Category Archives: Australia

Episode 331: Ompax, the Mystery Fish

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This week we have a mystery fish from Australia, the ompax!

Main source consulted:

Whitley, G. P. (1933). Ompax spatuloides Castelnau, a Mythical Australian Fish. The American Naturalist, 67(713), 563–567. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2456813

The fateful Ompax drawing:

The freshwater longtom (picture by Barry Hutchins):

Show transcript:

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

For the Patreon episode this month, we had a bird mystery from Queensland, Australia. While I was researching it I came across this mystery fish, also from Queensland.

In 1872, a man named Karl Staiger visited the town of Gayndah as part of his job. He was a chemist, but he also had an interest in nature and years later he worked for the Queensland Museum. One morning in Gayndah he went to breakfast and was served a strange-looking fish—so strange-looking that he asked what it was. He was told it was a very rare fish found in the nearby Burnett River.

Staiger was interested enough that he asked the road inspector, presumably one of his coworkers, to draw the fish for him. But the drawing wasn’t made until after Staiger ate the fish. It was his breakfast and he was hungry and, as he wrote later, he didn’t know he should have at least saved the head for study. Presumably he also didn’t want his breakfast to get cold while the drawing was being made.

The road inspector was a careful artist although he wasn’t a naturalist himself, so he did what he could to draw the fish accurately from the remains of Staiger’s meal. According to the drawing, the fish had a long, flattened rostrum that looked a little like a very long, thin duckbill, big scales on its body, and a fin that went all the way around the edges of the tail starting about halfway down the back, which appeared to be connected dorsal, caudal, and ventral fins. Its pectoral fins were small, and its eyes were also small and near the top of its head. The fish was brown in color and about 18 inches long, or 46 cm.

Staiger eventually wrote to a French naturalist and sent him the drawing. The French naturalist has about 500 names and titles, usually shortened to something like Francis de Laporte de Castelnau. I’m going to call him Francis because obviously I can’t pronounce any of those names properly.

Francis saw at a glance that the fish was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He suspected it didn’t just deserve its own genus but its own family. Staiger had reported what he’d been told, that the fish was known from a particular part of the Burnett River, and he’d also mentioned that it lived in the same area as another strange fish, the Australian lungfish.

The Australian lungfish had only been described a few years before, in 1870, and it’s a very big fish. It can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, and is greenish in color. It has big overlapping scales on its body and four strong fins that look more like flippers than ordinary fish fins, which it uses to stand and walk on the bottom of the river. Its tail comes to a single rounded point and it has tooth plates instead of regular teeth, which it uses to crush the small animals it eats. It also has a single lung in addition to gills, and like other lungfish it comes to the surface every so often to replace the air in its lung. When it’s especially active it will breathe at the surface more often. The ability to breathe air allows it to survive in water with low oxygen.

Francis noted that there were some similarities between the new fish and the Australian lungfish, but he thought it was more likely to be related to the alligator gar of North America. It had the same type of scales as the alligator gar. He also noted that its duckbill rostrum resembled the rostrum of the American paddlefish, which is similarly shaped but even longer than the new fish’s, but that the rest of the new fish was very different from the paddlefish.

Francis described the new fish in 1879 and gave it the name Ompax spatuloides, but as early as 1881 some fish experts wondered if the original drawing was misleading. They pointed out that the fish wasn’t drawn by someone with a knowledge of fish and that it had already been cooked and eaten, so the details might be completely wrong.

As it happens, the details were completely wrong, but not in a way anyone expected.

There’s actually some confusion as to whether the drawing of the fish was made before or after Staiger ate it, but it doesn’t actually matter after all. In 1930, an article in the Sydney Bulletin claimed that Ompax was a hoax to fool Staiger, made up of a lungfish head, a mullet body, and an eel tail.

The 1930 article isn’t available online, but one published in 1933 is, and it quotes the 1930 article. The 1933 article appears in a periodical called The American Naturalist and discusses the history of Ompax from start to finish, which is where most of our information comes from. The article finishes by pointing out that the Ompax’s head can’t have been made from a lungfish head unless a platypus bill or something like that was added, and suggests that the head might actually have been that of a fish of the family Belonidae. These are commonly called needlefish because they have long thin rostrums lined with teeth.

Needlefish are long, slender fish that resemble gars, although gars are native to North America and mostly live in freshwater. Needlefish live throughout much of the world’s oceans although some do live in brackish or freshwater. The needlefish swims near the surface of the water and will leap out of the water at high speed to jump obstacles like floating logs or boats. Since needlefish rostrums really do have a sharp point like a needle, it sometimes badly injures or even kills people who are fishing in boats by accidentally stabbing them.

One species, the freshwater longtom, is not only found in Australian rivers, it’s found in Queensland and occasionally even in the Burnett River. Its rostrum is the right size and shape to be the Ompax’s rostrum, while the platypus’s so-called duckbill is much too large to match the drawing. The freshwater longtom can grow almost three feet long, or about 85 cm, but is usually much smaller than that.

Like most needlefish, the freshwater longtom eats small fish, insects, and crustaceans. Also like other needlefish, it has no stomach. It swallows its prey whole and instead of the food going into its stomach, it just goes directly into its intestines, which excrete an enzyme called trypsin that breaks down proteins so they can be absorbed. This isn’t as efficient as stomach acids, but it also takes less energy to digest food this way.

The freshwater longtom’s dorsal and anal fins are long but fairly low and set well back on its body. Its pectoral fins are very small. While it does have an ordinary-looking tail fin, this might easily appear different after being cooked. And the longtom is edible, although it has a lot of thin bones that make it difficult to eat. Its bones are also green in color, which can be offputting to some people. Some needlefish also have greenish meat.

Staiger didn’t recount any details about the edibility and taste and texture of the fish he ate, so we don’t know if he actually ate a mullet that had a needlefish head and an eel tail stuck to it. The sea mullet and the sand mullet are both common fish around Australia and considered excellent eating fish. But if there really was that much of an eel’s tail stuck onto the fish’s body, you’d think Staiger would have noticed the difference in meat texture. The eels found in Australia are edible and considered a delicacy, but they wouldn’t look or taste the same as the rest of the fish.

The only reason we know the Ompax fish was a hoax is because of the 1930 article written by someone who called himself Waranbini. Waranbini’s article was published 58 years after the fish was served to Staiger for his breakfast.

I think the only hoax here was the 1930 article. I think Waranbini, whoever he was, looked at the picture, thought, “That looks like someone stuck three different types of animal together,” and wrote his article.

I think Staiger was actually served a freshwater longtom, and I think the people who served it to him were sincere that it was a rare fish. It is rare in the Burnett River. Staiger wasn’t an ichthyologist, nor was the man who drew the fish. They did the best they could, and Francis did the best he could to decipher from Staiger’s notes and the drawing what the fish was.

So from this we can learn three important things: Don’t use a drawing of a cooked and possibly mostly eaten fish to describe a new species, don’t assume people in the olden days were stupid, and don’t trust anonymous newspaper articles with no sources listed.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 325: The Burrunjor

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We have merch available again!

Thanks to Will for suggesting this week’s topic, the burrunjor!

Muttaburrasaurus had a big nose [picture by Matt Martyniuk (Dinoguy2) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3909643]:

The “rock art” that Rex Gilroy “found”:

Show transcript:

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

Recently, Will suggested we learn about an Australian cryptid called the burrunjor. As it happens, this is a short chapter in my book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, which is available to buy if you haven’t already. I’ve updated it a little from the chapter, so even if you have the book I think you’ll find this a fun episode.

Dinosaurs once lived in what is now Australia, just as they lived throughout the rest of the world. Similar to the southwestern United States reports of little living dinosaurs that we talked about in episode 252, some people in northern Australia report seeing living dinosaurs running around on their hind legs—but these dinosaurs aren’t so little.

The burrunjor, as it’s called, is often described as looking like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Mostly, though, people don’t actually see it. Instead, they hear roaring or bellowing and later see the tracks of a large, three-toed animal that was walking on its hind legs.

One Australian dinosaur that people mention when trying to solve the mystery of the burrunjor is Muttaburrasaurus. It was an ornithopod that grew up to 26 feet long, or 8 meters. It walked on its hind legs and had a big bump on the top of its muzzle that made its head shape unusual. No one’s sure what the bump was for, but some scientists speculate it might have been a resonant chamber so the animal could produce loud calls to attract a mate. Other scientists think it might have just been for display. Or, of course, it might have been both—or something else entirely. None of the Australian dinosaur sightings mention a big bump on the dinosaur’s nose. Muttaburrasaurus also had four toes on its hind feet, not three, and it disappeared from the fossil record about 103 million years ago. It also probably ate plants, not meat.

Another suggestion is that the burrunjor is a megaraptorid that survived from the late Cretaceous. These dinosaurs looked like theropods but with longer, more robust arms. Most scientists these days group them with the theropods. Most of the known specimens are from what is now South America, but two species are known from Australia, Australovenator and Rapator.

Australovenator is estimated as growing up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and probably stood about the same height as a tall human. It was a fast runner and relatively lightly built. It disappeared from the fossil record around 95 million years ago, not that we have very many bones in the first place. We only know Rapator from a single bone dated to 96 million years ago. It was probably related to Australovenator, although some paleontologists think Australovenator and Rapator are the same dinosaur. Either way, it’s doubtful that any of these animals survived the extinction event that killed off all the other non-avian dinosaurs.

“Burrunjor” is supposed to be a word used by ancient Aboriginal people to describe a monstrous lizard that eats kangaroos. But in actuality, Burrunjor is the name of a trickster demigod in the local Arnhem Aboriginal tradition and has nothing to do with reptiles or monsters. The Aboriginal rock art supposedly depicting a dinosaur-like creature doesn’t resemble other rock art in the region and isn’t recognized by researchers or Aboriginal people as being authentic.

All accounts of the burrunjor trace back to a single source, an Australian paranormal writer named Rex Gilroy. Gilroy was the one who “discovered” the rock art of a supposed dinosaur and none of the sightings he reports appear in local newspapers. The first mention of the word burrunjor referring to a monster appears in 1995, when Gilroy’s book Mysterious Australia was first published. According to Gilroy, the most recent burrunjor sighting is from 1985, when a family driving to Roper River reported seeing a feather-covered dinosaur that was 20 feet long, or 6 meters. But again, that report doesn’t appear in the newspapers, just in Gilroy’s books.

Gilroy’s burrunjor is probably a hoax, but there is a big lizard in Australia that sometimes stands on its hind legs. Monitor lizards live throughout Australia and are often called goannas. The largest Australian species can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. All monitor lizards, including the Komodo dragon that lives in Indonesia, can stand on their hind legs. The lizard does this to get a better look at the surrounding area. It uses its tail as a prop to keep it stable and can’t actually walk on its hind legs, but an 8-foot lizard standing on its hind legs might look like a dinosaur from a distance.

An even bigger monitor lizard, called Megalania, lived in Australia until at least 50,000 years ago and maybe much more recently. It’s possible that Aboriginal Australians lived alongside it, although there’s no evidence for this either way. (Unless you count the evidence that that would be really really cool.)

Megalania is considered the largest terrestrial lizard known. Dinosaurs weren’t lizards and crocodilians aren’t either, but monitor lizards are. We don’t have any complete fossils of Megalania but its total length, including its tail, is estimated to be as much as 23 feet long, or 7 meters. This is more than twice the length of the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard alive today and a close relation. Like the Komodo dragon, Megalania was probably venomous.

As for Rex Gilroy, he recently passed away at the age of 79 and his books about the burrunjor are out of print. Rest in peace, burrunjor man.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 319: The Phascogale

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Thanks to Kristie for suggesting this week’s topic, the phascogale!

Further reading:

Red-tailed phascogales (all photos below come from this site)

Sleeping phascogale:

Wide-awake phascogales:

Show transcript:

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

Ages ago, Kristie suggested I look up the phascogale, a really cute Australian animal. It’s definitely adorable and a little bit weird, so let’s learn about it this week!

Like most mammals that live in Australia, the phascogale is a marsupial. That means that the babies are born very early, then finish developing in their mother’s pouch. In this case, though, the phascogale mother doesn’t have a real pouch. Instead, when the mother is pregnant she develops what’s called a pseudo-pouch. Pseudo means false, so it’s not really a pouch although it resembles one. The pseudo-pouch is made up of folds of skin that develop around the mother’s teats, which protects the babies and keeps them warm. Since every baby needs its own teat at this stage, and the mother only has eight teats, if more than eight babies are born, the extra ones die.

The babies stay in the pseudo-pouch for about a month and a half, at which point they’re big enough that the mother can’t carry them around anymore. She makes a nest for them in a hollow tree, where they stay for another several months. She leaves them in the nest while she finds food, but comes back periodically to take care of them.

The phascogale is silvery-gray or gray-brown with a long tail that’s fluffy and black toward the end. It looks sort of like a mouse or rat with a long nose and a squirrel-like tail that’s almost as long as its body. It’s almost as big as a squirrel, up to about 10 inches long not including its tail, or 26 cm. Despite its resemblance to a rodent, the phascogale isn’t related to rodents at all. Rodents are placental mammals, not marsupial mammals.

The phascogale is nocturnal and mostly eats insects and spiders, but it will eat birds and mice too. It especially likes to eat cockroaches, yum. It mostly lives in trees although it will also hunt on the ground or in low brush, and it can jump long distances.

During the day the phascogale sleeps in a little hollow in a tree. It actually enters torpor while it’s asleep in order to save energy, which means it lowers its metabolic rate and its body temperature. But it can rev itself up again in only a few minutes when it needs to.

The strangest thing about the phascogale is that after mating season the males die. Mating season takes place over about three weeks in mid-winter, during which time a female may mate with several males. She’s able to store sperm in her body until she’s ready to have babies several months later, at which point she uses the stored sperm to fertilize her eggs. As a result, babies born in a single litter may have different fathers.

The males expend so much energy during these three weeks of mating season that they die of stress-related illnesses. In captivity, where the males can be treated by a veterinarian, a male who survives his first mating season can live as long as three years, but he doesn’t mate again. The female usually only has one litter of babies in her life even if she lives for several years.

The phascogale is closely related to the antechinus, which looks similar but has a skinny tail instead of a fluffy one. Antechinus males also die after mating season, while females give birth to tiny babies who latch onto a teat in the pseudo-pouch and stay there while they continue to develop, just like phascogales. Unlike phascogales, though, which always have eight teats, female antechinuses have different numbers of teats. How many teats a female has depends on where she lives. (Just a reminder, the word teats is another word for nipples.) Populations that live in areas where there’s plenty of food have more nipples, up to 13 but usually 12 at most. Populations that live in areas where it’s hard to find enough food have as few as 6 nipples. Producing milk for 12 or 13 babies requires a lot of energy, so females with more nipples can only survive and successfully raise that many babies when they have plenty of food. Females with only 6 nipples can survive on less food while still producing enough milk for six babies.

It seems strange that phascogale and antechinus males die after mating, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense. Both these animals are small and very likely to end up eaten by a larger animal. Odds are good that any given male won’t live long enough to see a second mating season anyway, so instead of conserving energy to stay alive, he expends all his energy during his first mating season to make sure he passes his genes along to the next generation.

One last interesting fact about the phascogale is that the red-tailed phascogale doesn’t need to drink water. It gets all the moisture it needs from its diet, which remember consists of insects and other animals. I guess animals are pretty moist on the inside. Don’t think about that too hard.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 314: Animals Discovered in 2022

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Let’s learn about some of the animals discovered in 2022! There are lots, so let’s go!

Further Reading:

In Japanese waters, a newly described anemone lives on the back of a hermit crab

Rare ‘fossil’ clam discovered alive

Marine Biologists Discover New Giant Isopod

Mysterious ‘blue goo’ at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists

New Species of Mossy Frog Discovered in Vietnam

A Wildlife YouTuber Discovered This New Species of Tarantula in Thailand

Meet Nepenthes pudica, Carnivorous Plant that Produces Underground Traps

Scientists discover shark graveyard at the bottom of the ocean

Further Watching:

JoCho Sippawat’s YouTube channel

A newly discovered sea anemone (photo by Akihiro Yoshikawa):

A mysterious blue blob seen by a deep-sea rover:

A newly discovered frog:

A newly discovered tarantula (photo by JoCho Sippawat):

Show transcript:

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

It’s the 2022 discoveries episode, where we learn about some of the animals discovered in 2022! Most of the time these animals were actually discovered by scientists before 2022, but the description was published in that year so that’s when we first learned about them. And, of course, a lot of these animals were already known to the local people but had never been studied by scientists before. There are lots of animals in the world but not that many scientists.

The great thing is, so many animals get discovered in any given year that I have to pick and choose the ones I think listeners will find most interesting, which in a stunning coincidence turns out to be the ones that I personally find most interesting. Funny how that works out.

We’ll start in the ocean, which is full of weird animals that no human has ever seen before. It’s about a hermit crab who carries a friend around. The hermit crab was already known to science, but until a team of scientists observed it in its natural habitat, the deep sea off the Pacific coast of Japan, no one realized it had an anemone friend.

The sea anemone is related to jellyfish and is a common animal throughout the world’s oceans. Some species float around, some anchor themselves to a hard surface. Many species have developed a symbiotic relationship with other animals, such as the clownfish, which is sometimes called the anemonefish because it relies on the anemone to survive. Anemones sting the way jellyfish do, but it doesn’t sting the clownfish. Researchers aren’t sure why not, but it may have something to do with the clownfish’s mucus coating. Specifically, the mucus may have a particular taste that the anemone recognizes as belonging to a friend. If the anemone does accidentally sting the clownfish, it’s still okay because the fish is generally immune to the anemone’s toxins.

The clownfish lives among the anemone’s tentacles, which protects it from predators, and in return its movements bring more oxygen to the anemone by circulating water through its tentacles, its droppings provide minerals to the anemone, and because the clownfish is small and brightly colored, it might even attract predators that the anemone can catch and eat.

Anemones also develop mutualistic relationships with other organisms, including a single-celled algae that lives in its body and photosynthesizes light into energy. The algae has a safe place to live while the anemone receives some of the energy from the algae’s photosynthesis. But some species of anemone have a relationship with crabs, including this newly discovered anemone.

The anemone anchors itself to the shell that the hermit crab lives in. The crab gains protection from predators, who would have to go through the stinging tentacles and the shell to get to the crab, while the anemone gets carried to new places where it can find more food. It also gathers up pieces of food that the crab scatters while eating, because crabs are messy eaters.

The problem is that hermit crabs have to move into bigger shells as they grow. Anemones can move, but incredibly slowly. Like, snails look like racecar drivers compared to anemones. The anemone moves so slowly that the human eye can’t detect the movement.

What the team of scientists witnessed was a hermit crab spending several days carefully pushing and pinching the anemone to make it move onto its new shell. If it wasn’t important, the crab wouldn’t bother. The sea anemone hasn’t yet been officially described since it’s still being studied, but it appears to be closely related to four other species of anemone that also attach themselves to the shells of other hermit crab species.

In other marine invertebrate news, a researcher named Jeff Goddard was turning rocks over at low tide at Naples Point, California a few years ago. He was looking for sea slugs, but he noticed some tiny clams. They were only about 10 mm long, but they extended a white-striped foot longer than their shells. Goddard had never seen anything quite like these clams even though he was familiar with the beach and everything that lived there, so he took pictures and sent them to a clam expert. The expert hadn’t seen these clams before either and came to look for the clams in person. But they couldn’t find the clams again. It took ten trips to the beach and an entire year before they found another of the clams.

They thought the clam might be a new species, but part of describing a new species is examining the literature to make sure the organism wasn’t already described a long time ago. Eventually the clam research team did find a paper with illustrations of a clam that matched, published in 1937, but that paper was about a fossilized clam.

They examined the 1937 fossil shell and compared it to their modern clam shell. It was a match! But why hadn’t someone else noticed these clams before? Even Goddard hadn’t seen them, and he’s a researcher that spends a lot of time along the coast looking specifically for things like little rare clams. Goddard thinks the clam has only recently started extending its range northward, especially during some marine heatwaves in 2014 through 2016. He suspects the clam’s typical range is farther south in Baja California, so hopefully a future expedition to that part of the Pacific can find lots more of the clams and we can learn more about it.

We talked about deep-sea isopods just a few weeks ago, in episode 311. They’re crustaceans related to crabs and lobsters, but also related to roly-polies that live on land. The deep-sea species often show deep-sea gigantism and are referred to as giant isopods, and that’s what this newly discovered species is. It was first found in 2017 in the Gulf of Mexico and is more slender than other giant isopods. The largest individual measured so far is just over 10 inches long, or 26 cm, which is almost exactly half the length of the longest giant isopod ever measured. It’s still pretty big, especially if you compare it to its roly-poly cousins, also called pillbugs, sow bugs, or woodlice, who typically grow around 15 mm at most.

Before we get out of the water, let’s talk about one more marine animal. This one’s a mystery that I covered in the October 2022 Patreon episode. It was suggested by my brother Richard, so thank you again, Richard!

On August 30, 2022, a research team was off the coast of Puerto Rico, collecting data about the sea floor. Since the Caribbean is an area of the ocean with high biodiversity but also high rates of fishing and trawling, the more we can learn about the animals and plants that live on the sea floor, the more we can do to help protect them.

When a remotely operated vehicle dives, it sends video to a team of scientists who can watch in real time and control where the rover goes. On this particular day, the rover descended to a little over 1,300 feet deep, or around 407 meters, when the sea floor came in view. Since this area is the site of an underwater ridge, the sea floor varies by a lot, and the rover swam along filming things and taking samples of the water, sometimes as deep as about 2,000 feet, or 611 meters.

The rover saw lots of interesting animals, including fish and corals of various types, even a fossilized coral reef. Then it filmed something the scientists had never seen before. It was a little blue blob sitting on the sea floor.

The blue blob wasn’t moving and wasn’t very big. It was shaped roughly like a ball but with little points or pimples all over it and a wider base like a skirt where it met the ground, and it was definitely pale blue in color.

Then the rover saw more of the little blue blobs, quite a few of them in various places. The scientists think it may be a species of soft coral or a type of sponge, possibly even a tunicate, which is also called a sea squirt. All these animals are invertebrates that don’t move, which matches what little we know about the blue blob.

The rover wasn’t able to take a sample from one of the blue blobs, so for now we don’t have anything to study except the video. But we know where the little blue blobs are, so researchers hope to visit them again soon and learn more about them.

It wouldn’t be a newly discovered species list without at least one new frog. Quite a few frogs were discovered in 2022, including a tree frog from Vietnam called Khoi’s mossy frog. It lives in higher elevations and is pretty big for a tree frog, with a big female growing over 2 inches long, or almost 6 cm, from snout to vent. Males are smaller. It’s mostly brown and green with little points and bumps all over that help it blend into the moss-covered branches where it lives. That’s just about all we know about it so far.

Our next discovery is an invertebrate, a spider that lives in bamboo. Specifically it lives in a particular species of Asian bamboo in Thailand, and when I say it lives in the bamboo, I mean it really does live inside the bamboo stalks. Also, when I say it’s a spider, specifically it’s a small tarantula.

It was first discovered by a YouTuber named JoCho Sippawat, who travels around his home in Thailand and films the animals he sees. I watched a couple of his videos and they’re really well done and fun, and he’s adorable even when he’s eating gross things he finds, so I recommend his videos even if you don’t speak the language he speaks. I’m not sure if it’s Mandarin or another language, and I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his name right either, so apologies to everyone from Thailand for my ignorance.

Anyway, Sippawat found a tarantula where no tarantula should be, inside a bamboo stalk, and sent pictures to an arachnologist. That led to a team of scientists coming to look for more of the spiders, and to their excitement, they found them and determined right away that they’re new to science. It was pretty easy to determine in this case because even though there are more than 1,000 species of tarantula in many parts of the world, none of them live in bamboo stalks. The new spider was placed in a genus all to itself since it’s so different from all other known tarantulas.

It’s mostly black and dark brown with narrow white stripes on its legs, and its body is only about an inch and a half long, or 3 1/2 cm. It can’t make holes into the bamboo plants itself, so it has to find a hole made by another animal or a natural crack in the bamboo. It lines its bamboo stalk with silk to make a little home, and while there’s a lot we don’t know yet about how it lives, it probably comes out of its home to hunt insects and other small animals since tarantulas don’t build webs.

Finally, let’s wrap around to the sea anemone again, at least sort of. If you remember episode 129, we talked about the Venus flytrap sea anemone, which is an animal that looks kind of like a carnivorous plant called the Venus flytrap. We then also talked about a lot of other carnivorous plants, including the pitcher plant. Well, in 2022 a new species of pitcher plant was discovered that has underground traps.

The pitcher plant has a type of modified leaf that forms a slippery-sided pitcher filled with a nectar-like liquid. When an insect crawls down to drink the liquid, it falls in and can’t get out. It drowns and is dissolved and digested by the plant. Almost all known carnivorous plants are pretty small, but the largest are pitcher plants. The biggest pitcher plant known is from a couple of mountains in Malaysian Borneo, and its pitchers can hold over 2 ½ liters of digestive fluid. The plant itself is a messy sort of vine that can grow nearly 20 feet long, or 6 meters. Mostly pitcher plants just attract insects, especially ants, but these giant ones can also trap frogs, lizards, rats and other small mammals, and even birds.

The newly discovered pitcher plant grows in the mountainous rainforests of Indonesian Borneo and is relatively small. Unlike every other pitcher plant known, its pitchers develop underground and can grow a little over 4 inches long, or 11 cm. Sometimes they grow just under the surface, with leaf litter or moss as their only covering, but sometimes they grow deeper underground. Either way, they’re very different from other pitcher plants in other ways too. For one thing, scientists found a lot of organisms actually living in the pitchers and not getting eaten by the plant, including a new species of worm. Scientists aren’t sure why some animals are safe in the plant but some animals get eaten.

The new pitcher plant is found in parts of Indonesian Borneo that’s being turned into palm oil plantations at a devastating rate, leading to the extinction or threatened extinction of thousands of animal and plant species. The local people are also treated very badly. Every new discovery brings more attention to the plight of the area and makes it even more urgent that its ecosystems are protected from further development. The fastest way to do this would be for companies to stop using so much palm oil. Seriously, it’s in everything, just look at the ingredients list for just about anything. I try to avoid it when I’m grocery shopping but it’s just about impossible. I didn’t mean to rant, but the whole palm oil thing really infuriates me.

You know what? Let’s have one more discovery so we don’t end on a sour note.

A biodiversity survey of two of Australia’s marine parks made some really interesting discoveries in 2022. This included a new species of hornshark that hasn’t even been described yet. It’s probably related to the Port Jackson shark, which grows to around five and a half feet long, or 1.65 meters, and is a slow-moving shark that lives in shallow water off the coast of most of Australia. Instead of a big scary mouth full of sharp teeth, the Port Jackson shark has a small mouth and flattened teeth that allow it to crush mollusks and crabs. The newly discovered shark lives in much deeper water than other hornsharks, though, around 500 feet deep, or 150 meters.

Another thing they found during the survey wasn’t a new species of anything, but it’s really cool so I’ll share it anyway. It was a so-called shark graveyard over three miles below the ocean’s surface, or 5400 meters. The scientists were trawling the bottom and when they brought the net up to see what they’d found, it was full of shark teeth–over 750 shark teeth! They were fossilized but some were from modern species while some were from various extinct species of shark, including a close relative of Megalodon that grew around 39 feet long, or 12 meters. No one has any idea why so many shark teeth are gathered in that particular area of the sea floor.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 312: Little Bouncy Animals

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Thanks to Zachary and Oran for this week’s topic, some little animals that bounce around like tiny kangaroos!

Further reading:

Evolution of Kangaroo-Like Jerboas Sheds Light on Limb Development

Supposedly extinct kangaroo rat resurfaces after 30 years

High-Speed Videos Show Kangaroo Rats Using Ninja-Style Kicks to Escape Snakes

Williams’s jerboa [picture by Mohammad Amin Ghaffari – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/177950563, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115769436]:

A drawing of a jerboa skeleton. LEGS FOR DAYS:

The San Quintin kangaroo rat lives! [photo from article linked above]

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two cute little animals suggested by Zachary and Oran! Both of these animals are rodents but although they look remarkably alike in some unusual ways, they’re not actually all that closely related.

First, Zachary suggested the jerboa. We talked about the pygmy jerboa in episode 136, but we haven’t talked about jerboas in general. It’s a small rodent that’s native to the deserts of Asia, north Africa, and the Middle East. It’s usually brown or tan with some darker shading on the back and tail. It looks sort of like a gerbil with long ears, long hind legs, and a tuft at the end of the tail. Its front legs are short and it has an adorable whiskery nose.

The reason the jerboa’s hind legs are so long while its front legs are really short is that it jumps around on its hind legs like a kangaroo. Not only can it jump really fast, up to 15 mph, or 24 km/h, it can change directions incredibly fast too. This helps it evade predators, because most animals are fastest when running in a straight line. The jerboa bounces in all sorts of directions, hopping or just running on its long hind legs, with its long tail held out for balance. It can also run on all fours with its short front legs helping it maneuver, but for the most part it’s a bipedal animal. It has tufts of stiff hairs under its toes that help it run through loose sand.

The jerboa eats plants, although sometimes if it finds a nice juicy insect it will eat it too. Mostly it just eats leaves, bulbs, roots, and some seeds. It gets all of the moisture it needs from its diet, which is good because it lives in the desert where there’s not much water available.

Some species of jerboa mainly eat insects and spiders, and some have short ears instead of long ears. This is the case for the thick-tailed pygmy jerboa that lives in parts of China, Mongolia, and Russia. Its head and body only measures about two inches long, or almost 5 cm, but its tail is twice that length. The reason it’s called a thick-tailed jerboa is because it stores fat at the base of its tail, which makes the tail look thick compared to many rodent tails.

The jerboa is mostly active at dawn and dusk, although some species are fully nocturnal. It spends the day in a burrow it digs in sand or dirt. A jerboa will usually have more than one burrow in its territory, with the entrances usually hidden under a bush or some other plant. Different burrows have different purposes. Some have numerous entrances and lots of side tunnels but are relatively shallow, which is useful if the jerboa lives in an area with a rainy season. A shallow burrow won’t flood if it rains a lot. Some burrows are temporary, which the jerboa may dig if it’s out and about during the day looking for food. A mother jerboa will dig a burrow with a roomy nesting chamber to raise her babies, and a jerboa’s winter burrow has a nesting chamber that’s deep underground to help it stay warm. Some species of jerboa construct unusual burrows, like the lesser Egyptian jerboa that has spiral-shaped burrows with storage chambers. Most jerboas are solitary animals, although sometimes a group will hibernate together in winter to help everyone stay warmer.

Scientists have been studying the jerboa to learn how different animals have evolved radically different leg lengths. The jerboa’s incredibly long hind legs are very different from its very short front legs, but it evolved from animals that had four short legs. But jerboas are born with four short legs, and as the babies grow up their hind legs grow longer and longer.

The jerboa is an incredibly efficient runner. Some species can jump as far as six feet in a single bound, or 1.8 meters, and up to three feet, or 90 cm, straight up.

The jerboa isn’t the only rodent that hops on its hind legs like a kangaroo. The kangaroo rat does too, and it’s Oran’s suggestion. Oran pointed out that a long time ago, I think in the humans episode, I said that humans are the only fully bipedal mammal, meaning we only ever walk on our hind legs. (Crawling when you’re a baby or trying to find something under the couch don’t count.) I was wrong about that for sure, because the kangaroo rat, the jerboa, and a few other mammals are also bipedal.

The kangaroo rat is native to parts of western North America. It looks a lot like a jerboa, with long hind legs and a long tail, although its ears are smaller. But the kangaroo rat and the jerboa aren’t closely related, although both are rodents. Their similarities are due to convergent evolution, since both animals live in very similar environments with the same selective pressures.

The largest species of kangaroo rat, the giant kangaroo rat, grows around 6 inches long, or 15 cm, with a tail about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. It can jump even longer than the jerboa although it doesn’t move as fast on average.

Like the jerboa, the kangaroo rat can change directions quickly, and it’s also mostly nocturnal and spends the day in a burrow. Some species spend almost all the time in burrows, only emerging for about an hour a night to gather seeds. Since owls like to eat kangaroo rats, you can’t blame them for wanting to stay underground as much as possible.

Snakes also like to eat kangaroo rats, especially the sidewinder rattlesnake. It’s a fast predator with venom that can easily kill a little kangaroo rat, but the kangaroo rat isn’t helpless. A study published in 2019 filmed interactions in the wild between the desert kangaroo rat and the sidewinder, using high-speed cameras. They had to use high-speed cameras because the snakes can go from completely unmoving to a strike in under 100 milliseconds. That’s less time than it takes you to blink. But the kangaroo rat can react in even less time, as little as 38 milliseconds after the snake starts to move. A lot of time the kangaroo rat will completely leap out of range of the snake, but if it can’t manage that, it will kick the snake with its long hind legs, which are strong enough to knock the snake away. Little fuzzy ninjas.

Unlike the jerboa, the kangaroo rat mostly eats seeds. The jerboa’s teeth aren’t very strong so it can’t bite through hard seeds, but the kangaroo rat’s teeth are just fine with seeds. The kangaroo rat also has cheek pouches, and it will carry lots of seeds home to its burrow. It keeps extra seeds in special burrow chambers called larders.

The kangaroo rat sometimes lives in colonies that can number in the hundreds, but it’s still a mostly solitary animal. It has its own burrow that’s separate from the burrows of other members of its colony, and it doesn’t share food or interact very much with its neighbors. It will communicate with other kangaroo rats by drumming its hind feet on the ground, including warning its neighbors to stay away and alerting them to predators in the area.

The kangaroo rat is vulnerable to habitat loss, since it mostly lives in desert grassland and humans tend to view that kind of land as useless and in need of development. An example of this is the San Quintin kangaroo rat, which is only found in western Baja California in Mexico. Only two large colonies were known when it was discovered by science in 1925, although it used to be much more widespread. But in the decades since 1925, the land was developed for agriculture until by 1986 the two colonies were completely wiped out. Scientists worried the species had gone extinct. Then, in 2017, a colony was discovered in a nature preserve and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Other colonies have been discovered on farmland that has been abandoned due to drought. Still, the San Quintin kangaroo rat is critically endangered.

The kangaroo rat is actually helpful for the environment. Because it stores seeds underground, and sometimes forgets where it put them, it helps native plants spread. Its burrows help increase soil fertility and the spread of water through the soil. This is similar to the jerboa, which also eats enough insects to help reduce the number of agricultural pests in some areas.

There are also two species of kangaroo mouse, which are closely related to kangaroo rats. They mostly live in the state of Nevada in North America. There are also jumping mice that look like ordinary mice but with long hind legs. It also has cheek pouches. While some jumping mice live in western North America, some live in northeastern North America and Canada and are adapted to cold weather and long winters. One species of jumping mouse lives in the mountains in parts of China. There’s also a larger jumping rodent called the springhare that lives in parts of Africa, and which is about the size of a squirrel or a small rabbit. Like all these other rodents, it’s bipedal and hops on its hind legs like a little kangaroo, using its long tail for balance and to prop itself up when it’s standing. It mostly eats plants but will sometimes eat insects, and it spends most of the day in burrows. There’s also a hopping mouse native to Australia, which is a rodent with long hind legs and a long tail and long ears. It’s not closely related to the jerboa or the kangaroo rat, but it looks a lot like both because of convergent evolution. It mostly eats seeds.

All these animals are rodents, but Australia also has another animal called the kultarr that looks a lot like the kangaroo rat and the jerboa. It’s not a rodent, though. It’s actually a marsupial that’s completely unrelated to rodents although it looks like a rodent. That’s definitely what you call convergent evolution.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 303: Weird and Mysterious Animal Sounds

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Thanks to Emory for suggesting this week’s topic, mysterious animal sounds!

Further reading/watching:

The Story of Elk in the Great Smoky Mountains

Terrifying Sounds in the Forests of the Great Smoky Mountains

Evidence found of stingrays making noise

This New AI Can Detect the Calls of Animals Swimming in an Ocean of Noise

The wapiti [pic from article linked above]:

The stingray filmed making noise [stills from video linked to above]:

The tawny owl makes some weird sounds:

The fox says all kinds of things:

Show transcript:

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

Emory suggested we do a new episode about strange and mysterious animal sounds a while back, which is one of my favorite topics. The problem is, it’s hard to find good audio clips to share. It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve found some good ones.

In late September 2018, in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, some hikers recorded a terrifying animal sound. The sound wasn’t a mystery for long, though, because they soon saw the animal making it. Here’s what it sounded like:

[elk bugle]

It’s the bugle of a male elk, which I’m going to call wapiti to avoid confusion. It’s a sound that wasn’t heard in the Smoky Mountains for at least a century. The eastern wapiti was once common throughout eastern North America but was driven to extinction in the late 19th century, although the last wapiti in North Carolina was killed almost a century earlier than that. All North American wapiti almost went extinct by about 1900, and hunters and conservationists worked to get nature preserves set aside to save it and its habitat. Starting in the 1990s, wapiti from western North American subspecies were reintroduced in the southeast, with reintroductions in the Smokies starting in 2001. There are now at least 200 wapiti living in the mountains, probably more. I’ve seen them myself and they’re beautiful animals!

The wapiti is a type of deer. We talked about it way back in episode 30 along with the moose. Various species of wapiti live throughout Europe and Asia as well as North America, although it’s been hunted to extinction in many areas. As we mentioned in episode 30, the name elk is used for the moose in parts of Europe, which causes a lot of confusion, which is why I’ve chosen to call it by its Algonquin name of wapiti.

The wapiti is a really big animal, one of the biggest deer alive today. Only the moose is bigger. It’s closely related to the red deer of Eurasia but is bigger. A male, called a bull, can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, with an antler spread some four feet wide, or 1.2 meters. Females, called cows, are smaller and don’t grow antlers. Males grow a new set of antlers every year, which they use to wrestle other males in fall during mating season. At the end of mating season the wapiti sheds its antlers.

The bugling sound males make during mating season is extremely loud. The sound tells females that the bull is strong and healthy, and it tells other bulls not to mess with it.

[elk bugle]

Our next sound is from an animal that scientists didn’t realize could even make sounds. There’ve been reports for a long time of stingrays making clicking noises when they were alarmed or distressed, but it hadn’t been documented by experts. A team of scientists recently decided to investigate, with their report released in July of 2022. They filmed stingrays of two different species off the coasts of Indonesia and Australia making clicking sounds as divers approached. They think it may be a sound warning the diver not to get too close. This is what it sounds like:

[Stingray making clicking sounds]

One exciting new technological development is being used to detect underwater sounds and hopefully help identify them. It’s called DeepSqueak, because it was originally developed to record ultrasonic calls made by mice and rats. This is an example of a mouse sound slowed down enough that humans can hear it, specifically a male mouse singing to attract a mate, which we talked about in episode 8:

[mouse song]

But DeepSqueak also works really well to detect sounds made by whales and their relatives, and researchers are currently using it to determine whether offshore wind farms cause problems for whales.

With DeepSqueak and other listening software, it turns out that a lot of animals we thought were silent actually make noise. For instance, this sound:

[Pelochelys bibron]

That’s a grunting sound made by the southern New Guinea giant softshell turtle.

And here’s a caecilian, a type of burrowing reptile that we talked about in episode 82:

[Typhlonectes compressicauda]

Let’s finish with a strange and mysterious sound heard on land. In January and February of 2021, some residents of London, England started hearing a weird sound at night.

[mystery sound]

Because the animal making the sound moved around so much, some people thought it must be a bird. One suggestion is that it was a tawny owl, especially the female tawny owl who makes a chirping sort of sound to answer the male’s hoot. This is what the male and female tawny owl sound like:

[owl sounds]

The tawny owl also sometimes makes an alarm call that sounds like this:

[tawny owl alarm call]

But the sound didn’t really match up with what residents were hearing. Here it is again:

[mystery sound]

Finally someone pointed out that red foxes make a lot of weird sounds, mostly screams and sharp barks, but occasionally this sound:

[fox sound]

That seems to be a pretty good match for what people were hearing in early 2021, although since no one got a look at the animal they heard, we can’t know for sure. So it’s still a mystery.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 298: The Tantanoola Tiger

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This week we’re examining the Tantanoola Tiger, a mystery animal that probably wasn’t a tiger…but what was it? This episode is rated two ghosts out of five for monster month spookiness! Thanks to Kristie for sharing her photos of the Tantanoola tiger!

Happy birthday to ME this week! I’ve decided to turn 25 again. That was a good year.

Further reading:

The Tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction as a ‘large predator’–but it was only half as heavy as we thought

The grisly mystery of the murderous Tantanoola Tiger (Please note that the end of this article has some disturbing details not appropriate for younger readers. However, true crime enthusiasts will just shrug.)

Kristie and her kids reacting to the  taxidermied Tantanoola Tiger:

Kristie’s picture of the taxidermied Tantanoola Tiger. WHO DID THIS TO YOU, TIGER?

The numbat is striped but too small to fit the description of the “tiger”:

Our friend the thylacine, probably not strong enough to kill a full-grown sheep:

Tigers are really really really big. Also, don’t get this close to a tiger:

Show transcript:

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

This past spring, when I was researching mysterious accounts of big cats spotted in Australia for episode 274, I considered including the Tantanoola Tiger. That was Kristie and Jason’s episode, and Kristie casually mentioned that she’d seen the stuffed Tantanoola tiger on display and wasn’t impressed. She even sent me pictures, which we’ll get to in a moment.

In the end, I decided the Tantanoola Tiger deserved its own episode, because it’s completely bonkers, and that it needed to be in monster month, because parts of the story are weird and creepy. I give it two ghosts out of five on our spookiness scale, so it’s not too spooky but it’s more than a little spooky.

The story starts in the southeastern part of South Australia at the very end of the 19th century. The little town of Tantanoola was home to a lot of sheep farmers, and in the early 1890s something was killing and eating sheep.

For years there had been rumors that a Bengal tiger had escaped from a traveling circus in 1884 and was living in the area, so once half-eaten sheep carcasses started turning up near Tantanoola, people assumed the tiger was to blame.

There was definitely something unusual killing sheep. Aboriginal shearers reported seeing an animal they didn’t recognize, something that frightened their dogs. Paw prints were found that measured over 4 inches across, or 11 cm, which is really big for a dog’s print although that’s what it resembled. It also happens to be a reasonable size for a small tiger, although a big tiger’s paw is usually more like 6 inches across, or almost 16 cm.

In 1892, a couple out driving in their buggy saw a striped animal cross the road ahead of them. They reported it as brown with stripes and a long tail. They estimated its length as three feet long not counting its tail, or about a meter, 5 feet long including the tail, or 1.5 meters. This is actually really short for a full-grown tiger. A big male Bengal tiger can grow more than ten feet long, or over 3 meters, including the tail, and even a small female Bengal tiger is about eight feet long, or 2.5 meters, including the tail.

There aren’t a lot of animals native to Australia that have stripes. The numbat has stripes and does live reasonably close to Tantanoola, although it was driven to extinction in the area by the late 19th century. But the numbat is only about 18 inches long, or 45 cm, including its tail, and it looks kind of like a squirrel. It eats insects, especially termites, which it licks up with a long, sticky tongue like a tiny anteater. It’s even sometimes called the banded anteater even though it’s a marsupial and not related to anteaters at all. Plus, it doesn’t eat very many ants. The female numbat doesn’t have a pouch, but while her babies are attached to her teats they’re protected by long fur and the surrounding skin, which swells up a little while the mother is lactating.

So the animal seen in 1892 probably wasn’t a numbat, but it also probably wasn’t actually a tiger. The people who saw it said it definitely wasn’t a dingo either.

In May 1893, a tiger hunt was organized but found nothing out of the ordinary, but in September of that year a farmer found huge paw prints after his dogs alerted him to an intruder during the night. The prints were over 4 inches across, or 11 cm, and this time a policeman took plaster casts of them. A zoologist at the Adelaide Zoo examined the casts and said that they weren’t tiger prints but were instead from some kind of canid.

The next month, in October, a farmer reported that he’d killed the Tantanoola tiger. But it wasn’t a tiger and wasn’t even any kind of wolf relation. Instead, it was a feral hog that had been killing his sheep for years and evading his attempts to kill it. The boar measured 9 feet from nose to tail, or 2.7 meters, and while it was probably responsible for some sheep killing, it wasn’t the Tantanoola tiger. The so-called tiger kept on killing sheep.

In August of 1894 a 17-year-old named Donald Smith saw a strange animal dragging a struggling sheep into the trees. The mystery animal was light brown with darker stripes and stood about two and a half feet high at the shoulder, or 75 cm, and was over four feet long, or 1.3 meters. Donald thought it was a tiger, although he’d never seen a tiger before. He said the stripes on its body were dull, but they were much more distinct on its head. When police and trackers arrived at the area later, after Donald alerted them, they found claw marks, bloody tufts of wool, and big paw prints.

Finally, the following August, two sharpshooters set out to hunt the so-called tiger and actually found it. It was just barely dawn when they saw what looked like a gigantic dog grab a sheep and wrestle it to the ground. One of the men shot the animal and killed it.

The Tantanoola tiger definitely wasn’t a tiger. It was more like a dog, but it was much bigger than any dog they knew and certainly much bigger than a dingo. It was three feet tall at the shoulder, or 91 cm, and 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, including the tail. It was mostly dark brown with patches of lighter brown and gray, and yellowish legs. Its paws were over 4 inches across, or 11 cm. But it didn’t have stripes. It was identified as a wolf, although what kind of wolf varied. Suggestions included a European wolf, a Syrian wolf, or an Arabian wolf.

We still don’t know exactly what kind of wolf or related animal the animal was, but we do still have the stuffed specimen. It’s on display in the Tantanoola Hotel, which is where Kristie and her kids saw it several years ago. She took pictures and was kind enough to give me permission to use them, and please, I beg you, even if you’ve never clicked through to see any pictures I’ve posted before, please look at these. There are two, the reaction shot of Kristie and her kids looking at the Tantanoola tiger, and a picture of the tiger itself. You will laugh until you cry.

As we’ve mentioned a few times before, taxidermy requires a lot of work and artistic ability. Whoever stuffed and mounted the Tantanoola tiger lacked some of the artistic skills. It looks really goofy. Really, really goofy. But at least we have the body, although unfortunately it hasn’t been DNA tested so we still don’t know exactly what kind of wolf or wolf relation it is. But that’s not the only mystery.

In fact, there are three separate mysteries here. First, how did the wolf get to Australia? Second, what was the striped animal people were seeing? Third, what was killing sheep? Because even after the wolf was shot, sheep kept being killed and the striped animal was occasionally spotted.

One suggestion is that the striped animal was a thylacine. We’ve talked about it a few times before, most recently in episode 274. The thylacine was still alive in Tasmania in the 1890s, but it had been extinct in mainland Australia for about 3,000 years. It’s possible that someone brought a thylacine to mainland Australia where it escaped or was set loose, just as the wolf had to have been brought to Australia.

Then again, thylacines weren’t very strong. They mostly ate small animals, especially the Tasmanian native hen, which is about the size of a big flightless chicken with long legs. It was much smaller than a wolf and much, much smaller than a tiger. If there was a thylacine around Tantanoola at the time, it probably wasn’t the animal killing sheep.

Even though farmers had shot a huge feral hog and a wolf, neither of which belonged in Australia, sheep kept being killed. No one ever figured out what the striped animal was, and eventually it stopped being seen. The 19th century turned into the 20th century, and more and more sheep started disappearing—hundreds of them every year. In this case, though, they weren’t being eaten. They just disappeared.

Toward the end of 1910 the mystery was accidentally solved. Three hunters smelled an intense stench of death coming from some trees. It was so strong that they went to investigate. They found a path into the trees and came across something awful.

There were piles of dead sheep and lambs everywhere, dozens of them. They’d been skinned and the skins were hanging on wires strung through the trees. But the path continued, and when the hunters went farther, they found even more dead sheep.

It took a few weeks, but the police eventually tracked down the culprit, a local man who had been selling a lot of sheepskins on the sly for years despite not raising sheep himself. He’d killed thousands of sheep to sell their skins, leaving the bodies to just rot. He’d also done some other terrible crimes, so if you click through to read the article I’ve linked to in the show notes, please be aware that it’s not appropriate for younger readers. He’d also been convicted of sheep stealing in 1899, but in Victoria, not South Australia.

The sheep rustler wasn’t the Tantanoola tiger, because he was probably a good 140 miles away, or 225 km, when it was killing sheep. Besides, the so-called tiger actually ate the sheep it killed. But once he was caught and sentenced to jail, the Adelaide Evening Journal newspaper wrote about it with the headline “The Tiger Caged.”

As for the striped animal, tiger or not, we still have no idea what it was.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 291: The Ediacaran Biota

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This week let’s find out what lived before the Cambrian explosion!

A very happy birthday to Isaac!

Further reading:

Some of Earth’s first animals–including a mysterious, alien-looking creature–are spilling out of Canadian rocks

Say Hello to Dickinsonia, the Animal Kingdom’s Newest (and Oldest) Member

Charnia looks like a leaf or feather:

Kimberella looks like a lost earring:

Dickinsonia looks like one of those astronaut footprints on the moon:

Spriggina looks like a centipede no a trilobite no a polychaete worm no a

Glide reflection is hard to describe unless you look at pictures:

Trilobozoans look like the Manx flag or a cloverleaf roll:

Cochleatina looked like a snail:

Show transcript:

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

It’s the last week of August 2022, so let’s close out invertebrate August with a whole slew of mystery fossils, all invertebrates.

But first, we have a birthday shoutout! A humongous happy birthday to Isaac! Whatever your favorite thing is, I hope it happens on your birthday, unless your favorite thing is a kaiju attack.

We’ve talked about the Cambrian explosion before, especially in episode 69 about some of the Burgess shale animals. “Cambrian explosion” is the term for a time starting around 540 million years ago, when diverse and often bizarre-looking animals suddenly appear in the fossil record. But we haven’t talked much about what lived before the Cambrian explosion, so let’s talk specifically about the Ediacaran (eedee-ACK-eron) biota!

I was halfway through researching this episode when I remembered I’d done a Patreon episode about it in 2021. Patrons may recognize that I used part of the Patreon episode in this one. You’d think that would save me time but surprise, it did not.

The word Ediacara comes from a range of hills in South Australia, where in 1946 a geologist noticed what he thought were fossilized impressions of jellyfish in the rocks. At the time the rocks were dated to the early Cambrian period, and this was long before the Cambrian explosion was recognized as a thing at all, much less such an important thing. But since then, geologists and paleontologists have reevaluated the hills and determined that they’re much older than the Cambrian, dating to between 635 to 539 million years ago. That’s as much as 100 million years before the Cambrian. The Ediacaran period was formally designated in 2004 to mark this entire period of time, although fossils of Ediacaran animals generally start appearing about 580 million years ago.

Here’s something interesting, by the way. During the Ediacaran period, every day was only 22 hours long instead of 24, and there were about 400 days in a year instead of 365. The moon was closer to the earth too. And life on earth was still sorting out the details.

Fossils from the Ediacaran period have been discovered in other places besides Australia, including Namibia in southern Africa, Newfoundland in eastern Canada, England, northwestern Russia, and southern China. Once the first well-preserved fossils started being found, in Newfoundland in 1967, paleontologists started to really take notice, because they turned out to be extremely weird. The fossils, not the paleontologists.

Many organisms that lived during this time lived on, in, or under microbial mats on the sea floor or at the bottoms of rivers. Microbial mats are colonies of microorganisms like bacteria that grow on surfaces that are either submerged or just tend to stay damp. Microbial mats are still around today, usually growing in extreme environments like hot springs and hypersaline lakes. But 580 million years ago, they were everywhere.

One problem with the Ediacaran biota, and I should explain that biota just means all the animals and plants that live in a particular place, is that it’s not always clear if a fossil is actually an animal. Many Ediacaran fossils look sort of plant-like. At this stage, the blurry line between animals and plants was even more blurry than it is now, with the added confusion that sometimes non-organic materials can resemble fossils, and vice versa.

For instance, the fossil Charnia, named after Charnwood Forest in England where it was first discovered. In 1957, a boy named Roger, who was rock-climbing in the forest, found a fossil that looked like a leaf or feather. He took a rubbing of the fossil and showed his father, who showed it to a geologist. The year before, in 1956, a 15-year-old girl named Tina saw the same fossil and told her teacher, who said those rocks dated to before the Cambrian and no animals lived before the Cambrian, so obviously what she’d found wasn’t a fossil.

Tina’s teacher was wrong about that, of course, although he was correct that the rocks dated to before the Cambrian, specifically to about 560 million years ago. But while Charnia looks like a leaf, it’s not a plant. This was about 200 million years before plants evolved leaves, and anyway Charnia lived in water too deep for plants to survive. It anchored itself to the sea floor on one end while the rest of the body stuck up into the water, and some specimens have been found that were over two feet long, or 66 cm. Some researchers think it was a filter feeder, but we have very little evidence one way or another.

One common animal found in Australia and Russia is called Kimberella, which lived around 555 million years ago and might have been related to modern mollusks or to gastropods like slugs. It might have looked kind of like a slug, at least superficially. It grew up to 6 inches long, or 15 cm, 3 inches wide, or 7 cm, and an inch and a half high, or 4 cm, which was actually quite large for most animals that lived back then. It was shaped roughly like an oval, with one thin end that stuck out, potentially showing where its front end was, although it didn’t have a head the way we think of it today. The upper surface of its body was protected by a shell, but not the type of shell you’d find on the seashore today. This was a flexible, non-mineralized shell, basically just thick, toughened tissue with what may be mineralized nodules called sclerites embedded in it. All around its body was a frill that might have acted as a gill. The underside of Kimberella was a flat foot like that of a slug.

We know Kimberella lived on microbial mats on the sea floor, and it might have had a feeding structure similar to a radula. That’s because it’s often found associated with little scratches on its microbial mat that resemble the scratches made by a radula when a slug or related animal is feeding on a surface. The radula is a tongue-like organ studded with hard, sharp structures that the animal uses to scrape tiny food particles from a surface.

Kimberella displays bilateralism, meaning it’s the same side to side. That’s the case with a lot of modern animals, including all vertebrates and a lot of invertebrates too, like insects and arachnids. But other Ediacarans showed radically different body plans. Charnia, for instance, exhibits glide reflection, where both sides are the same as in bilateralism, but the sides aren’t exactly opposite each other. If you walk along a beach and make footprints in the sand, your trail of footprints actually demonstrates glide reflection. If you stand on the sand and jump forward with both feet together, your footprints demonstrate bilateralism since the prints are side by side. (This is confusing to describe, sorry.) Pretty much the only living animals with this body pattern are some sea pens, which get their name because they resemble old-fashioned quill pens. Many sea pens look like plants, and for a long time researchers thought Charnia might be an ancient relation to the sea pen. These days most researchers are less certain about the relationship.

A similar-looking animal that lived around the same time as Charnia was Dickinsonia. It looks sort of like a leaf too, but a more broad oval-shaped leaf instead of a long thin one like Charnia. It’s also not a leaf. Some are only a few millimeters long, but some are over 4 1/2 feet long, or 1.4 meters.

Dickinsonia may be related to modern placozoans, a simple squishy creature only about one millimeter across. It travels very slowly across the sea floor and absorbs nutrients from whatever organic materials it encounters. But we don’t know if Dickinsonia was like that or if it was something radically different. Until a few years ago a lot of paleontologists thought Dickinsonia might be some kind of early plant or algae. Then, in 2016, a graduate student discovered some Dickinsonia fossils that were so well preserved that researchers were able to identify molecular information from them. They found cholesteroids in the preserved cells, and since only animals produce cholesteroids, Dickinsonia was definitely an animal. But that’s still about all we know about it so far.

Spriggina is another animal that at first glance looks like a leaf or feather. Then it sort of resembles a trilobite, or a segmented worm, or a possible relation to Dickinsonia. It looks like all sorts of animals but doesn’t really fit with anything known. It grew up to two inches long, or 5 cm, and had what’s referred to as a head shield although we don’t know for sure if it was actually its head. The head shield might have had eyes and might have had some kind of antennae, and some fossils seem to show a round mouth in the middle of the head, but it’s hard to tell. The rest of its body was segmented in rings. What Spriggina didn’t have was legs, or at least none of the fossils found so far show any kind of legs. Some species of Spriggina show a glide reflection body plan, while others appear to show a more ordinary bilateral body plan.

Three Ediacaran animals have such a weird body plan that they’ve been placed in their own phylum, Trilobozoa, meaning three-lobed animals. They show tri-radial symmetry, meaning that they have three sections that are identical radiating out from the center. They lived on microbial mats and were only about 40 mm across at most, which is about an inch and a half. Tribrachidium was roughly round in shape although its relations looked more like tiny cloverleaf rolls. Cloverleaf rolls are made by putting three little round pieces of dough together and baking them so that the roll has three lobes, although Trilobozoans probably didn’t taste as good. Also, Trilobozoans were covered with little grooves from center to edge and had three curved ridges, one on each lobe. The ridges were originally interpreted as arms or tentacles, but they seem to have just been ridges. Researchers think the little grooves directed water over the body’s surface and the ridges acted as tiny dams that slowed the water down just enough that particles of food carried in the water would fall onto the body so that the animal could absorb the nutrients, although we don’t know how that worked.

Many other Ediacaran animals had radial symmetry like modern echinoderms and jellyfish, including the ancestors of jellyfish. Some Ediacaran animals even had shells of various kinds, and they’re generally referred to as small shelly fossils. They were rarely more than a few millimeters across at most and are sometimes found mixed in with microbial mats. Cochleatina, for instance, is less than a millimeter across and all we know about it is that it had a ribbon-like spiral shell like a really simple snail’s shell. It wasn’t a snail, though. We don’t even know if it was an animal. It might have been some kind of algae or it might have been something else. Unlike most small shelly fossils, Cochleatina survived into the Cambrian period.

We’re also not sure why most Ediacaran organisms went extinct at the beginning of the Cambrian, but it’s probable that most were outcompeted by newly evolved animals. There may also have been a change in the chemical makeup of the ocean and atmosphere that caused an extinction event of old forms and allowed the rapid expansion of new animal forms that we call the Cambrian explosion.

We can also learn a lot about what we don’t find in the Ediacaran rocks. Pre-Cambrian animals didn’t appear to burrow into the sea floor, or at least we haven’t found any burrows, just tracks on the surface. Most Ediacaran animals also didn’t have armored bodies or claws or so forth. Researchers think that predation was actually pretty rare back then, with most animals acting as passive filter feeders to gather nutrients from the water, or they ate the microbial mats. It wasn’t until the Cambrian explosion that we see evidence that some animals evolved to kill and eat other animals exclusively.

With every new Ediacaran fossil that’s found and studied, we learn more about this long-ago time when multi-cellular life was brand new.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 289: Weird Worms

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This week we learn about some weird worms!

Further reading:

Otherworldly Worms with Three Sexes Discovered in Mono Lake

Bizarre sea worm with regenerative butts named after Godzilla’s monstrous nemesis

Underground giant glows in the dark but is rarely seen

Giant Gippsland earthworm (you can listen to one gurgling through its burrow here too)

Further watching:

A giant Gippsland earthworm

Glowing earthworms (photo by Milton Cormier):

This sea worm’s head is on the left, its many “butts” on the right [photo from article linked to above]:

A North Auckland worm [photo from article linked to above]:

A giant beach worm:

Show transcript:

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

This week we continue Invertebrate August with a topic I almost saved for monster month in October. Let’s learn about some weird worms!

We’ll start with a newly discovered worm that’s very tiny, and we’ll work our way up to larger worms.

Mono Lake in California is a salty inland lake that probably started forming after a massive volcanic eruption about 760,000 years ago. The eruption left behind a crater called a caldera that slowly filled with water from rain and several creeks. But there’s no outlet from the lake—no river or even stream that carries water from the lake down to the ocean. As a result, the water stays where it is and over the centuries a lot of salts and other minerals have dissolved into the lake from the surrounding rocks. The water is three times as salty as the ocean and very alkaline.

No fish live in the lake, but some extremophiles do. There’s a type of algae that often turns the water bright green, brine shrimp that eat the algae, some unusual flies that dive into the water encased in bubbles, birds that visit the lake and eat the brine shrimp and flies, and eight species of worms that have only been discovered recently. All the worms are weird, but one of them is really weird. It hasn’t been described yet so at the moment is just going by the name Auanema, since the research team thinks it probably belongs in that genus.

Auanema is microscopic and lives throughout the lake, which is unusual because the lake contains high levels of arsenic. You know, a DEADLY POISON. But the arsenic and the salt and the other factors that make the lake inhospitable to most life don’t bother the worms.

Auanema produces offspring that can have one of three sexes: hermaphrodites that can self-fertilize, and males and females that need each other to fertilize eggs. Researchers think that the males and females of the species help maintain genetic diversity while the hermaphrodites are able to colonize new environments, since they don’t need a mate to reproduce.

When some of the worms were brought to the laboratory for further study, they did just fine in normal lab conditions, without extreme levels of arsenic and so forth. That’s unusual, because generally extremophiles are so well adapted for their extreme environments that they can’t live anywhere else. But Auanema is just fine in a non-harsh environment. Not only that, but the team tested other species in the Auanema genus that aren’t extremophiles and discovered that even though they don’t live in water high in arsenic, they tolerate arsenic just as well as the newly discovered species.

The team’s plan is to sequence Auanema’s genome to see if they can determine the genetic factors that confer such high resistance to arsenic.

Next, we go up in size from a teensy worm to another newly discovered worm, this one only about 4 inches long at most, or 10 cm. It’s a marine polychaete worm that lives inside sea sponges, although we don’t know yet if it’s parasitizing the sponge or if it confers some benefit to the sponge that makes this a symbiotic relationship. The worm was only discovered in 2019 near Japan and described in early 2022 as Ramisyllis kingghidorahi.

Almost all worms known are shaped, well, like worms. They have a mouth at one end, an anus at the other, and in between they’re basically just a tube. Ramisyllis is one of only three worms known that have branched bodies, which is why they’re called branching sea worms. In this case, Ramisyllis has a single head, which stays in the sponge, but its other end branches into multiple tail ends that occasionally break off and swim away. The tails are specialized structures called stolons. When a stolon breaks off, it swims away and releases the eggs or sperm it contains into the water before dying. The worm then regenerates another stolon in its place.

Ramisyllis’s branches are asymmetrical and the worms found so far can have dozens of branches. Its close relation, a species that lives in sponges off the coast of northern Australia, can have up to 100 branches. Researchers suspect that there are a lot more species of branching sea worms that haven’t been discovered yet.

Next, let’s head back to land to learn about a regular-sized earthworm. There are quite a few species across three different earthworm families that exhibit a particular trait, found in North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of Africa. A few species have been introduced to parts of Europe too. What’s the trait that links all these earthworms? THEY CAN GLOW IN THE DARK.

Bioluminescent earthworms don’t glow all the time. Most of the time they’re just regular earthworms of various sizes, depending on the species. But if they feel threatened, they exude a special slime that glows blue or green in the dark, or sometimes yellowish like firefly light. The glow is caused by proteins and enzymes in the slime that react chemically with oxygen.

Researchers think that the light may startle predators or even scare them away, since predators that live and hunt underground tend to avoid light. The glow may also signal to predators that the worm could taste bad or contain toxins. The light usually looks dim to human eyes but to an animal with eyes adapted for very low light, it would appear incredibly bright.

One bioluminescent earthworm is called the New Zealand earthworm. It can grow up to a foot long, or 30 cm, although it’s only about 10 mm thick at most, and while it’s mostly pink, it has a purplish streak along the top of its body (like a racing stripe).

Like other earthworms, the New Zealand earthworm spends most of its time burrowing through the soil to find decaying organic matter, mostly plant material, and it burrows quite deep, over 16 feet deep, or 5 meters. If a person tried to dig a hole that deep, without special materials to keep the hole from collapsing, it would fall in and squish the person. Dirt and sand are really heavy. The earthworm has the same problem, which it solves by exuding mucus from its body that sticks to the dirt and hardens, forming a lining that keeps the burrow from collapsing. This is a different kind of mucus than the bioluminescent kind, and all earthworms do this. Not only does the burrow lining keep the worm safe from being squished by cave-ins, it also contains a toxin that kills bacteria in the soil that could harm the worm.

Worms that burrow as deep as the New Zealand earthworm does are called subsoil worms, as opposed to topsoil worms that live closer to the surface. Topsoil contains a lot more organic material than subsoil, but it’s also easier for surface predators to reach. That’s why topsoil worms tend to move pretty fast compared to subsoil worms.

The New Zealand earthworm glows bright orange-yellow if it feels threatened, so bright that the Maori people used the worm as bait when fishing since it’s basically the best fish lure ever.

Another New Zealand earthworm is called the North Auckland worm, and while it looks like a regular earthworm that’s mostly pink or greenish, it’s also extremely large. Like, at least four and a half feet long, or 1.4 meters, and potentially much longer. It typically lives deep underground in undisturbed forests, so there aren’t usually very many people around on the rare occasion when heavy rain forces it to the surface. Since earthworms of all kinds absorb oxygen through the skin, instead of having lungs or gills, they can’t survive for long in water and have to surface if their burrow completely floods.

We don’t actually know that much about the North Auckland worm. Like the New Zealand earthworm, it’s a subsoil worm that mostly eats dead plant roots. Some people report that it glows bright yellow, although this hasn’t been studied and it’s not clear if this is a defensive reaction like in the New Zealand earthworm. It’s possible that people get large individual New Zealand earthworms confused with smaller North Auckland worm individuals. Then again, there’s no reason why both worms can’t bioluminesce.

An even bigger worm is the giant beach worm. It’s a polychaete worm, not an earthworm, and like other polychaete worms, including the branching sea worm we talked about earlier, it has a segmented body with setae that look a little like legs, although they’re just bristles. The giant beach worm’s setae help it move around through and over the sand. It hides in a burrow it digs in the sand between the high and low tide marks, but it comes out to eat dead fish and other animals, seaweed, and anything else it can find. It has strong jaws and usually will poke its head out of its burrow just far enough to grab a piece of food. It has a really good sense of smell but can’t see at all.

There are two species of giant beach worm that live in parts of Australia, especially the eastern and southeastern coasts, where people dig them up to use as fish bait. The largest species can grow up to 8 feet long, or 2.4 meters, and possibly even longer. There are also two species that live in Central and South America, although we don’t know much about them.

Another huge Australian worm is the endangered Giant Gippsland earthworm that lives in Victoria, Australia. It’s also a subsoil worm and is about 8 inches long, or 20 cm…when it’s first hatched. It can grow almost ten feet long, or 3 meters. It’s mostly bluish-gray but you can tell which end is its head because it’s darker in color, almost purple. It lives beneath grasslands, usually near streams, and is so big that if you happen to be in the right place at the right time on a quiet day and listen closely, you might actually hear one of the giant worms moving around underground. When it moves quickly, its body makes a gurgling sound as it passes through the moist soil in its burrow.

The Giant Gippsland earthworm is increasingly endangered due to habitat loss. It also reproduces slowly and takes as much as five years to reach maturity. Conservationists are working to protect it and its remaining habitat in Gippsland. The city of Korumburra used to have a giant worm festival, but it doesn’t look like that’s been held for a while, which is too bad because there aren’t enough giant worm festivals in the world.

To finish us off, let’s learn what the longest worm ever reliably measured is. It was found on a road in South Africa in 1967 and identified as Microchaetus rappi, or the African giant earthworm. It’s mostly dark greenish-brown in color and it looks like an earthworm, because it is an earthworm. On average, this species typically grows around 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, which is pretty darn big, but this particular individual was 21 feet long, or 6.7 meters. It’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest worm ever measured. Beat that, other worms. I don’t think you can.

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. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, or just tell a friend. 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 274: Mystery Big Cats in Australia

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Thanks to Kristie and Jason, we’re going to learn about some mystery big cats reported in Australia, in particular Victoria.

Further reading:

Official big cat hunt declared a bust, so why do people keep seeing them?

Further watching:

Thylacine video from 1933, colorized

You’ll probably need to enlarge this but it’s a still from a 2018 video purportedly showing a mystery big cat, but in this frame you can see the ears are pointy, which is a sure sign of a domestic cat:

A melanistic (black) leopard and regular leopards (picture from this site). If you zoom in you can see the spot pattern on the black leopard:

A puma/cougar/mountain lion. Note the lack of spots:

A thylacine. Note the lack of spots but presence of stripes:

Show transcript:

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

This week is Kristie and Jason’s episode. They want everyone to learn about mysterious big cats in Australia!

Australia, of course, is home to many wonderful animals, but almost all of the native mammals are marsupials. There are no native felids of any kind in Australia, even in the fossil record. This is because Australia split off from the rest of the world’s landmasses when the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart. Marsupials actually first arose in South America and spread to Australia when the two landmasses were connected. Then, around 180 million years ago, South America and Africa split off from the rest of Gondwana, including Australia. Most of South America’s marsupials went extinct as placental mammals arose and became more and more numerous, but Australia was on its own starting about 30 to 50 million years ago. Marsupials never had to compete with placental mammals during most of that time, except for bats, and the marsupials thrived.

Humans first populated Australia at least 41,000 years ago and probably more like 65,000 years ago. The first dingoes, a type of dog, were introduced around 5,000 years ago. The first European sighting of Australia was in 1606, and less than 200 years later the British colonized the continent, bringing with them invasive species like cats, rats, cattle, sheep, foxes, rabbits, deer, and lots more, which have driven many indigenous animals to extinction. But while domestic cats are common in Australia, as far as we know no one has ever deliberately released enough big cats to form a breeding population.

In that case, though, why are there so many reports of big cats in parts of Australia?

If you remember way back in episode 52, where we talked about big cats in Britain, there were lots of stories and a certain amount of evidence that individual big cats were occasionally found in the country. Ultimately, though, there’s no proof of a breeding population of big cats. The same is more or less true in Australia, but Australia is so much bigger and so much less populated than Britain, it would be easy for a small population of big cats to hide. And maybe they’re not actually big cats but some other animal, something that is native to Australia.

Kristie and Jason have lots of experience searching for big cats in central Victoria, Australia. They even helped with the research of a book about big cat sightings. Victoria is in southeastern Australia and is the smallest state. If you walked south from central Victoria to the coast, and then got on a boat and kept going south, you’d run into Tasmania. If you walked north instead, eventually you’d come to New South Wales but that is going to be a long walk. Victoria is mostly temperate and rainy but has tall mountains, semi-arid plains, and lots of rivers.

As Kristie pointed out, different parts of Australia have different stories about mystery big cats, but I’m mostly going to talk about sightings in Victoria, just to narrow it down.

To start us off, now that we have some background information, here’s a clip from the conversation I had with Kristie. The audio isn’t great, unfortunately, but it’s definitely interesting.

[quote of Kristie’s account:]

“Jason and I used to go puma hunting. It was very scary. So, there was this bloke we used to go and visit. I’m not going to name any names; I’m not even going to tell you exactly where he was other than he was in Castlemaine along a railway line, a disused railway line. So, the story goes that this man (let’s just take 80% of what he says with a grain of salt), he’d gone up to get a horse from a paddock outside their house that they lived in, on a dirt road near the railway. There was lots of long grass on the side of the road. He said he went to get the horse and was bringing the horse back to the house paddock, and he felt like he was being watched. Not a good feeling. And then he heard something that sounded like a growl coming from in the grass. And the horse had a bit of a moment. He continued on his way—he was safe, the horse was safe! No animals were hurt in the making of this story. From then on he said he and his wife would hear things walking around their house and it would just feel really weird. They would say that they actually saw these cats walking along the road.

“I would call Jason and we’d get on a motorbike and we’d go down, probably about a 5 or 10 minutes motorbike ride. Of course whenever we got there, there was nothing there. Occasionally you might see something on the dirt road, because there was a bit of fine dirt on there that maybe you could find a footprint on there.

“You would hear dogs bark, hear them off in the distance when whatever it was out there was on the move. It would actually follow the creek down and the railway line and you would get a succession of dog barks.”

Kristie went on to say that they’d even found and taken a plaster cast of a large paw print that looked different from a dog’s print, but the veterinarian they took it to wasn’t able to determine whether it was made by a big cat or just a dog.

She also talked about some other evidence that their friend gave as proof of big cats living in his paddock, including swirls in the long grass that looked like a cat had flattened the grass to sleep. In that case, she also pointed out that the same thing had happened in her own yard recently and that she was pretty sure it was caused by the wind. But here’s another clip from her about an experience she had that wasn’t so easy to explain:

[quote of Kristie’s account:]

“I spent one night out in a caravan that they had in their yard, just waiting, and I heard a cough. Pumas cough, but so do kangaroos, so I don’t know. I didn’t see any kangaroos. I like to think I heard a puma cough. I honestly don’t know what I heard.”

Kristie even thinks she spotted a big cat once as she and Jason rode by on a motorbike, but by the time she realized what she’d seen, it was long gone. She said it was a large black animal with a very long tail, much longer than a domestic cat’s tail.

One theory of big cat sightings is that they’re descendants of cougars, also called pumas or mountain lions, brought to Australia as mascots by American troops during World War II but released into the wild. While WWII units from various countries did often have mascots, they were usually dogs. A few mascots were domestic cats, there were a couple of pigs, birds, and donkeys, but mascots were almost always domesticated animals that a unit adopted even though they weren’t really supposed to have them. Wild animals were rare as mascots because they were hard to handle and hard to hide from officers. While there were certainly some big cats of various kinds brought to Australia by American soldiers and released when they started getting too big and dangerous to handle, or when they were found by officers, there wouldn’t have been enough to form a breeding population.

Besides, big cat sightings go back much earlier than the 1940s. Some people blame Americans again for these earlier stories, specifically American miners who came to Australia in the mid-19th century gold rush. Supposedly they brought pet cougars that either escaped or were released into the mountains. While miners did bring animals, they were almost always dogs or pack animals like mules.

More likely, though, any big cats escaped or released into the Australian bush in the olden days came from traveling circuses or exotic animal dealers. Even so, again, there just weren’t enough big cats of any given species to result in a breeding population. But, also again, people are definitely seeing something.

The most compelling evidence for big cats in Australia is attacks on large animals like horses, cattle, calves, and sheep. Australia doesn’t have very many large predators. Dingoes are rare or unknown in Victoria these days, as are feral pigs, foxes don’t typically hunt animals larger than a rabbit or chicken, and feral dogs usually leave telltale signs when they attack livestock.

In 2012, the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment commissioned a study of big cat sightings in the state. The study’s aim was to determine whether a breeding population of big cats might exist, and if so, what impact it was having on the native wildlife. The team examined historical and contemporary reports of big cats, and studied photos and videos and other evidence. Its findings were inconclusive—there just isn’t enough evidence that big cats are living in Victoria, although it couldn’t rule it out either—and it recommended further investigation.

An earlier study in the 1970s by Deakin University also attempted to determine whether big cats lived in the Grampians, a national park that includes a mountain range. Its traditional name is Geriwerd. The study came to the conclusion that there probably were pumas in the Grampians, but one of the pieces of proof, a 3-inch, or 8-cm, fecal pellet, was later identified as a pellet regurgitated by a wedge-tailed eagle.

Kristie also mentioned that the wedge-tailed eagle might be the source of some claw marks found on wildlife. The wedge-tailed eagle is a large, robust bird with a wingspan over nine feet across, or 2.84 meters, and it lives throughout Australia and southern New Guinea. It’s mostly black or brown in color and has a large hooked bill and large, strong talons. It often hunts in pairs or even groups and can kill animals as large as kangaroos. Larger species of wallabies and other native animals are the eagle’s natural prey but it also eats lots of introduced animals like rabbits and foxes, and occasionally kills lambs or piglets. It also eats a lot of carrion.

Eagle attacks don’t explain everything, though, such as claw marks found on horse rugs. Horse rugs are special blankets that horses wear, especially in cold weather. There are also reports of dead sheep and goats found dragged into trees or through fences, something a dog couldn’t or wouldn’t do but a leopard or other big cat could.

In 1991 a piece of poop, more properly called scat or feces, was turned into authorities and sent for testing. Initially reports said it looked like it came from a large felid, although what species couldn’t be determined. Fortunately it was saved and was genetically examined a decade or so later, at which point it matched up to a leopard. Assuming it was actually found in the bush and wasn’t a joke by an exotic pet owner, it means there was a leopard running around in central Victoria a few decades ago for sure.

Most sightings of Australian big cats fall into two categories: black cats and tan or gray-brown cats with white bellies. As we learned in last year’s wampus cat episode, the cougar is tan or gray-brown in color, sometimes called yellowish, with a pale belly, but is never black. Melanism is common in some big cats, especially leopards and jaguars, but leopards and jaguars are always spotted. Even melanistic individuals show a faint spotted pattern up close. So if some Australian big cats are black and other Australian big cats are tan or gray-brown without spots, they’re probably not the same species. But now it’s even more complicated! How could there be two species of big cat hiding so close to people without anyone hitting one with a car or shooting one in a pasture or just getting a really good picture of one on a trail cam or just a phone?

A lot of people think that feral domestic cats are responsible for all the sightings. While some feral cats can grow larger than average for a domestic cat, especially in areas where there’s lots to eat, most are actually quite small and thin. Feral cats are definitely responsible for a lot of big cat sightings, but not all. Black domestic cats in particular stand out in fields and on bright days so might be noticed more often than other colors of cat, and it’s easy to see a big black cat in the distance, not very close to anything, and assume it’s larger than it really is. But pictures and videos of these cats are usually pretty easy to identify as domestic. Domestic cats have pointy ears set high on the head, unlike big cats who have rounded ears that are lower on the head.

One video from 2018 is often cited as proof of a big cat in Australia, although in this case it’s in New South Wales. If you check the show notes, you’ll see a still I took from the video showing the animal’s ears. They’re pointy ears so the animal has to be a domestic cat.

There’s always another possibility, of course. Maybe the big cats aren’t cats at all but rare, reclusive carnivorous marsupials. The two main contenders are the marsupial lion and the thylacine.

The marsupial lion, or Thylacoleo carnifex, isn’t actually a lion. It’s a marsupial, and in fact I should say it was a marsupial because it went extinct at least 30,000 years ago as far as we know. It was probably almost as big as a lion, though, with massive jaws and teeth that could bite through bones. It ate large animals like the giant wombat relation Diprotodon and giant kangaroos, so it would have no trouble with a sheep.

But the marsupial lion didn’t actually look like a lion either. It probably resembled a small bear in some ways, although it had a thick tail more like a kangaroo’s than a cat’s. Its method of hunting doesn’t match up with the dead animals found in Victoria either. The marsupial lion had huge claws that it used to disembowel its enemies, I mean its prey, whereas modern big cats mostly use their strong jaws to bite an animal’s neck. Also, of course, the marsupial lion went extinct a really long time ago. While there’s always a slim possibility that it’s still hanging on in remote areas, I wouldn’t place any bets on it. I don’t think it’s the real identity of the mystery big cats. There are just too many discrepancies.

The thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger because it lived in Tasmania and had stripes, was about the height of a big dog but much longer. It was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and its tail. It had relatively short legs but a very long body and its tail was thick. It was a carnivorous marsupial, mostly nocturnal.

The thylacine went extinct in mainland Australia around 3,000 years ago while the Tasmanian population was driven to extinction by white settlers in the early 20th century. But like big cat sightings, people still report seeing thylacines. Maybe people are mistaking thylacines for big cats, since a quick glimpse of a big tawny animal with a long tail could resemble a puma if the witness didn’t see its stripes or didn’t notice them in brush or shadows.

The thylacine wasn’t a very strong hunter, though, at least as far as researchers can tell. But there’s a lot we don’t know about the thylacine even though it was still alive less than 100 years ago. As Kristie says:

“Maybe it was a thylacine. Who knows?”

Kristie and Jason think most big cat sightings are explainable as feral cats and other known animals. They also pointed out that what appear to be unusual predation methods might just be caused by more than one kind of animal scavenging an already dead carcass.

But there are lots of sightings that can’t be explained away, and people occasionally find dead animals that look like they’ve been killed and eaten by a big cat instead of a dog or eagle. While there’s a low probability that a breeding population of big cats is living in Victoria, there’s a very good chance that a few individual animals are. They’re most likely escaped or released exotic pets, possibly ones that were kept illegally in the first place.

As Kristie and Jason point out, people often freak out when they’re confronted with something strange, like the possibility that a leopard is sneaking around their house. You can’t really blame them. That’s why it’s so important to find out more about these animals, because turning the unknown into the known helps people know what to do and not be so scared.

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