture of two grown kouprey bulls [photo by Christian Pirkl – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73848355]:

A banteng bull (with a cow behind him) [photo taken from this site]:

A qilin/kilin/kirin looking backwards:

The “purple” calf:

The Milka purple cow:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some mystery bovids, or cow relations, suggested by Will and Måns, whose name I am probably mispronouncing.

We’ll start with a mystery about the musk ox, which is not otherwise a mysterious animal. Måns emailed about reading a children’s book about animals that had a picture of a musk ox in the part about the Gobi Desert. The problem is, the musk ox is native to the Arctic and was once found throughout Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. So the question is, was the book wrong or are there really musk oxen in the Gobi Desert?

We’ll start by learning about the musk ox and the Gobi Desert. The musk ox can stand up to 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It has thick, dense, shaggy fur all over, a tiny tail only about four inches long, or 10 cm, and horns that curve down close to the sides of its head and then curve up again at the ends.

The musk ox is well adapted to the cold, which isn’t a surprise since it evolved during the ice ages. Its ancestors lived alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Pleistocene megafauna. Like many cold-adapted animals, its fur consists of a thick undercoat that keeps it warm, and a much longer layer of fur that protects the softer undercoat. The undercoat is so soft and so good at keeping the animal warm in bitterly cold temperatures that people will sometimes keep musk oxen in order to gather the undercoat in spring when it starts to shed, to use for making clothing and blankets. But it’s definitely not a domesticated animal. It can be aggressive and extremely dangerous.

A warm coat isn’t the musk ox’s only cold adaptation. The hemoglobin in its blood is able to function well even when it’s cold, which isn’t the case for most mammals. It lives in small herds that gather close together in really cold weather to share body heat, and if a predator threatens the herd, the adults will form a ring around the calves, their heads facing outward. Since a musk ox is huge, heavy, and can run surprisingly fast, plus it has horns, if a wolf or other predator is butted by a musk ox it might end up fatally injured.

The main predator of the musk ox is the human, who hunted it almost to extinction by the early 20th century. It was completely extirpated in Alaska but was reintroduced there and in parts of Canada in the late 20th century. Similarly, it was reintroduced to parts of Siberia and even parts of northern Europe, although not all the European introductions were successful.

So what about the Gobi Desert? It’s nowhere near the Arctic. Not all deserts are hot. A desert just has limited rainfall, and the Gobi is a cold desert. Parts of the Gobi are grasslands and parts are sandy or rocky, and it covers a huge expanse of land in central Asia, mainly divided between northern China and southern Mongolia. Some parts of it do get limited rainfall in the summer and limited snowfall and frost in the winter, but for the most part it’s dry and therefore has limited vegetation for animals to eat.

Animals do live in the Gobi, though. The wild Bactrian camel, which has two humps, is found nowhere else in the world and is critically endangered. The Mongolian wild ass lives in parts of the Gobi, as do several species of antelope and gazelle, wild sheep, and ibex. The Gobi bear, which is the rarest bear in the world, also lives in the Gobi, along with smaller animals like hares, foxes, polecats, marmots, and various lizards, snakes, and birds. Occasionally wolves and snow leopards visit parts of the Gobi. So do humans, specifically nomadic herders who travel through parts of the desert to find food for their animals.

Of all the animals found in the Gobi, and in central Asia in general, the musk ox is not listed on any scholarly site I could find. Despite its name, it’s not actually closely related to other cattle and is instead most closely related to goats and sheep. However, a close relation of the domestic cow and its ancestors is the wild yak, the ancestor of the domestic yak. The wild yak lives mostly in the Himalayas these days but was once much more widespread, and the domestic yak is farmed by nomadic herders in the colder, more mountainous parts of the Gobi.

The yak isn’t closely related to the musk ox, but it does have a very similar-looking long, shaggy coat. Its horns point forward and up like cattle horns, but to someone who doesn’t really know much about yaks or musk ox, it would be easy to get the two confused. This seems to be what has happened in the case of the children’s book Måns read and in various non-academic websites. I think we can call this mystery solved.

Next, let’s go on to Will’s suggestion of mystery bovids. The family Bovidae includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw, and instead has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants.

One mystery bovid is a creature from Madagascar, called the habeby. It’s supposed to look like a big white sheep with brown or black spots. It has cloven hooves and droopy ears but not horns, and it’s supposed to be nocturnal and never seen in the daytime. Its eyes are very large and staring. It’s shy and fortunately not dangerous. Bovids are almost always diurnal, so a nocturnal bovid would be quite unusual.

Since sheep and other bovids aren’t native to Madagascar, it’s much more likely that the habeby is a type of large lemur that looks enough like a sheep at a distance that people thought it was a sheep. Either it’s extinct now or it lives in such remote areas that it’s never seen anymore.

Another Madagascar mystery animal is called the songòmby, which either looks like a wild ox or a horse depending on the story. Like the habeby it has floppy ears, a spotted coat, and hooves. Some stories say it has a single horn, some stories say it has a pair of horns, and other stories say it has no horns at all. It lives in mountainous areas and can run incredibly fast uphill, but is much slower downhill because its long ears flop over its eyes and it has trouble seeing where it’s going. This is fortunate, because it’s also supposed to eat people.

One clue to the songòmby’s possible real identity comes from some stories that state it always looks backwards over its back, and is only ever seen from the side. This is reminiscent of how the Chinese kilin is often represented, and also explains why the songòmby has a varying number of horns and looks like a cow or horse but is supposed to eat people. The kilin is often depicted as having both hooves and fangs, and may have a single horn, a pair of horns, or no horns at all. Arab traders began stopping in Madagascar around a thousand years ago and would have brought Chinese goods, including some items decorated with kilins. It’s possible that the kilin artwork inspired the story of the songòmby, but it’s also so similar to the habeby in some ways that details of that animal may have been incorporated into the story of the songòmby, or vice versa.

Way back in episode 100 we talked briefly about an animal called the kouprey. It’s a wild ox native to southeast Asia, sometimes called the forest ox. It can stand over six feet tall at the shoulder, or two meters, and while bulls are dark brown, cows and calves are a lighter brownish-gray. Both have white lower legs with a dark stripe down the front of the front legs. The bull’s horns look like those of a domestic cow or wild yak, but are extremely large and curve forward, but the cow’s horns grow up and back, more like an antelope’s horns. As a bull ages, the tips of his horns start to fray and end up looking almost tassled. A bull also develops a large dewlap as he ages, which in older bulls can actually be so big it touches the ground.

By 1937, when a kouprey was sent to a zoo in Paris, the animal was probably mostly restricted to the forests of Cambodia. Before then it had been completely unknown to science, but after that, European big game hunters went to Cambodia to kill as many as possible. It was already rare and by the 1950s there were probably fewer than 500 individuals left alive. By the 1960s, there were probably no more than 100 animals left alive. The last verified sighting of one was in 1983.

Recently, some scientists have questioned whether the kouprey actually existed at all. Its description sounds a lot like another bovid, the wild banteng. A bull banteng is dark brown or black while the cows are light brown or reddish-brown. Both have white lower legs and a white patch on the rump. Some scientists started to think that either the kouprey was a misidentification of the banteng or the hybrid offspring of a banteng and a domestic cow.

A 2006 genetic study suggested that this was the case, that the kouprey was just a hybrid animal. But a follow-up study, including genetic testing of a kouprey skull that dated back to before cattle were domesticated, came to a different conclusion. The kouprey was a distinct species, not a hybrid animal. The real mystery now is whether it’s still alive or if it has gone extinct in the last 40 years.

We’ll finish with a domestic cow that’s a little bit of a mystery. A popular brand of chocolate in Europe is Milka, and since 1973 many of its advertisements have included a light purple and white cow with a bell around her neck. Well, in 2012 a calf was born in Serbia that actually looked like the Milka purple cow. It was a purple cow!

In January of 2012 a bull calf was born on a small farm in Serbia. There’s not a lot of information available about it, but it looks like it was a breed of cattle called the busa, or maybe a busa cross. The busa is mainly raised in the mountainous parts of Serbia and mostly raised as a meat animal. It’s rare these days but was once extremely popular in the area, so a lot of cattle raised in Serbia have at least some busa ancestry. The busa can be white with darker markings, or a solid color with no white or very little white. It can be red-brown, black, or gray.

In pictures, the purple calf’s mother looks to be black and white. The calf itself is white with markings that look pale blue-gray, almost lilac. The pictures aren’t very good so it’s hard to tell. The farmer was surprised when he saw the calf and called a veterinarian to make sure it was healthy, which it was. The veterinarian suggested the calf’s strange coloration was just a rare color mutation.

As it happens, a blue-gray coloration is common in a variety of busa cattle raised in Macedonia. It’s also a common coloration in other breeds of cattle. A pale version of this color can look almost like a shade of lilac. Since I can’t find a follow-up to the 2012 articles about the calf, it’s probable that as he grew up, his spots darkened to look more gray than purple. The farmer said that he would be keeping the little purple cow instead of slaughtering him to make steaks and hamburgers, so hopefully there’s still a handsome purple and white bull living his best life in the mountains of Serbia.

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 371: The Peacock

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Thanks to Ari for suggesting this week’s episode, about the peacock!

Further reading:

Peacock tail feathers shake at resonance and hold eye-spots still during courtship displays

Indian peafowls’ crests are tuned to frequencies also used in social displays

An ocellated turkey (not a peacock but related):

An Indian peacock male:

An Indian peahen with chicks [photo from this site]:

Close-up of a male Indian peacock’s crest [photo by Jatin Sindhu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49736186]:

A male Indian peacock with train on display [photo by Thimindu Goonatillake from Colombo, Sri Lanka – Peacock Dance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19395087]:

A green peacock [photo from this site]:

The mysterious Congo peacock [photo by Terese Hart, taken from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a beautiful bird that almost everyone has seen pictures of, and a lot of people might have seen in zoos and parks. It’s a suggestion by Ari, who wants to learn about the peacock!

The name peacock is technically only used for the male bird, with the female called a peahen and the birds all together referred to as peafowl. Most people just say peacocks, though, because the male peacock has such a fabulous tail that it’s what people think of when they think of peafowl. I’m happy to report that baby peafowl are called peachicks.

The peacock most people are familiar with is native to India, specifically called the Indian peafowl. It’s a surprisingly large bird, with a big male weighing more than 13 lbs, or 6 kg. Females are smaller. It’s the size of a wild turkey and in fact it’s related to the turkey, along with pheasants, partridges, and chickens. Back in episode 144 we talked about a bird called the ocellated turkey, a brightly colored turkey that lives in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is part of Mexico. The male’s tail feathers have the same type of colorful eyespots seen on a peacock’s tail.

But the peacock’s tail is way bigger than any turkey’s tail. It’s called a train and most of the time it’s folded so that it’s not in the way. A big male can grow a train that’s much longer than the rest of his body, more than five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Most of the train’s elongated feathers end in a colorful eye-spot, around 200 of them in total. The eyespot pattern really does resemble a big eye, with a dark blue spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of blue-green and a bigger ring of bronze. The bronze color is surrounded by pale green and the rest of the feather is a darker green. As far as we know, the eyespots aren’t supposed to look like eyes the way some animal markings are. A leopard or other predator doesn’t attack the tail thinking it’s a peacock’s head. It’s just a pattern.

For a long time scientists were divided as to what the peacock’s train was really used for. Not everyone thought it was for showing off for peahens. Some thought it was just for camouflage in the jungle. The main confusion was why the peacock would grow such a long, conspicuous train, which can be a hindrance to him in thick undergrowth and can attract the attention of predators. But many male birds have long, ornamental tails that may impede their mobility, such as various bird of paradise species, that are definitely meant to show off for females. This appears to be the case for the peacock too.

During mating season, male peacocks gather at what’s called a lekking site, where they hang out waiting for females. When a female approaches a male, he spreads his train into a fan and shivers it, which rattles the feathers together and also shows off the iridescent colors. The male struts around, showing off his tail, and the female may ignore him completely or take a good look at his tail. In studies where scientists snipped all the eyespots off a male’s train feathers, females never bothered to even look at the male, but since immature males don’t have eyespots, it could be the females thought the eyespot-less male was just a kid.

A 2016 study took a closer look at the shivering motion that the male produces during displays. Not only does the sound interest the female, the study discovered that the eyespots are locked together with microscopic hooks that help them stay still while the remainder of any particular feather moves, since it isn’t locked with other feathers. This makes it look like the eyespots are floating against a shimmery green background. Who wouldn’t love watching that? The brighter the eyespot’s iridescence, the more attractive the male is to females.

The rest of the Indian peacock is bright too. His back and most of his body is bronze, while his long neck is a brilliant green-blue. He has white markings on his face and a crest growing from the back of his head. The crest consists of a bundle of mostly bare feather shafts, with a little tuft of blue-green at the end. The female has a similar crest but it’s brown in color along with most of the rest of her feathers, although she does have some metallic green on her neck. She doesn’t have a long train, but she will sometimes spread her tail feathers and rattle them to communicate warnings to other peafowl. A 2018 study learned that the crests of both male and female peafowl are sensitive to vibrations, specifically to the sound frequencies produced by tail rattling.

Peafowl eat plant materials like seeds, fruit, and flower buds, but they also eat a lot of worms, insects, frogs, and other small animals, including small snakes. Because they’re so beautiful and do well in captivity, lots of zoos and parks keep peacocks. They’ve even been selectively bred to produce different colors, including a white peacock and a mostly black peacock.

Ari specifically mentioned hearing that peacocks cry happy tears. Crying tears as a result of emotions, whether happy or sad, is very specific to humans, and scientists aren’t sure why we do it. It seems to be a visual signal to other humans that the person crying needs help or support in some way. Other animals sometimes have weepy eyes, but that’s due to simple eye discharge, not emotions.

The idea that peacocks cry tears dates back many centuries. Medieval bestiaries published in Europe said that the peacock was vain of his beauty and strutted around proudly, but whenever he noticed his ugly feet he would cry. Similar proverbs date back at least several thousand years from ancient Rome and India. Some proverbs say that the peacock tries to hide his feet and that’s why he doesn’t fly very often, or that he cries first thing every morning when he first wakes up, either because he sees his feet and thinks they’re ugly, or because he’s worried he’s lost his beautiful feathers overnight. Some proverbs say that when the peacock cries at his ugly feet, the peahen will swallow one of his tears and that’s how her eggs are fertilized instead of in the usual way.

These stories are interesting, but they don’t have any basis in fact. The peacock doesn’t care what his feet look like because he’s a bird, not a human. Anyway, he has big, handsome feet that let him walk around as much as he wants. The peacock also doesn’t actually cry tears, whether happy or sad.

What he does do, though, is make a wailing noise that can sound like someone crying. It sounds like this:

[peacock sound]

Most of the time it’s only the male bird that makes these calls, as a way to attract a mate or just announce that he’s around. It’s also an alarm call if the peacock spots a potential predator. People in the olden days observed this behavior and thought the peacock might really be crying. That led to the stories about his supposedly ugly feet, because the rest of the bird is so beautiful that he couldn’t possibly be crying about the rest of his appearance.

There’s another species of peacock that’s just as spectacular as the Indian peacock, although it’s less well known because it’s harder to keep in captivity. The green peafowl lives in many parts of southeast Asia and is endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and capture for the illegal pet trade. It’s more lightly built than the Indian peacock but the male can have an even longer train, over six and a half feet long, or 2 meters. The male is green and blue all over. The female is also mostly green, but with coppery speckles on her neck. Both have crests, although they point straight up instead of back.

That brings us to a mystery peacock, although fortunately it’s not a mystery anymore, or not as much of one.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congo basin in central Africa was colonized by Belgium, and Belgian authorities kept hearing interesting reports from local people and colonizers alike about a strange, shy animal that lived in the forest. In 1913 a small expedition was sent to find the animal, but it failed. Eventually the animal was discovered by scientists, and we know it by the name okapi. We talked about it in episode 218. (It’s not a peacock, it’s a relative of the giraffe.) One of the scientists in the expedition was James Chapin, and while he was in Africa he bought some feather headdresses from local people and took them home to examine the feathers.

He was able to identify all but one of the feathers. The mystery feather looked like it came from a guineafowl or pheasant, but it was too big and didn’t quite match any known species. Chapin set the mystery feather aside to look at again when he had more time.

Twenty-one years later, in 1936, Chapin visited a museum in Belgium to study a big collection of taxidermied birds that had been donated in 1914. The museum specialized in items and animals from central Africa, so when Chapin noticed two stuffed birds that looked like pheasants, he knew there was something weird going on with them. True pheasants aren’t found in Africa. The card attached to the specimens said they were young peacocks, and that didn’t make sense either. Peacocks are only found in Asia.

Chapin examined the birds and realized that they really were an unusual type of peacock. Not only that, he recognized the feathers. His mystery feather from 1915 matched the mystery peacock.

The following year, Chapin traveled to the Congo to look for the bird in the wild. Sure enough, it was there!

The Congo peacock looks a lot like a turkey at first glance, or a big guineafowl. Instead of a long train, the male has a more turkey-like fan of tail feathers, but they’re deep blue and black in color. He also has blue on his wings and his neck is red, with a black head with a black and white crest. The female has a red neck with a red crest, and her back is green while the rest of her is a soft brown. We don’t know a whole lot about the bird, but it’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss and hunting.

The Congo peacock isn’t a true peacock, although it’s very closely related. While the male does fan his tail during courtship displays, he’s actually fanning a different set of feathers than true peacocks. A peacock’s train is actually made up of the upper tail coverts, a set of feathers near the tail but not actually making up the tail. A peacock’s actual tail feathers are shorter and bronzey-brown in color.

All peacocks can fly, even males with the longest trains, although they prefer to spend most of the time on the ground. Outside of mating season, males shed the long feathers of their train and regrow them the following year. Many zoos that keep peacocks will collect these shed feathers and sell them so that people can use them in crafts and decorations, because everyone loves peacock feathers.

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 366: The Muntjac AKA Deer with Fangs

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Thanks to Chuck for suggesting this week’s topic, a weird little deer called the muntjac!

Further reading:

Dam Project Reveals Secret Sanctuary of Vanishing Deer

Wildlife camera trap surveys provide new insights into the occurrence of two threatened Annamite endemics in Viet Nam and Laos

Getting ahead (or two?) with Vietnam’s Viking Deer – the Long-Running Saga of a Slow-Running Mystery Beast

A giant muntjac [photo by Mark Kostich, taken from article linked above]:

A Reeve’s muntjac [photo by Don Southerland, taken from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Chuck, who wanted to learn about a small hoofed animal that I don’t think we’ve ever covered before, the muntjac. It’s a deer, but it’s a very weird deer.

In fact, it’s not just one deer, it’s at least 12 different species that are native to parts of south and southeast Asia, although it used to have a much broader range. Muntjac fossils have been found throughout Europe in particular. It prefers thick forests with lots of water around. Most species live in tropical or subtropical areas, although it can tolerate colder temperatures. It eats leaves, grass, fruit, seeds, and other plant parts, and it will also sometimes eat bird eggs and small animals when it finds them. It will even sometimes eat carrion.

The typical muntjac is small, barely larger than a fox. The largest species, the giant muntjac, stands a little over two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 80 cm, while there are several species of muntjac that don’t grow taller than 15 inches high, or 40 cm. It’s brown or reddish-brown, sometimes with darker or lighter markings depending on species. The muntjac appears hump-backed in shape like a rabbit, since instead of having a mostly level back, its back slopes upward from the shoulders to the rump. Its tail is very short and males grow short antlers that either have no branches or only one branch. Males also have a single pair of sharp, curved fangs that grow down from the upper jaw, more properly called tusks.

The muntjac is usually a solitary animal, with each individual defending a small territory. Both males and females have a large gland near the eye that secretes an oily substance with a strong smell. It also has another pair of scent glands on the forehead. The muntjac rubs its face on the ground to mark the edges of its territory with scent. It can even flare its scent glands open to communicate with other muntjacs by smell more effectively.

Unlike many deer species, the muntjac doesn’t have a particular mating season. Females, called does, can come into season any time of the year, so males are always ready to fight with other males for a doe’s attention. The male loses and regrows his antlers yearly, but mainly he only uses them to push an opponent over. He does the real fighting with his fangs.

There are other types of hoofed animals with fangs. We talked about the musk deer and the chevrotain in episode 116, but even though the chevrotain in particular looks a lot like the muntjac, it’s not closely related to it at all. Neither is the musk deer. In fact, neither the musk deer nor the chevrotain are actually deer, and they’re not even closely related to each other.

The southern red muntjac is one of the smallest species of muntjac known and is fairly common throughout much of southeast Asia, although we don’t know much about it. One thing we do know is that it has the smallest number of chromosomes of any mammal ever studied. Males have 7 diploid chromosomes and females only have 6. In comparison, the common Reeve’s muntjac has 46 diploid chromosomes. Scientists have no idea why there’s so much difference in chromosome count between species, but it works for the muntjac.

Many species of muntjac are common and are doing just fine, but others are endangered due to habitat loss, hunting, and the other usual factors we talk about a lot. But the muntjac is small, solitary, and very shy, so there are also species that are probably still waiting to be discovered.

The giant muntjac, also called the large-antlered muntjac, was only discovered in 1994 from a skull found in Vietnam. Scientists were eager to learn more about the animal, especially whether it was still alive or had gone extinct. They talked to hunters and other local people in Vietnam and Laos, and set up camera traps, and went on expeditions searching for it. The hunters said it was still around but the scientists just couldn’t find any. It wasn’t until 1997 that a camera trap took a few pictures of one near a newly constructed dam, which gave everyone hope that this animal could be saved from possible extinction.

Scientists had been searching for the giant muntjac for so long, and had only finally gotten a photograph after 13 years of trying, that they figured it would be an even longer time before they learned more about it. But then, suddenly, only four months after the first pictures of the giant muntjac were captured, a team of conservationists working to relocate animals from the flood area of the new dam ended up capturing 38 of the deer.

When a new dam is constructed across a river or other waterway, it doesn’t flood right away. It takes a long time for the water to back up behind the dam and turn into a lake or large pond, sometimes several years depending on the size of the dam and the waterway. There’s time to relocate animals to higher ground so they’ll be safe, and that’s exactly what Ulrike Streicher and her team were doing in 2007. Not only that, they made sure to transport the animals to a protected area where they’d be safer from hunters. Before they released the giant muntjacs, they had the opportunity to study them and fit some of them with radio collars so the scientists could track where they went. It turned out that the muntjacs settled into their new home just fine, so although the giant muntjac is still classified as critically endangered, at least we know that one small population is doing well.

Another muntjac search involves a camera trap in Vietnam and Laos too, but it’s still an ongoing mystery. The story actually starts back in 1929 when a dead muntjac was sent to the Field Museum in Chicago. The scientists at the museum couldn’t identify it as any known species of muntjac, so they described it in 1932 as Muntiacus rooseveltorum, also called Roosevelt’s muntjac. Modern genetic testing of the specimen determined that it’s a subspecies of Fea’s muntjac that lives in a small area of southern Myanmar and Thailand. Fea’s muntjac itself is so rare and so little known that we don’t even know if it’s extinct or not. As for Roosevelt’s muntjac, no one had seen it since the 1929 specimen was killed and it was presumed extinct.

Then, starting in 2014, a team of scientists conducted surveys in parts of the Annamites, a mountain range along the Vietnam/Laos border. Over the next five or six years, camera traps recorded every animal that passed by them in various remote locations. In addition to lots of animals the scientists expected to see, they found three animals that were either extremely rare or thought extinct. One of these was the Annamite striped rabbit we talked about in episode 254, but the other two were muntjacs.

One of the muntjacs captured on camera was identified as Roosevelt’s muntjac while the other was identified as the Annamite muntjac, a species that was only identified in 1997. The problem is that we only have pictures of the animals, and only a single specimen of Roosevelt’s muntjac to compare the pictures to. Scientists disagree as to whether Roosevelt’s muntjac is for sure still alive and well in the Annamite mountains, or whether the pictures are of a totally different species of muntjac. At least the pictures were taken in a nature reserve, so we know the muntjacs should be safe.

Muntjacs are such strange, attractive animals that rich people used to keep them as pets to show off. Sometimes they would escape into the wild, or were even released on purpose, and that’s why Japan, England, Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland all have invasive populations of Reeve’s muntjac. Reeve’s muntjac is common in southeastern China and Taiwan and only grows a little over a foot high at the shoulder, or maybe half a meter. The male has stubby little antlers and long tusks, so that his tusks are almost as long as his antlers. Cute as the animals are, they’re also bad for the local ecosystems, since they reproduce quickly and eat food that native animals need.

Rumors have circulated for a few decades now of another possible mystery muntjac, usually referred to as the quang khem. Supposedly it’s a large muntjac with unbranched antlers that lives in remote areas of Vietnam. So far it hasn’t been discovered, if it exists at all, but there’s definitely a chance that it’s yet another muntjac that’s just waiting to be spotted by scientists or their camera traps.

The muntjac is sometimes called the barking deer because of its alarm call. This is what a muntjac sounds like:

[muntjac barking sound]

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