Episode 304: Animals of the Paleogene

Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this week’s topic, animals of the Paleogene, the period after the Cretaceous! Thanks also to Llewelly for suggesting the horned screamer, now one of my favorite birds.

Further watching:

Southern Screamers making noise

Horned Screamers making noise

Further reading:

The Brontotheres

Presbyornis looked a lot like a long-legged goose [art by Smokeybjb – CC BY-SA 3.0]

The southern screamer (left) and horned screamer (right), probably the closest living relation to Presbyornis:

Megacerops was really really big:

All four of these illustrated animals are actually megacerops, showing the variation across individuals of nose horn size:

Uintatherium had a really weird skull and big fangs:

Pezosiren didn’t look much like its dugong and manatee descendants:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at some strange animals of the Paleogene period, a suggestion from Pranav. Pranav also suggested the naked mole-rat that we talked about in episode 301, but I forgot to credit him in that one.

As we talked about in episode 240, about 66 and a half million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into the earth and caused an extinction event that ended the era of the dinosaurs. The geologic time period immediately after that event is called the Paleogene, and paleontologists study this era to learn how life rebounded after the extinction event. We’re going to learn about a few animals that evolved to fill ecological niches left vacant after dinosaurs went extinct.

These days, mammals fill a whole lot of these ecological niches, so it’s easy to assume that mammals have been successful for the last 66 million years. But while that’s true now, birds were incredibly successful for a long time. Basically for millions of years after the non-avian dinosaurs died out, it was dinosaurs 2.0 as the avian dinosaurs, better known as birds, spread throughout the world and evolved into some amazing organisms.

This included terror birds, which we talked about in episode 202. They lived in South America, except for one species from North America, and evolved really soon after the dinosaurs went extinct, appearing in the fossil record about 60 million years ago. They lasted a long time, too, only going extinct around 2 million years ago.

The earliest known terror bird was about three feet tall, or 91 cm, but its descendants became larger and more fearsome until they were apex predators throughout South America. The biggest species grew up to ten feet tall, or three meters, with a massive beak and sharp claws on its toes. It couldn’t fly but was a fast runner. You would not want a terror bird chasing you.

Lots of other birds evolved throughout the Paleogene, but most of them would look pretty familiar to us today. Paleontologists have found fossils of the ancestors of many modern birds, including penguins, hummingbirds, and parrots, which shows that they were already specialized some 25 or 35 million years ago or even more. In the case of penguins, we have fossils of penguin ancestors dating back to the late Cretaceous, before the extinction event. Those ancient penguins could probably still fly, but it didn’t take too long to evolve to be a fully aquatic bird. The species Waimanu manneringi lived around 62 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. It resembled a loon in a lot of ways, with its legs set well back on its body, and it probably spent much of its time floating on the water between dives. But unlike a loon, it had lost the ability to fly and its wings were already well adapted to act as flippers underwater.

Another bird would have looked familiar at first glance, but really weird when you gave it a second look. Presbyornis lived between about 62 and 55 million years ago in what is now North America, and it lived in flocks around shallow lakes. It was the size of a swan or goose and mostly shaped like a goose, with a fairly chonky body and a long neck. It had a large, broad duckbill that it used to filter small animals and plant material from the water and its feet were webbed…but its legs were really long, more like a heron’s legs.

When the first Presbyornis fossils were found in the 1920s, the scientists thought they’d found ancient flamingos. But when a skull turned up, Presbyornis was classified with ducks and geese. It wasn’t very closely related to modern ducks and geese, though. Researchers now think its closest modern relation is a South American bird called the screamer. Llewelly suggested the horned screamer a long time ago and now that I have learned more about these birds, I love them so much!

The screamer looks sort of like a goose but has long, strong legs and a sharp bill more like a chicken’s. It lives in marshy areas and eats pretty much anything, although it prefers plant material. It has two curved spurs that grow on its wings that it uses to defend its territory from predators or other screamers, and if a spur breaks off, which it does pretty often, it grows back. The screamer mates for life and both parents build the nest together and help take care of the eggs and chicks when they hatch.

The horned screamer has a long, thin structure that grows from its forehead and looks sort of like a horn, although it’s not a horn. It’s wobbly, for one thing, but it’s also not a wattle. It grows throughout the bird’s life and may break off at the end every so often, and it’s basically unlike anything seen in any other bird. Maybe presbyornis had something similar, who knows?

The screamer gets its name from its habit of screaming if it feels threatened or if it just encounters something new or that it doesn’t like. The screaming is actually more of a honking call that sounds like this:

[screamer call]

People sometimes raise screamers with chickens to act as guard birds. It can run fast but it can swim faster, and it can also fly although it doesn’t do so very often. Although it’s distantly related to ducks, its meat is spongy and full of air sacs that help keep it afloat in the water, so people don’t eat it. It is vulnerable to habitat loss, though.

One organism that evolved early in the Paleogene was grass. You know, the plant that a whole lot of animals eat. There are lots and lots of different types of grass, not just the kind we’re used to mowing, and as the Paleogene progressed, it became more and more widespread. But it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, so even though the ancestors of modern grazing animals evolved around the same time, they weren’t grazers yet. The word graze comes from the word grass, but ancient ancestors of horses and other grazing animals were still browsers. They ate all kinds of plants, and didn’t specialize as grazers until grasses really took off and huge grasslands developed in many parts of the world, around 34 million years ago.

Because the Paleogene lasted so long, between about 66 and 23 million years ago, there’s literally no way we can talk about more than a few animals that lived during that time, not in a single 15-minute episode. We’ve also covered a lot of Paleogene animals in previous episodes, like paraceratherium in episode 50, the largest land mammal known. It probably grew up to about 16 feet tall at the shoulder, or 5 meters, and taller if you measured it at the top of its head. Other examples are moeritherium, an ancient elephant relation we talked about in episode 18, the giant ground sloth that we talked about in episode 22, and the ancient whale relation basilosaurus that we talked about in episode 132. Patrons also got a bonus basilosaurid episode this month. But I’m pretty sure we’ve never talked about brontotheres.

Brontotheres first appear in the fossil record around 56 million years ago and they lived until at least 34 million years ago. All animals in the family Brontotheriidae are extinct, but they were closely related to horses. They didn’t look like horses, though; they looked a lot like weird rhinoceroses, although remember that rhinos are also related to horses. They were members of the odd-toed ungulates, along with tapirs and the gigantic Paraceratherium.

Fossil remains of brontotheres have been found in North America, a few parts of eastern Europe, and Asia, although they might have been even more widespread. The earliest species were only about three and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or about a meter, but later species were much larger. While they looked a lot like rhinos, they didn’t have the kind of keratin hose horns that rhinos have. Instead, some species had a pair of horns made of bone that varied in shape and size depending on species. The horns were on the nose as in rhinos, but were side-by-side.

Brontotheres developed before grasslands became widespread, and instead they were browsers that mostly ate relatively soft vegetation like leaves and fruit. Grass is really tough and animals had to evolve specifically to be able to chew and digest it. In fact, the rise of grasslands as the climate became overall much drier around 34 million years ago is probably what drove the brontotheres to extinction. They lived in semi-tropical forests and probably occupied the same ecological niche that elephants do today. This was before elephants and their relations had evolved to be really big, and brontotheres were the biggest browsing animals of their time.

Brontotheres probably lived in herds or groups of some kind. They were widespread and common enough that they left lots of fossils, so many that they were found relatively often in North America even before people knew what fossils were. The Sioux Nation people were familiar with the bones and called them thunder horses. When they were scientifically described in 1873 by Othniel Marsh, he named them after the Sioux term, since brontotherium means “thunder beast.”

Two of the biggest brontotheres lived at about the same time as each other, around 37 to 34 million years ago. Megacerops lived in North America while Embolotherium lived in Asia, specifically in what is now Mongolia. Megacerops is the same animal that’s sometimes called brontotherium or titanotherium in older articles and books.

Megacerops and Embolotherium were about the same size, and they were huge, although Embolotherium was probably just a bit larger than Megacerops. They stood over 8 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.5 meters, and were more than 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. This is much larger than any rhinos alive today and as big as some elephants. Their legs would probably have looked more like an elephant’s legs than a rhinoceros’s.

Brontothere nose horns weren’t true horns, since they don’t seem to have been covered with a keratin sheath, but they were formed from protrusions of the nasal bones. They might have been more like ossicones, covered with skin and hair. Megacerops had a pair of nose horns that were much larger in some individuals than others, and scientists hypothesize that males had the larger horns and used them to fight each other.

But this can’t have been the case for embolotherium. It had even bigger nose horns that were fused together in a wedge-shaped plate sometimes referred to as a ram, but they contained empty chambers inside that were a continuation of the nasal cavities. They wouldn’t have been strong enough to bash other embolotheriums with, but they might have acted as resonating chambers, allowing embolotherium to communicate with loud sounds. All individuals had these nose horns, even juveniles, and they were all about the same size, which further suggests that they had a purpose unrelated to fighting.

At about the same time the brontotheres were evolving, another big browsing animal also lived in what are now China and the United States. Two species are known, one in each country, and both stood about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It looked sort of like a brontothere in some ways, but very different in other ways, especially its weird skull, and anyway it was already big around 56 million years ago when brontotheres were still small and unspecialized.

Scientists aren’t sure what uintatherium was related to. It’s been placed in its own genus, family, and order, although some other uintatherium relations have been discovered that share its weird traits. Most scientists these days think it was probably an ungulate.

Uintatherium’s skull was extremely strong and thick, which didn’t leave a whole lot of room for brains. But what uintatherium lacked in brainpower, it made up for in sheer defensive ability. It had huge canine teeth that hung down like a sabertooth cat’s fangs, although males had larger fangs than females. Males also had three pairs of ossicones or horns on the top of the skull that pointed upwards. One pair was on the nose, one pair over the eyes, and one pair almost on the back of the skull. They could be as much as 10 inches long, or 25 cm, and paleontologists think that males wrestled with these horns the same way male deer will lock antlers and wrestle.

Uintatherium lived in the same habitat and probably ate more or less the same type of plants that later brontotheres did. They went extinct around the time that brontotheres evolved to be much larger, which suggests that brontotheres may have outcompeted uintatherium.

We’ll finish with one more Paleogene mammal, Pezosiren. It was only described in 2001 from several incomplete specimens discovered in Jamaica in the 1990s, and it lived between 49 and 46 million years ago.

Pezosiren was about the size of a pig, although it had a longer, thicker tail compared to pigs. It wasn’t any kind of pig, though, and in fact it was distantly related to elephants. It was the oldest known ancestor of modern sirenians. Pezosiren is also called the walking siren, because it still had four legs and probably spent at least part of the time on land, although it could swim well. Scientists think it probably swam more like an otter than a sirenian, propelling itself through the water with its hind legs instead of its tail.

Pezosiren was probably semi-aquatic, sort of like modern hippos, and already shows some details specific to sirenians, especially its heavy ribs that would help it stay submerged when it wanted to. It ate water plants and probably stayed in shallow coastal water. At different times in the past, Jamaica was connected to the North American mainland or was an island on its own as it is now, or occasionally it was completely submerged. About 46 million years ago it submerged as sea levels rose, and that was the end of Pezosiren as far as we know. But obviously Pezosiren either survived in other areas or had already given rise to an even more aquatic sirenian ancestor, because while Pezosiren is the only sirenian known that could walk, its descendants were well adapted to the water. They survive today as dugongs and manatees.

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

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 295: The Peregrine Falcon

Thanks to Nikita for this week’s suggestion that we learn all about the peregrine falcon!

I’ll be at the Next Chapter Book Fair in Dalton, Georgia on October 1, 2022! Come say hi!

Further listening:

Crossover episode with Arcane Carolinas from ConCarolinas 2022!

Further reading:

Falcons see prey at speed of Formula 1 car

A peregrine falcon in flight:

Baby peregrine falcons. Look at those giant peets! [photos by Robin Duska, taken from this site]

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Nikita, who wants to learn about the peregrine falcon! The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal known, and I thought about trying to talk very fast for this episode, but I decided I make enough mistakes just talking normally.

A quick note before we start. On Saturday, October 1, 2022, I’ll be at the Next Chapter Book Fair and Convention in Dalton, Georgia. If you happen to be in the area, stop by and say hi! I’ll be selling books and I think I’m on a panel too. That’s the last event I have planned for the year and I’m not sure if I’ll be selling books at conventions next year. It’s fun, but it’s also a lot of work. Whatever copies of the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book that don’t sell next week, I can offer for sale directly from me. If you want a signed copy of a slightly banged-up paperback that’s been to a lot of conventions, email me and we can work out a price with shipping.

Speaking of conventions, back in June I had a fantastic time at ConCarolinas, and one of the things I did was join the guys from Arcane Carolinas to record an episode of their excellent podcast. Well, they’ve just released that episode and it’s fantastic! I’ll put a link in the show notes in case you don’t already listen to their podcast.

Now, let’s learn about the peregrine falcon!

The peregrine falcon lives throughout the world, with as many as 19 subspecies, although experts disagree about a few of those. It’s about the size of a crow, with females being much bigger than males. Different subspecies have different patterns, but in general the peregrine falcon is dark above and pale below with a darker barred pattern. It has bright yellow around its eyes, and the base of its hooked bill and its feet are yellow.

The peregrine mates for life, and reuses the same nesting site every year. Some populations of peregrine migrate long distances, and sometimes the male will stay year-round near the nesting site while the female migrates. Either way, at the beginning of the breeding season, which is usually around the end of winter, the pair performs courtship flights where the male will pass food to the female while they’re both flying. Sometimes the female turns over to fly upside-down to take food from her mate.

The male typically prepares several potential nesting sites, and the female chooses which one she likes best to lay her eggs. The peregrine doesn’t build a nest, though, just kicks at the dirt to make what’s called a scrape. It’s just a shallow depression in the dirt. The female lays 2 to 5 eggs that hatch in about a month into fuzzy white babies with gigantic talons. Both parents help incubate the eggs and both feed the babies after they hatch.

The peregrine especially likes open areas with cliffs for its nest, and as far as it’s concerned, skyscrapers are just a type of cliff. It’s surprisingly common in cities as a result, not to mention that cities are home to another bird, the pigeon, that the peregrine loves to eat. The peregrine mostly eats birds, especially pigeons, gulls, ducks, and various songbirds, but it will also eat bats and sometimes small animals like squirrels and rats. It mostly hunts at dawn and dusk, but it will hunt at night too and sometimes during the day.

Even though the peregrine isn’t very big compared to many birds of prey like eagles, owls, and hawks, it is an astounding hunter. It has strong feet equipped with sharp talons to grab prey, and its hooked beak is notched to help it bite through the spine of a bird it’s caught to kill it quickly.

But the main reason the peregrine is such an effective hunter is how fast it can fly. It’s pretty fast while just cruising around looking for prey, flying about 30 miles per hour, or 48 km/hour. If it spots a bird it wants to eat, it can easily more than double its speed to chase it. But that’s not all.

The peregrine’s signature move is the stoop. This is a high-speed dive from a height, and the falcon hits its prey with feet extended but clenched into a fist. Stoop speeds have been recorded and are as high as 238 miles per hour, or 383 km/hour. This is the speed of a Formula One race car! So getting hit by a stooping falcon would be like being punched by a small feathery car. BOOM! That’s the end for you.

While the peregrine mostly eats medium-sized birds, it’s been documented to kill birds as large as a sandhill crane or a great horned owl by stooping. During the stoop, the peregrine changes its body shape for maximum aerodynamics, and high-resolution photos taken of a falcon flying in a wind tunnel show that certain feathers pop up in rows to guide air over the body.

If you were riding in a race car going that fast, everything around you would look like a blur. That’s because our eyes and our brains can only capture and process images so fast. But the peregrine falcon can see just fine at those speeds, because its eyes and brain have evolved to capture and process images extremely quickly. The only birds studied with similar visual processing are flycatchers, little songbirds that chase insects to eat. Insects are fast so flycatchers are fast, but the peregrine falcon catches and eats flycatchers.

The peregrine’s speed of visual processing has a side effect when birds are kept in captivity. If the lights in their enclosure flicker at all, the birds will get sick. That’s because what may be only a barely perceptible flicker to us is like a constant strobe light for the peregrine!

The peregrine has been kept as a hunting bird for thousands of years. It’s not domesticated, but young birds are relatively easy to tame and it can be trained to return to the falconer after catching its prey. Peregrines used to be captured from the wild by falconers, and if you’ve read the book My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, this is one of the things the boy in the book does. That book was published in 1959, though, and around this time the peregrine falcon began to decline in numbers worldwide due to DDT use.

We’ve talked about DDT recently, in episode 277 about rewilding Scotland. DDT is a pesticide that was developed in the 1950s and used extensively to kill insects on crops and gardens. But DDT doesn’t just do its job and evaporate. It stays in the environment and ends up in the bodies of animals, including people. It’s especially bad for birds of prey, and it causes their eggshells to become so thin and weak that the eggs break when the mother tries to keep them warm. The peregrine falcon was one bird that was especially badly affected, especially in North America and parts of Europe, where it almost went extinct. It was placed on the endangered species list and protected, but it wasn’t until scientists realized that DDT was the cause, and DDT use was banned in most parts of the world, that the peregrine’s numbers stopped dropping.

Falconers played a big part in helping the peregrine falcon recover from nearly going extinct. Falconers mostly care deeply about their birds and know how to take care of them. While the peregrine was on the endangered species list, falconers stopped taking birds from the wild and instead bred already captive birds. Then, once DDT was banned in most places, falconers helped with the reintroduction of peregrines into the wild. The peregrine was removed from the U.S. endangered species list in 1999 and from the Canadian list in 2017. But conservationists worldwide still monitor the peregrine falcon to make sure it continues to do well in the wild.

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 294: Updates 5 and a New Zealand Parrot!

It’s our fifth updates and corrections episode, with some fun information about a New Zealand parrot, suggested by Pranav! Thanks also to Llewelly, Zachary, Nicholas, and Simon who sent in corrections.

Further reading:

Vitiligo

Tyrannosaurus remains hint at three possible distinct species

Study refutes claim that T. rex was three separate species

The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring

Impact crater may be dinosaur killer’s baby cousin

California mice eat monarch butterflies

‘Hobbit’ human story gets a twist, thanks to thousands of rat bones

Playground aims to distract mischievous kea

The kea showing off the bright colors under its wings:

A kea jungle gym set up to stop the birds from moving traffic cones around for fun:

Show transcript:

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

This is our fifth annual updates episode, where I catch us up on new studies published about various animals we’ve talked about before. This is mostly just whatever happens to catch my eye and isn’t comprehensive by any means. Also, because things have been so busy for me the last few weeks, I decided to just go with what I’d already finished and not try to add more.

We’ll start as usual with corrections, then do some updates, then learn about a parrot from New Zealand, which was a suggestion from Pranav. This part of the episode started as a Patreon episode from 2019, so patrons, I promise your October bonus episode will be brand new and interesting and in-depth!

First, both Llewelly and Zachary pointed out that there are lions living in Asia, not just Africa. It’s called the Asiatic lion and these days, it only lives in a few small areas in India. It’s a protected animal but even though their numbers are increasing, there are probably still no more than 700 Asiatic lions living in the wild.

Next, Nicholas points out that vitiligo isn’t a genetic condition, it’s an autoimmune disorder that can be caused by a number of different diseases and conditions. You still can’t catch it from other people, though. We talked about vitiligo briefly in episode 241, about squirrels. Nicholas included a link, which I’ll put in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in learning more.

For our final correction, Simon questioned whether there really are only six living species of macaw known. This was polite of him, since I was completely wrong about this. In fact, there are six genera of macaws and lots of species, although how many species there are exactly depends on who you ask. Since this mistake made it into the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book, I am very irritated at myself, but thank you to Simon for helping me clear this up.

Let’s start our updates with the animal who gets an update every single time, Tyrannosaurus rex. A study published in February 2022 examined the fossilized remains of 37 T. rexes and suggested that there may actually be three distinct species of T. rex instead of just one. The study focused specifically on differences in teeth and leg bones that don’t seem to have anything to do with the individual’s age when it died or whether it was male or female.

However, in July 2022, another study found that all the T. rexes found so far do indeed belong to the same species. This is how science works, because new information is always being discovered and that means we have to reassess the things we thought we knew.

In other dinosaur news, in episode 240 we talked about the last day of the dinosaurs. Results of a study released in February 2022 suggest that the asteroid struck in early spring in the northern hemisphere. The asteroid hit the earth so hard that it rocked the entire continental plate that it struck, which caused massive waves unlike any other waves, since all the water above the continental plate was pushed upwards at once. This pushed all the sediment lying quietly on the bottom of the ocean up into the water, so much of it at once that it actually buried a lot of fish alive. The same thing happened in lakes and every other body of water. The fossil site we talked about in episode 240 is still being studied, the one that appears to date to literally the day of the asteroid impact, and preserved soft tissues in some of the fish have been discovered. Careful analysis of the fish show evidence that they all died in early spring. Researchers suggest that the time of year may have been especially bad for many dinosaurs, who were probably just starting to lay eggs and have babies.

In even more recent last-day-of-the-dinosaurs news, in August 2022 a study was released about a newly discovered crater off the coast of West Africa. Researchers are pretty sure it was from an asteroid impact, although much smaller than the big one that hit what is now Mexico and led to the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. They’re also not completely certain when it formed, since it’s deep under the sea floor these days and was only discovered when scientists were examining seismic survey data of the sea floor. But it does seem to have formed about 66 million years ago, and another crater found in Ukraine is also about the same age. In other words, there may have been more than one asteroid that hit earth at the same time, either because a bigger asteroid broke into pieces as it entered earth’s atmosphere, or because smaller asteroids were orbiting the bigger one.

We’ve talked about the monarch butterfly several times, especially in episode 203. The monarch is a beautiful orange and black butterfly that migrates from the United States and Canada into central Mexico for the winter, where it gathers in huge groups. The monarch butterfly caterpillar primarily eats the milkweed plant, which contains toxins that the caterpillar stores in its body. Those toxins remain in the body even after the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly, meaning the butterflies are toxic too. Birds and other animals learn to recognize the bright orange and black pattern of the butterfly and avoid eating it, because it tastes bad and makes them sick.

But a study from December 2021 determined that one animal does eat monarch butterflies, and a whole lot of them. Many species of mouse that live where monarch butterflies spend the winter, in a few spots in Mexico and California, will eat the butterflies, especially ones that fall to the ground either by accident or because they’re unhealthy and weak. The mice show resistance to the butterfly’s toxins.

Research into the small hominin remains on the island of Flores is ongoing, and the most recent findings shed some light on what might have happened about 60,000 years ago. The so-called Hobbit fossils have all been found at Liang Bua, a giant cave, but lots of other fossils have been found at the same site. A whole lot of those are from various species of rodent, especially rats, ranging in size from mouse-sized to ordinary rat-sized to giant rat sized, over two feet long including the tail, or about 75 cm.

Because we know a lot about the rats that lived on Flores, and in some cases still live there, we can infer a lot about what the area around Liang Bua was like over the centuries. Until about 60,000 years ago, most of the rat remains found were of medium-sized species that like open habitats. That means the area around Liang Bua was probably pretty open. But after about 60,000 years ago, there’s a big shift in what kind of rodents appear in the fossil record. More rats of smaller size moved in, ones that were adapted for life in forests, while the medium-sized rats moved out. That corresponds with other animals disappearing from the fossil record in and around the cave, including a species of Komodo dragon and a subspecies of Stegodon, an elephant relation that exhibited island dwarfism and was about the size of a cow. The Flores little people remains also vanish from the cave during this time, until by 50,000 years ago there are no signs of them.

But that doesn’t mean that H. floresiensis went extinct at that time. Researchers now think that as the land around the cave became more heavily forested, the Flores little people moved to other parts of the island that were more open. We don’t know where yet, and as a result we don’t know when exactly they went extinct. They might even have left the island completely. One neighboring island is Sulawesi, and researchers have found small stone tools on that island that are very similar to those made by H. floresiensis.

Modern humans probably arrived on the island of Flores about 46,000 years ago, and it’s possible that when they did, their small-statured cousins were still around.

We’ll finish with Pranav’s suggestion, a New Zealand parrot called the kea!

The kea is a type of parrot, but it doesn’t look much like a parrot at first glance. Parrots usually have brightly colored feathers but the kea appears more drab initially. It’s olive green with black-laced feathers, but it has bright orange feathers under its wings that show when it flies and the tips of its wings are blue. It’s a big, heavy bird with a wingspan more than three feet across, or one meter, and it has a big hooked beak like other parrots. It lives in the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island, the only parrot that lives in such a cold environment.

The kea is an omnivore but it mostly eats plants and insects. It will eat roadkill, small animals like rabbits, chicks of other species of bird, and trash. For over a century there were rumors that the kea would attack sheep, which led to the New Zealand government paying a bounty for dead keas that wasn’t lifted until 1970. By the time the bounty ended, there were only around 5,000 keas left, and even then the bird wasn’t fully protected until 1986.

So does the kea kill sheep or was that just an excuse to kill birds? Actually, the kea does attack sheep, or at least some keas do. Most of the attacks aren’t fatal, but we definitely know it happens because someone got it on video in 1992.

The keas land on the sheep’s back and pull out hunks of wool, which exposes and injures the skin underneath. Then they use their sharp beaks to dig into the wound and eat the fat from the living sheep. This can result in the sheep dying from infection and shock, naturally, so it’s no wonder sheep farmers disliked the kea. But the sheep is not an animal native to New Zealand while the kea is, plus the kea primarily eats plants—and sheep destroy the plants the kea eats, especially the ones high in vegetable lipids that provide the same high energy food that sheep fat does.

Besides, there’s some tantalizing evidence that the kea used to do the same thing to the moa, a huge flightless bird that lived in New Zealand until it went extinct after humans arrived. Moa bones dating to 4,000 years ago and found in a swamp along with lots of other well-preserved bones show markings on the pelvis that may be from kea beaks.

Like other parrots, the kea is remarkably intelligent and known for its tool use. It’s also infamous for its curiosity and willingness to disassemble things, including cars. I found an article about the kea in New Zealand Geographic that has some awesome stories about the bird, like this one that I’ll quote.

“In September 1983, the Old Pompolona Hut on the Milford Track was destroyed by flood when the pent-up Clinton River broke through its winter avalanche dam. The walking track season was only six weeks away. Planners, builders and helicopter crews worked night and day to complete a new hut complex before the first walkers arrived.

“The local clan of kea took a keen interest in all this frantic activity after a cold and quiet winter. Just what were these people up to? One bird, for whom building materials seemed to hold a particular attraction, began stealing nails. So persistent was the bird’s thievery that an exasperated carpenter chased it (in vain) over the roof of the new main hut. While his back was turned, another kea stole his packet of roll-your-owns, shredding tobacco and papers to the raucous approval of spectator kea perched in nearby trees.

“Weeks later, after the new hut had been completed, the purloined nails were discovered. They had been neatly laid in the gutters of an outbuilding’s iron roof, sorted according to size.”

The kea’s intelligence, tool use, and problem-solving abilities line up with those in corvids like crows and ravens. Studies show that corvids are more successful figuring out tasks that require them to make pecking motions in one way or another while parrots, including the kea, are more successful when the tasks require pulling motions. This makes sense, since parrots have a hooked beak that they use to pull things apart, like rotting logs to get at grubs, while corvids have straight beaks that they use to stab through things to find food.

The kea is also really sociable. Young keas play together, often using items as toys. For instance, from the same article, witnesses at a ski resort watched a kea steal a plastic mug, fly off with it, and start up a game of catch with it with a group of other keas.

The kea even has a particular call it makes to encourage other keas to play. In a recent study, when the call was broadcast to some captive keas over a loudspeaker, the keas immediately started a game of chase. Researchers think the call isn’t so much an invitation to play but is more like laughter which makes other keas want to laugh along, or in this case play.

This is what the play call sounds like:

[kea call]

The kea builds its nests in burrows it digs in the ground, with some burrows 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The nesting chamber is lined with soft plant material. Females lay two to five eggs, which hatch in about three weeks. Despite the parents’ care, more than half of babies don’t survive their first year, mostly due to introduced predators like rats, stoats, and possums. But if a kea survives to grow up, it can live up to 50 years or possibly more.

Young keas, like young adult humans, can cause a lot of mischief that sometimes leads to tragedy. A lot of keas are killed by cars because they find cars and roads interesting. They especially like to move road cones, which of course is also dangerous to humans. One community set up a kea jungle gym well off the road to give keas a safe place to play, and it succeeded so well that other communities have built kea jungle gyms too.

Kea numbers are improving slowly, with an estimated 7,000 individuals alive today. Part of the problem is that keas find humans interesting. They like our things, which they want to steal or destroy, and they like our junk food, which they want to eat. In other words, they’re suspiciously like us. Only they can fly.

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 286: Chimerism, Mosaicism, and Venus the Cat

Thanks to Vaughn for suggesting this week’s episode topic about Venus the cat and her unusual coat pattern!

Further reading:

Mystery Cats of the World Revisited by Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker

Further listening:

Half-siders and sea monkeys Patreon episode from December 2018 (unlocked episode)

Venus the cat:

“Half-sider” birds can be spectacular:

Half-side chimeras are not just restricted to birds:

Ranger the “black lion” (photo by Peter Adamson, from this site which you should also read). Note the black patch on his right front leg:

Show transcript:

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

This week I had planned to release our updates episode, but I didn’t have time to finish it. The 2022 updates episode will run in September instead, since we’re doing Invertebrate August again this year!

Way back at least a year ago and possibly more, Vaughn suggested we do an episode about “rare two-tone animals like Venus the cat.” I put the suggestion on my list and totally forgot about it until today, when I saw it and thought, “hmm, who’s Venus the cat?”

If you don’t already know, Venus is a beautiful cat whose coloration is mostly what’s called tortoiseshell, meaning she has a mixture of colors on her body, in her case black and orange. But Venus’s face is completely black on one side with a green eye, but orange tabby on the other side with a blue eye. She also has a white bib and white on her paws.

Venus became famous after the family who adopted her as a stray in 2009 posted pictures of her online. Her coloration is so unusual that everyone wondered what caused it. The answer is that we aren’t exactly sure, but veterinarians and experts in cat genetics do have some pretty good ideas.

There are probably several things going on genetically with Venus that resulted in her interesting coloration. Her different-colored eyes are one result. When an animal has different-colored eyes, called heterochromia iridis, there are a number of possible causes, from an injury to one eye to various genetic conditions. Sometimes it’s not complete, meaning one eye may be partly a different color. It even happens in people sometimes, although it’s rare.

In Venus’s case, researchers think her heterochromia may be due to a gene that produces what’s called piebaldism. A piebald animal has white markings when an ordinary animal of the same species doesn’t have any white markings. Some animals who naturally have a white pattern may have the word pie or pied or just bald hidden in their name, such as the magpie and the bald eagle, because it used to mean just an outfit with different contrasting colors. In the story of the pied piper, the piper had on a suit made of different colors.

The white patches of a piebald animal actually don’t have any pigment, and if a white patch is over an eye, the eye may also lack pigment and appear blue. That’s pretty common in piebald or pinto horses or in some dog breeds with white markings. The piebald gene may also affect one or both eyes even if a white patch doesn’t cover the eye, which some researchers think may be the case in Venus. Her left eye is blue even though the left side of her face is orange tabby.

Venus’s unusual facial fur coloration may be due to a condition called chimerism. Chimerism happens long before an animal is born—in fact, it happens within a few hours after an egg cell is fertilized. I’ll do my best to explain it. A lot of the next section comes from a Patreon episode from 2018, and if you want to listen to the original I’ve unlocked it for anyone to listen to and put a link in the show notes.

As soon as an egg cell is fertilized, it starts to divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, which divide into more cells, and on and on. After a while, the groups of cells start to differentiate into parts of the body. Some cells become a heart, others become toes, and so on. Eventually there’s a whole finished baby ready to be born or hatched.

If there are two fertilized egg cells, they develop into two separate babies, which are fraternal twins that don’t necessarily look alike. Occasionally, a fertilized egg cell will split and each of the two resulting cells will start to develop separately. In that case, you get identical twins.

But very rarely, you start with two egg cells that should develop into fraternal twins—but for some reason, in those very first hours when each egg cell has only divided a few times, the egg cells fuse together. The cells continue to divide and develop into not two babies, but one that contains the genetic markers for both twins.

Since the resulting single baby has genes for both twins, sometimes it will show physical traits of both twins. For instance, if one twin’s genetic makeup would have developed into a green budgie, and the other twin’s genetic makeup would have developed into a blue budgie, you get a budgie that’s green on one side and blue on the other. Occasionally one side has the markings and coloration of a male, and the other side has the markings and coloration of a female. An animal with this kind of genetic anomaly is properly called a tetragametic chimera, but it’s often called a half-sider.

This doesn’t just happen in birds. Occasionally someone will come across a butterfly where the pair of wings on one side is colored like a male of that species and the pair of wings on the other side is colored like a female. Occasionally someone will adopt a kitten that’s one color on one side and a totally different color and pattern on the other side.

So I bet now you’re wondering if it happens in humans. Yes, it does! It happens occasionally in everything, including plants. Usually no one knows if a particular animal is a chimera because most of the time it doesn’t show. It’s only when it produces a spectacular coloration difference like in half-siders that anyone takes a second look.

Venus’s facial markings look a lot like those of a half-sider, but the markings on the rest of her body don’t, so she’s probably not a half-sider. That doesn’t mean she isn’t a chimera, since while all half-siders are chimeras, not all chimeras are half-siders. However, she might have a genetic mutation called mosaicism instead.

Mosaicism is similar to chimerism, but instead of being caused by two fertilized egg cells fusing together, it’s caused by a chromosomal mutation in one cell during the embryo’s very early development. The mutation is replicated as that cell divides, and then replicated in the divided cells, and so on, so that when the organism has finished developing into a baby, part of its body contains the mutation while the rest doesn’t. The part of the body with the mutation has a different genetic profile from the rest of the body.

Mosaicism can result in various physical conditions, but for the most part you can’t tell by looking if an organism exhibits mosaicism. But sometimes you can. In 1975 a lion cub was born in Glasgow Zoo in Scotland, and he had a big black patch on his chest and right front leg, with a less dark patch on his left hind leg. Since black lions are rumored to exist but have never been scientifically documented, or even photographed, this was a big deal. When Ranger the lion grew up he was introduced to several different females in hopes that he would sire cubs that also had black patches, or which were even black all over. Unfortunately Ranger seemed to be sterile and none of his mates got pregnant.

Ranger lived to be 22 years old but died before genetic testing became widespread and sophisticated. These days we know a lot more about big cat genetics and researchers are pretty sure Ranger’s black patches resulted from somatic mosaicism, which affected some of his skin cells. Since the right side of Venus’ face is solid black, some researchers think she might have a similar condition.

Whatever the cause or causes of Venus the cat’s coloration, though, one thing is for sure. She’s an absolutely beautiful cat!

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 282: Little Longtailed Birds

Sign up for our mailing list!

Thanks to Elaine for suggesting one of our long-tailed birds this week!

Happy birthday to Jasper!! Have a great birthday!

Further reading:

Fossil of Ancient Long-Tailed Bird Found in China

All adult scissor-tailed flycatchers have long tails:

The long-tailed sylph male is the one with the long tail:

The long-tailed widowbird male has a long tail:

The long-tailed widowbird female has a short tail:

The pin-tailed whydah male has a long tail:

A pin-tailed whydah baby (left) next to a common waxbill baby (right):

Kompsornis longicaudus had a really long tail:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is a short episode all about little birds with really long tails. The tails are longer than the episode. Thanks to Elaine for suggesting one of the birds we talk about today!

But before we start learning about birds, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Jasper, who has the best name and who will hopefully have the best birthday to go along with it!

Let’s start with Elaine’s suggestion, the scissor-tailed flycatcher. I’m embarrassed to admit that Elaine suggested this bird way back in 2020, so it’s about time we talked about it.

The scissor-tailed flycatcher lives in south-central North America during the summer, especially Texas and Oklahoma, and migrates to parts of Mexico and Central America in winter. It’s pale gray with black and white wings and tail, and salmon pink markings on its sides and under its wings. It also has a really long tail. It gets the name scissor-tail because its tail is so long and forked that it’s sort of the shape of an open pair of scissors. The male’s tail is typically longer than the female’s, longer than the rest of its body. The bird is about the size of an average songbird, with a body length of about 5 inches, or 13 centimeters, but with a tail that can increase its overall length to over 14 inches, or 36 cm.

The scissor-tailed flycatcher prefers open areas like pastures and fields, where there’s lots of space but some brush, trees, or fences nearby to perch in. It mostly eats insects, but it will also eat berries, especially in winter. It’s related to kingbirds and pewees and will even hybridize with the western kingbird where their ranges overlap. Its long tail is partly for display, but mostly it helps the bird maneuver in midair as it chases insects, or hover in midair as it looks around for an insect to catch. It especially likes grasshoppers, and when it catches one, it will usually kill it before eating it by smashing it against a tree limb or other perch.

Another little bird with a long tail is the long-tailed sylph, which is a type of hummingbird! It lives on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in northwestern South America, mostly along forest edges, in gardens, grasslands, and other mostly open areas. It migrates to different parts of the mountains at different times of year to follow the flowering of its favorite plants. It’s larger than many species of hummingbird even if you don’t count the tail.

It eats nectar like other hummingbirds do, but also eats tiny insects and spiders. Its bill is black and not very long compared to most of its relations. Sometimes it will jab the tip of its bill straight through the base of a flower to get at the nectar, instead of inserting it into the flower like other hummingbirds do, and while it can hover, sometimes it perches to feed instead.

Both the male and female long-tailed sylph are a beautiful metallic blue and green in color, although the male is brighter and has purplish-brown wings. The female is about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, including her tail, and while the male is about the same size as the female, his tail is really long—up to 4.5 inches long, or 12 cm. His tail is forked like the scissor-tailed flycatcher’s, but unlike the flycatcher, the sylph’s tail makes it harder for the bird to fly. During breeding season the male attracts a mate by flying in a U-shaped pattern that shows off his tail and his flying ability.

The male long-tailed widowbird also attracts a mate with a flying display to show off his long tail. It lives in grasslands in a few parts of Africa, with the biggest population in South Africa. It forages in small flocks looking for seeds, and it also eats the occasional insect or spider. It’s a sparrow-like bird only about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, not counting its tail. The female is mostly brown with darker streaks and has a short tail. The male is black with red and white patches on the shoulders of his wings, called epaulets. His coloring, including the epaulets, is almost identical to that of a totally unrelated bird, the red-winged blackbird of North America, but he has something the blackbird doesn’t: a gigantically long tail.

The male widowbird’s tail is made up of twelve feathers, and about half of them grow up to 20 inches long. That’s nearly two feet long, or half a meter. Like the long-tailed sylph, the long-tailed widowbird’s tail actually makes it harder for him to fly. If it’s raining, he can’t fly at all. Fortunately for him, outside of the breeding season his tail is much shorter. During display flights, he spreads his tail feathers to show them off better and flies very slowly. Males with the longest tails attract the most females.

Similarly, the pin-tailed whydah is another little sparrow-like bird where the male grows a really long tail to attract females. It lives in grasslands, savannas, and open woodlands in sub-Saharan Africa, which just means south of the Sahara Desert. It mostly eats seeds.

During breeding season, the male is a striking pattern of black and white with a bright orangey-red bill and really long tail plumes. He’s about the size of the long-tailed widowbird but his tail grows about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. The female is brown with darker streaks and looks a lot like a sparrow, although it’s not related to sparrows. To impress a female, the pin-tailed whydah will hover in place near her, showing off his long tail plumes and his flying ability.

A lot of whydah species grow long tails. A lot of whydahs are also brood parasites, including this one, meaning that instead of building a nest and taking care of her own eggs, the female sneaks in and lays her eggs in the nest of a different species of bird. Then she flies away, probably whistling to make her seem extra nonchalant, and leaves the other bird to take care of her eggs and the babies when they hatch. She mostly lays her eggs in the nests of various species of finch, and not only do her eggs resemble the finch’s eggs except that they’re bigger, the babies resemble finch babies when they hatch, except they’re bigger.

Specifically, the babies have a really specific gape pattern. When an adult bird approaches its nest, a baby bird will gape its mouth wide to beg for food. This prompts the parent bird to shove some food down into that mouth. The more likely a baby is to be noticed by its parent, the more likely it is to get extra food, so natural selection favors babies with striking patterns and bright colors inside their mouths. Many finches, especially ones called waxbills, have a specific pattern of black and white dots in their mouths that pretty much acts as a food runway. Insert food here. The whydah’s mouth gape pattern mimics the waxbill’s almost exactly. But as I said, the whydah chick is bigger, which means it can push the finch babies out of the way and end up with more food.

The pin-tailed whydah is a common bird and easily tamed, so people sometimes keep it as a pet. This is a problem when it’s brought to places where it isn’t a native bird, because it sometimes escapes or is set free by its owners. If enough of the birds are released in one area, they can become invasive species. This has happened with the pin-tailed whydah in many parts of the world, including parts of Portugal, Singapore, Puerto Rico, and most recently southern California. Since they’re brood parasites, they can negatively impact a lot of other bird species in a very short time. But a study released in 2020 about the California population found that they mostly parasitize the nests of a bird called the scaly-breasted munia, a species of waxbill from southern Asia that’s been introduced to other places, including southern California, where it’s also an invasive species. So I guess it could be worse.

There are lots of other birds with long tails we could talk about, way too many to fit into one episode, but let’s finish with an extinct bird, since that seems to be the theme lately. In May 2020, an ancient bird was described as Kompsornis longicaudus, and it lived 120 million years ago in what is now China. Its name means long-tailed elegant bird. It was bigger than the other birds we’ve talked about today, a little over two feet long, or 70 cm, but a lot of that length was tail.

Kompsornis is only known from a single fossil, but that fossil is amazing. Not only is it almost a complete skeleton, it’s articulated, meaning it was preserved with all the body parts together as they were in life, instead of the bones being jumbled up. That means we know a lot about it, including the fact that unlike other birds of the time, it didn’t appear to have any teeth. It also shows other features seen in modern birds but not always found in ancient birds, including a pronounced keel, which is where wing muscles attach. That indicates it was probably a strong flier. It also had a really long tail, but unlike modern birds its tail was bony like a lizard’s tail although it was covered with feathers.

During their study of Kompsornis, the research team compared it to other birds in the order Jeholornithiformes, which seem to be its closest relations. There were six species known, with Kompsornis making a seventh—except that during the study, the team discovered that one species was a fake! Dalianraptor was also only known from one fossil, and that fossil was of a different bird with the arms of a flightless theropod added in place of its missing wings. Send that fossil to fossil jail!

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 that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 278: Gender Diverse Animals

This week is Connor’s episode, and we’re going to learn about some animals that don’t conform to “typical” gender roles, one way or another.

I’ll be at ConCarolinas this week, from June 3 through 5, including recording a live crossover episode with Arcane Carolinas!

Further reading:

Species of algae with three sexes that all mate in pairs identified in Japanese river

How a microbe chooses among seven sexes

Facultative Parthenogenesis in California Condors

The sparrow with four sexes

Chinstrap penguins make good dads:

Laysan albatrosses make good moms:

Black swans make good dads:

Some rams really like other rams (photo by Henry Holdsworth):

New Mexico whiptail lizards are all females:

California condor females don’t always need a male to produce fertilized eggs:

Clownfish change sex under some circumstances:

The white-throated sparrow essentially has four sexes:

You are awesome (photo by By Eric Rolph)!

Show transcript:

“Hey y’all, this is Connor. Welcome to a very special Pride Month edition of the Strange Animals Podcast.”

This week we have Connor’s episode! We decided to make it the very last episode in our Kickstarter month so that it’s as close to the month of June as possible, because June is Pride Month and our episode is about gender-diverse animals! Don’t worry, parents of very young children, we won’t be discussing mating practices except in very general terms.

Pride month celebrates people’s differences when it comes to gender expression and sexuality. That’s why its symbol is the rainbow, because a rainbow is made up of all different colors the same way there are different kinds of people. Sometimes people get angry when they hear about Pride month because they think there are only two genders, and that those two genders should only behave in certain ways. Pffft. That’s not even true when it comes to animals, and humans are a lot more socially complicated.

For instance, let’s start by talking about a humble creature called algae. If you remember episode 129, about the blurry line between animals and plants, you may remember that algae isn’t actually a plant or an animal. Some species resemble plants more than animals, like kelp, but they’re not actually plants. In July of 2021, scientists in Japan announced that a species of freshwater algae has three sexes: male, female, and bisexual. All three sexes can pair up with any of the others to reproduce and their offspring may be male, female, or bisexual at random.

Even though the algae has been known to science for a long time, no one realized it has three sexes because most of the time, algae reproduces by cloning itself. The research team thinks that a lot of algae species may have three sexes but researchers just haven’t been looking for it.

Yes, I realize that was a weird place to start, but it’s also fascinating! It’s also not even nearly as complicated as a protozoan called Tetrahymena thermophila, which has seven sexes.

Let’s look at a bird next, the penguin. You’ve probably heard of the book And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who adopt an egg and raise the baby chick together. For some reason some people get so angry at those penguins! Never trust someone who doesn’t like baby penguins, and never trust someone who thinks animals should act like humans. The events in the book are based on a true story, where two male chinstrap penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo formed a pair bond and tried to hatch a rock, although they also tried to steal eggs from the other penguins. A zookeeper gave the pair an extra penguin egg to hatch instead.

The most interesting thing about the story is that same-sex couples are common among penguins, in both captivity and in the wild, among both males and females. Since penguins sometimes lay two eggs but most species can only take care of one chick properly, zookeepers often give the extra eggs to same-sex penguin pairs. The adoptive parents are happy to raise a baby together and the baby is more likely to survive and be healthy. Occasionally a same-sex penguin couple will adopt an egg abandoned by its parents.

If you remember episode 263 a few months ago, where we talked about animals that mate for life, you may remember the Laysan albatross. In that episode we learned about a specific Laysan albatross named Wisdom, the oldest wild bird in the world as far as we know. While I was researching Wisdom, I learned something marvelous. As many as 30% of all Laysan albatross pairs are both females. Sometimes one of the females will mate with a male and lay a fertilized egg, and then both females raise the baby as a couple. Sometimes one of the females lays an unfertilized egg that doesn’t hatch. There are many more Laysan albatross females than males, which may be the reason why females form pairs, but it’s perfectly normal behavior. It’s also been a real help to conservationists. Sometimes an albatross pair will nest in an area that’s not safe, like on an airfield. Instead of leaving the egg to be smashed by an airplane, conservationists take the fertilized egg from the unsafe nest and use it to replace the unfertilized egg of a female pair. The egg is safe and the chick has adoptive parents who raise it as their own.

Many other birds develop same-sex pairs too. This is especially common in the black swan, where up to a quarter of pairs are both male. One or both of the males will mate with a female, but after she lays her eggs the males take care of them and the cygnets after they hatch. Cygnets raised by two dads are much more likely to survive than cygnets raised by one mom and one dad. The males are stronger and more aggressive, so they can defend the nest and babies more effectively.

Birds aren’t the only animals that form same-sex pair bonds. Many mammals do too. It’s been documented in the wild in lions, elephants, gorillas, bonobos, dolphins, and many more. In species that don’t typically form pair bonds, homosexual behavior is still pretty common. It’s so common among domestic sheep that shepherds have to take into account the fact that up to 10% of rams prefer to mate with other rams instead of with ewes. Some rams show attraction to both males and females. This happens in wild sheep too, where rams may court other rams the same way they court ewes. Some ewes also show homosexual behavior.

The New Mexico whiptail is a lizard that lives in parts of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. It can grow over nine inches long, or 23 cm, and is black or brown with yellow racing stripes. It eats insects and is an active, slender lizard that’s common throughout its range. And every single New Mexico whiptail lizard is a female.

The lizards reproduce by a process called parthenogenesis. That basically means an animal reproduces asexually without needing to have its eggs fertilized. The lizards do mate, though, but not with males. Females practice mating behaviors with each other, which researchers think causes a hormone change that allows eggs to develop. Females who don’t mate don’t develop eggs.

Female birds can sometimes reproduce asexually too. It’s been documented in turkeys, chickens, pigeons, finches, and even condors. A study published in late 2021 detailed two instances of parthenogenesis in California condors in a captive breeding program. In both cases the females were housed with their male mates, and in both cases the pairs had produced offspring together before. But in both cases, for some reason the females laid eggs that hatched into chicks that were genetically identical to the mothers. It’s possible parthenogenesis is even more common in birds than researchers thought.

In many species of reptile, whether a baby is a male or female depends completely on how warm its egg gets during incubation. For example, the American alligator. The mother gator builds a nest of plant material and lays her eggs in it. As the plant material decays, it releases heat that keeps the eggs warm. How much heat is generated depends on where the mother alligator builds her nest and what plants she uses, which in turns affects the eggs. If the temperature in the nest is under 86 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 Celsius, during the first few weeks of incubation, most or all of the eggs will hatch into females. If the temperature is 93 F or 34 C, most or all of the eggs will hatch into males. If the temperature is between the two extremes, there will be a mix of males and females, although usually more females.

Because climate change has caused an overall increase in temperatures across the world, some already vulnerable reptile populations, especially sea turtles, are hatching almost all males. Conservationists have to dig up the eggs and incubate them at a cooler temperature in captivity, then release the babies into the ocean when they hatch.

Other animals change from male to female or vice versa, depending on circumstances. The clownfish, for example. Clownfish start out life as males but as they grow up, most become females, although only the dominant pair in a colony actually reproduces. Clownfish live in colonies led by the largest, most aggressive female, with the largest, most aggressive male in the group as her mate. If something happens to her, her former mate takes her place, becoming a female in the process. The largest juvenile male then becomes her mate and remains male even though he puts on a growth spurt to mature quickly. If Finding Nemo was scientifically accurate, it would have been a much different movie.

Another group of fish that live around reefs are wrasses, which includes the famous cleaner fish that cleans parasites and dead tissue off of larger fish. Wrasses hatch into both males and females, but the males aren’t the same type of males that can breed. Those develop later. When the dominant breeding male of the group dies, the largest female or the largest non-breeding male then develops into a breeding male. But sometimes a non-breeding male will develop into a female instead.

The term for an animal that changes sex as part of its natural growth process is sequential hermaphroditism. It’s common in fish and crustaceans in particular. Other animals have the reproductive organs of both a male and a female, especially many species of snail, slug, earthworm, sea slug, and some fish. We talked about the mangrove killifish in episode 133, and in that episode I said it was the only known vertebrate hermaphrodite. That’s actually not accurate, although I was close. It’s the only known vertebrate hermaphrodite that can self-fertilize. Almost all mangrove killifish are females, although they also produce sperm to fertilize their own eggs. The eggs hatch into little clones of the mother.

We’ve talked about seahorses before too, especially in episode 130. Seahorse pairs form bonds that last throughout the breeding season. The pair participate in courtship dances and spend most of their time together. When the eggs are ready, the female deposits them in a special brood pouch in the male’s belly, where he fertilizes them. They then embed themselves in the spongy wall of the brood pouch and are nourished not only by the yolk sacs in the eggs, but by the male, who secretes nutrients in the brood pouch. So basically the male is pregnant. The female visits him every day to check on him, usually in the mornings. When the eggs hatch after a few weeks, the male expels the babies from his pouch and they swim away, because when they hatch they are perfectly formed teeny-tiny miniature seahorses.

Let’s finish with a little songbird that’s common throughout eastern North America, the white-throated sparrow. It has a white patch on its throat and a bright yellow spot between the eye and the bill. There are two color morphs, one with black and white stripes on its head, one with brown and tan stripes on its head. Both males and females have these head stripes. The male sings a pretty song that sounds like this:

[white-throated sparrow call]

A 30-year study into white-throated sparrow genetics has revealed some amazing things. The color morphs are due to a genetic difference that affects a lot more than just feather colors. Black morph males are better singers, but they don’t guard their territory as well or take care of their babies as well as brown morphs do. They also aren’t as faithful to their mates as the brown morph males, which are fully monogamous and are diligent about helping take care of their babies. Despite their differences in raising offspring, both morphs are equally successful and equally common.

All this seems to be no big deal on the surface, maybe just pointing to the possibility that the species is in the process of splitting into two species or subspecies. But that’s not the case.

Black morphs always mate with brown morphs. A black morph male will always have a brown morph mate, and vice versa. Genetically, the two morphs are incredibly different—so different, in fact, that they seem to be developing a fully different set of sex chromosomes. In other words, there are male and female black morph birds and male and female brown morph birds that are totally different genetically, but still members of the same species that only ever breed with each other. In essence, the white-throated sparrow has four sexes.

Usually I try to end episodes with something funny, but today I’m going to speak directly to you. Yes, you! If you’re listening to this or reading the transcript, my words are meant just for you. You are an amazing person and I love you. You deserve to be happy. If anyone has ever told you there’s something wrong with the way you are, or the way you wish you were or want to be, they’re wrong. They probably also don’t like penguins, so you don’t have to believe anything they say. If you’ve ever read books by Terry Pratchett, you may recognize this quote: “Be yourself, as hard as 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 277: Rewilding Scotland

This week is Caitie Sith and Dave’s episode! They want to learn about animals reintroduced to Scotland, especially the Highland wildcat!

The Scottish (or Highland) wildcat:

The Eurasian lynx:

The Eurasian beaver (with babies!):

The white-tailed eagle:

Reindeer in Scotland:

The pine marten:

Show transcript:

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

This week is Caitie Sith and Dave’s episode, where we’ll learn about the re-wilding of Scotland! Re-wilding is the process of restoring an ecosystem to its natural state, basically reversing habitat loss. Most of the time there’s a lot more to it than just reintroducing native animals, but sometimes that’s all that’s required.

Scotland is a part of the island of Great Britain, north of England. People have lived there since the last glaciers melted at the end of the Pleistocene, around 12,000 years ago. During the Pleistocene and a few thousand years after the glaciers melted, Scotland was connected to Europe by a lot of marshy land where today there’s ocean, and naturally many animals lived in Scotland that were also found in Europe at the time. Some of the ice age megafauna that lived in Scotland included the woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, bison, aurochs, wild boar, saiga antelope, giant deer, red deer, reindeer, moose, wild horse, beaver, walrus, Polar bear, brown bear, lynx, wolf, Arctic fox, and cave lion. Many fossil and subfossil remains of Pleistocene animals were destroyed by the formation and movement of thick glacier ice, which scoured the land down to bedrock in many places, so those are only the animals we know for sure lived in Scotland.

But Scotland wasn’t covered by glaciers all the time. The Pleistocene wasn’t a single ice age but a series of cold events interspersed with warming trends. During these interglacial periods, which lasted some 10- to 15,000 years at a time, animals would move to Scotland from other places or become more numerous than before. Then the climate would start cooling again, glaciers would slowly form over many years, and animals would move to areas where there was more food. This happened repeatedly over a period of more than 2.5 million years.

In other words, while we have some fossils of Pleistocene animals that once lived in Scotland, we don’t have nearly as many as have been found in England, Ireland, and Wales. But what we do know is that Scotland was once teeming with all kinds of animals we’d never associate with the country today, like cave lions and Polar bears!

Much of the ice age megafauna went extinct around 12,000 years ago when the last glaciers melted and the climate started warming. Cold-adapted animals couldn’t always survive in a warmer climate, not to mention that as the climate changed, the types of plants available to eat changed too. Some animals migrated away or went extinct, while some were able to stay in Scotland successfully. This included the red deer, reindeer, wild boar, walrus, brown bear, and lynx.

If you’re wondering why that list is full of animals that don’t actually live in Scotland these days, like the brown bear and lynx, it’s because humans hunted many of the native Scottish animals to extinction. Others went extinct due to habitat loss or competition with introduced animals. Many surviving species are endangered today for the same reasons.

For example, the Scottish wildcat, also called the Highland wildcat. We talked about it briefly in episode 52 way back in early 2018. One of the animals that migrated to Scotland after the Pleistocene, but before sea levels rose and cut the British Isles off from Europe, was the European wildcat. The Scottish population has been separated from the European population for at least 7,000 years, and some researchers think it should be classified as a subspecies of European wildcat.

The Scottish wildcat is a little larger than a domestic cat and is always tabby striped. It has a bushy tail with a black tip, a striped face and legs, never any white markings, and is usually dark in color with black paws. It’s a solitary animal that mostly lives in woodlands, where it eats mice, voles, and other rodents, rabbits, and birds. It used to be common throughout much of the British Isles, but these days it’s only found in parts of Scotland.

You’d think people would be excited to have a genuine wildcat living in their country, since wildcats are pretty awesome and eat animals that can damage crops. But for some reason, until recently people thought these wildcats were pests and would shoot them on sight. Some people thought the wildcats were killing game birds, which is rare, or that they were dangerous, which isn’t true. At the same time, the people shooting wildcats were letting their domestic cats roam freely, which has caused an even bigger problem to wildcats than getting shot at.

Like other wildcat species, the Scottish wildcat can and will cross-breed with domestic cats. The resulting kittens are fertile, meaning they can have babies with either wildcats or domestic cats. Kittens are great, of course, but domestic cats are a different species from wildcats. Hybrid cats are less suited to live in the wild, but too wild to be good pets, and if too many domestic cats breed with wildcats, soon there won’t be any real wildcats left. Not only that, domestic cats carry diseases that wildcats can catch.

The Scottish wildcat is a protected species these days, with conservation efforts in place to keep the wildcats and their habitat as safe as possible. One important step is to encourage people to get their domestic cats neutered. This is healthier for pet cats anyway and will help keep tomcats from spraying and fighting, and of course it stops them from having kittens with wildcats.

Another felid that once lived in Scotland is the Eurasian lynx. It still lives in parts of Asia and Europe, but it went extinct in Scotland several hundred years ago, mainly due to deforestation and hunting for its fur. It’s about 28 inches tall at the shoulder, or 70 cm, and is a heavily built animal with thick spotted fur and a short bobtail. The tip of its tail is black although the rest of the animal is mostly tan or brown with darker brown spots, and it has long black tufts of fur on the tips of its ears. It’s slightly bigger than the related Canadian lynx.

Conservationists have wanted to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx to Scotland for years. Since the lynx is threatened in the rest of its range by habitat loss and hunting, reintroducing it to its former range in Scotland would help it and the ecosystem in general. With no large predators to keep their numbers in check, the population of roe deer in Scotland is too high to be healthy, and the lynx loves to eat roe deer.

Some people worry that if the lynx is reintroduced to Scotland, it will be dangerous to humans and livestock. But the lynx is a shy, solitary animal that avoids humans as much as possible. There are enough roe deer alone to sustain a population of over 400 lynxes in the wilder parts of Scotland, especially in the Highlands. The lynx also spends almost all of its time in forests and doesn’t like open pastures. It’s been successfully reintroduced to its former range in other countries, with a nice side effect being increased tourism to national parks where it’s now found.

Scotland also used to have beavers, which were hunted to extinction in the 16th or 17th century. Then, in 2009, the Eurasian beaver was reintroduced to parts of Scotland and is doing great! There are more than 1,000 beavers living in Scotland now. Beavers are considered a keystone species, a term we haven’t really examined on the podcast before, but it means that an animal is so important to an ecosystem that if it goes extinct in an area, the ecosystem sort of falls apart and many other animals go locally extinct soon after.

Beaver ponds create a winter habitat for many types of fish, and beaver dams don’t stop fish like salmon that migrate upriver to spawn. The dams help reduce flooding, improve water quality, and create cover for lots of fish and other animals.

Naturally, though, some people complain about the beavers, because there will always be someone who complains about anything. Some people think beavers eat fish and will eat up all the fish that humans want to catch. Beavers actually don’t eat fish at all, they only eat plant material. Some people think beavers carry the giardia parasite, which causes a bacterial infection sometimes called beaver fever that’s spread in water, but giardia is actually mostly spread by domestic dogs. Some people complain that beavers fell trees and build ponds, and both these things are true. But the beaver is just doing what it’s supposed to do, and as we just learned, this tree felling and pond-making are good for the environment—unlike humans, who chop down lots of trees and make artificial ponds when landscaping, while simultaneously draining wetlands, which doesn’t help the local environment at all. Besides, the beavers are cute and attract tourists who want to get pictures of them, which is also good for the local economy. Everybody wins when there are beavers around, is what I’m trying to say.

The beavers reintroduced in 2009 aren’t the only beavers in Scotland. In 2001, people started seeing them around the river Tay—but no one knew where they came from. Well, presumably someone knew, because the beavers didn’t get there without help. If this reminds you of episode 48, where we talked about some mystery beavers that appeared in Devon, England, the Devon beavers showed up in 2013, twelve years after the Scottish mystery beavers. At first the Scottish government planned to capture the Tayside beavers and keep them in captivity, but the beavers are still there and doing very well.

It’s great that over a thousand beavers live in Scotland now, but that’s actually not very many. Still, it’s a whole lot better than the number of Eurasian beavers about 150 years ago, when researchers think there may have been as few as 300 individuals alive in the whole world.

Another animal that once lived in Scotland, was hunted to extinction, and then mysteriously reappeared recently is the wild boar. They first appeared in the 1990s and by now there are thousands of them in Scotland. It’s possible they escaped from farms, where they’re sometimes raised for meat like domestic pigs. While they’re a native species, they don’t have any predators in Scotland and are causing a lot of damage as they become more numerous. The wild boar’s natural predator is the wolf, and the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1743. Lynxes will also kill wild boar piglets.

Some birds have been reintroduced to Scotland too. The white-tailed eagle is a type of sea eagle, closely related to the bald eagle of North America although it’s slightly larger than the bald eagle. The biggest ever reliably measured was a specimen from Greenland with a wingspan of 8 feet 4 inches across, or 2.53 meters, just a smidge larger than the largest bald eagle wingspan known. It’s mostly brown and gray with a yellow bill and feet, and a white tail. It lives around water and eats a lot of fish, but it also eats lots of carrion, gulls and other birds, and occasionally small mammals like rabbits. It always lives near water but it prefers wooded areas, especially lowlands and forested islands.

The white-tailed eagle went extinct throughout Britain in the early 20th century when people decided they wanted all those fish the eagle eats for themselves. Never mind that even a thousand eagles couldn’t eat as many fish that a single commercial fishing boat catches in a day. People also decided that eagles killed lambs, even though this is extremely rare. White-tailed eagles would much rather eat fish and seagulls than lamb. The last white-tailed eagles in Scotland were shot and killed in 1916.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, white-tailed eagles were also killed throughout the rest of their range and were especially vulnerable to the chemical called DDT. DDT was a popular pesticide developed in the 1950s and used to kill insects on crops and gardens. But DDT is dangerous, because like other pesticides it doesn’t just do its job and evaporate. It stays in the environment and ends up in the bodies of animals, including people. It’s especially bad for birds that eat a lot of fish, since a lot of pesticides end up in the water, and it causes their eggshells to become so thin and weak that the eggs break when the mother tries to keep them warm. This is the same thing that almost drove the bald eagle to extinction in North America. By the time DDT use was banned in many countries and the white-tailed eagle was declared a protected species, it was almost too late.

Conservation efforts have helped stop the white-tailed eagle from going extinct and its numbers are slowly growing. Starting in 1975, young eagles were brought from Norway to Scotland, where they were successfully reintroduced in the inner Hebrides islands and have now expanded to other parts of Scotland. Some people still complain about the eagles and sometimes shoot or poison them even though it’s illegal, but most people are happy to have them around, especially birdwatchers.

Scotland even has some reindeer these days. Reindeer probably lived in Scotland until around the 12th century, and in 1952 a Swiss herdsman thought they should still be there. He brought a small herd to the Cairngorm mountains, which is now a national park. The reindeer are semi-domesticated but roam free, and they attract tourists who hope to catch a glimpse of them.

At the same time that many native animals have gone extinct, lots of non-native animals have been introduced to Scotland, including wallabies, American mink, gray squirrels, various species of crayfish, and many more. Conservationists are working to minimize the damage these introduced species cause. Many invasive species were animals kept as pets that either escaped or were released into the wild. We talked about the invasive eastern gray squirrel versus the native red squirrel in episode 241, for instance. People released gray squirrels into parks in England because they were so cute, and a hundred years later, the gray squirrels are taking over in many places. They’re increasingly common in Scotland, although Scotland has a small predator called the pine marten that loves to eat squirrels.

The pine marten is a type of mustelid, or weasel relative, that’s common throughout much of Europe and Asia. It grows about two and a half feet long, or 75 cm, including its bushy tail. It mostly lives in wooded areas and spends a lot of its time in trees, hunting squirrels and other small animals like frogs, insects, and birds. It will also eat carrion, bird eggs, and sometimes fruit. It’s mostly brown with a cream-colored throat. It even has partially retractable claws like a cat to help it climb trees, although it’s not related to the cat.

The pine marten is especially good at catching squirrels, and it tends to target the gray squirrel because it’s easier to catch. The red squirrel is more cautious. Where there are pine martens, there are fewer or no gray squirrels. The problem is, the pine marten is considered a pest that kills game birds, so some people shoot or poison it even though it’s a protected species. Then those same people complain about all the gray squirrels around. The pine marten is doing well in many parts of Scotland, though, and has even expanded its range slightly in the last few years.

Scotland is a beautiful country known for its wild and rugged countryside. It wouldn’t take much to rewild it properly, a process that’s well underway with keystone species like beavers already re-established in many places. The main problem is people who don’t understand that a healthy ecosystem requires predators. Without lynxes, wolves, bears, and other large predators, animals like roe deer and wild boar become so numerous that they can’t find enough to eat and either starve or destroy crops and gardens.

Fortunately, many more people in Scotland do understand the importance of building healthy ecosystems. After all, they’re naturally proud of where they live and want to make it even better.

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 271: Springtime Animals

Pre-order your tiny pin friend via our Indiegogo campaign!

This week we talk about some springtime animals! Sort of! Thanks to Derek and Nikita for their suggestions!

Happy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! What a busy birthday week! Everybody gets cake!

Further reading:

Tales from Tennessee

There’s more than one way to grow a beak

A male river chub. “It’s not funny guys, put me down guys” (photo by Bill Hubick):

Busy busy busy building a big big nest (photo from site linked to above):

Got a rock (photo from site linked to above):

One bilby:

Two bilbies:

Easter bilbies not bunnies:

Egg tooth:

The red jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken:

Modern domestic chickens:

Show transcript:

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

It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere, with spring festivals like Easter coming up fast. This week let’s look at three animals that represent springtime, sort of. Thanks to Derek and Nikita for suggesting two of the animals we’ll learn about this week!

Before we start, though, two things! One, I’m running a little crowdfunding campaign to have some enamel pins made. I won’t spam you about it like our big Kickstarter for the book last fall, but there will be a link in the show notes if you want to take a look. There are three designs, a narwhal, a capybara with a tangerine on its head, and a not-terribly-accurate thylacine. The campaign is called Tiny Pin Friends and it’s on Indiegogo.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tiny-pin-friends/x/2964999#/

Two, it’s birthday shout-out time! This week we have not one, not two, but THREE birthday shout-outs! You know what that means, of course. It means we all need to be celebrating all week! A great big happy birthday to Lillian, Hannah, and Derek! And yes, birthday Derek is the same Derek who suggested one of the animals this week!

In fact, let’s start with his suggestion, a fish called the river chub. It’s a little fish that only grows a little over a foot long at most, or 33 cm, although it’s usually much smaller than that. It’s common in fast-moving streams and rivers throughout North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains and surrounding areas.

The river chub isn’t all that exciting to look at, unless of course you’re a fish enthusiast or a river chub yourself. It’s greenish-silver above and pale underneath with orange fins. Males are larger than females and during breeding season, in late spring, the male turns purplish-red, his head enlarges, and he develops tubercles on the front part of his head that look sort of like white rhinestones.

His physical changes aren’t just to attract a mate. The male river chub builds a pebble nest by picking up little stones and moving them to just the right spots, so by having a more robust head and broad mouth, he can pick up bigger stones. And he picks up a LOT of stones, as many as 10,000 of them, which he arranges and rearranges.

Females are attracted to well-made nests. After a female lays her eggs in the nest, the male fertilizes the eggs and then spends the next week or so defending them by head-butting other males and potential predators, until the eggs hatch into larvae.

The pebble nests help other animals too. Over 30 species of fish use the nests as spawning sites once the river chub’s eggs hatch. Good job, river chub, helping out all those other fish!

Next, a while back Nikita suggested we learn about the bilby. It’s not springtime right now in Australia where the bilby lives, but the Christian holiday of Easter is still celebrated at the same time as it is in the northern hemisphere. Instead of chocolate Easter bunnies, in Australia they also have chocolate Easter bilbies.

In 1968, a nine-year-old girl named Rose-Marie Dusting wrote a story called “Billy the Aussie Easter Bilby.” When she grew up, Rose-Marie published the story as a picture book, which became popular enough that it inspired people in Australia to start talking about the Easter bilby instead of the Easter bunny. Starting in 1991 there was a big push to change from Easter bunnies to bilbies. Rabbits are an invasive species in Australia and do a lot of damage, and in fact they’ve almost driven the bilby to extinction. The lesser bilby did go extinct in the 1950s but the greater bilby is hanging on despite introduced predators like cats and foxes, rabbits and other introduced animals that eat all their food, and habitat loss.

The bilby has silky fur that’s mostly gray in color, and it has long pink ears that look sort of like a rabbit’s. It’s sometimes called the rabbit-eared bandicoot because of its ears. It has a long, pointy muzzle that’s pink and a long tail that’s black with a white tip, and it’s about the size of a cat but with shorter, thinner legs. It has a good sense of smell and good hearing, naturally, but its big ears are also useful for shedding heat. This is important since it often lives in hot, dry areas.

The bilby is nocturnal and spends the day in one of several burrows it digs in its territory. Not only are the burrows up to almost 10 feet long, or 3 meters, but they can be up to 6 feet deep, or 2 meters, with multiple exits. Digging such large, deep burrows not only keeps the bilby cool on hot days, it helps improve soil quality and provides shelter for lots of other animals that move in when the bilby isn’t home.

The bilby eats a lot of plant material, including seeds, fruit, bulbs, and tubers, along with eggs and various types of fungus, but it also eats insects, spiders, grubs, snails, and other small animals. It gets all of the moisture it needs from its diet. Its tongue is long and sticky, which helps it gather termites and other insects more easily, and its ears are so sensitive that it can hear insects moving around underground. It will actually put its ear to the ground to listen, then dig the insect up.

A mother bilby usually has one or two babies at a time that stay in her pouch for a little under three months. Her pouch is rear-facing so that sand and dirt don’t get onto her joeys when she digs a new burrow. Once her joey leaves the pouch, she hides it in one of her burrows and comes to feed and take care of it for another few weeks, until it’s ready to strike out on its own. In a lot of marsupials, the joey will come and go from the pouch as it grows older, but by the time the bilby’s joey is ready to emerge from the pouch, she already has a new baby or two ready to be born, so she needs her pouch for the new joeys.

Sales of some brands of chocolate Easter bilbies raise money to help bilby conservation efforts. And here I thought there was no way to improve on chocolate.

We’ll finish with the humble domestic chicken. Chickens are symbols of springtime because that’s when they start laying a whole lot of eggs. Most birds only lay eggs after mating, but chickens have been selectively bred so that the females, called hens, start to lay unfertilized eggs once they’re adults. The eggs you buy at the grocery store are unfertilized. Some people think those little whitish strings on either side of the yolk are embryonic baby chicks, but that’s not the case. Those strings are called chalazae [ka-LAYzee] and they help keep the yolk from moving around too much inside the egg.

Modern domestic chickens are descendants of wild birds called jungle fowl that evolved in parts of Southeast Asia some 50 million years ago. Humans domesticated the red jungle fowl at least 8,000 years ago, probably independently in different areas, and they’ve spread around the world as people migrated from place to place. The red jungle fowl is still around in the wild, too. It looks like a chicken.

Like all birds, jungle fowl descended ultimately from theropod dinosaurs. This included Tyrannosaurus rex, which means you’ll occasionally hear people say that chickens are direct descendants of T. rex. While chickens and other birds are related to T. rex, you wouldn’t find a T. rex in a chicken’s direct ancestry even if you could follow it back 66 million years, although you would find much smaller theropods. You’d have to go back farther than 66 million years, though, because paleontologists think theropods started evolving bird-like features some 160 million years ago.

You may have heard the saying, “That’s as scarce as hen’s teeth” to indicate something that’s not just rare, it’s basically non-existent. That’s because chickens, like all modern birds, don’t have teeth. Most birds and reptiles do grow what’s called an egg tooth, which actually looks like a little spike at the tip of the bill, or the nose in reptiles. It helps the baby break out of its egg, after which it either falls off or is reabsorbed. But it’s not a real tooth.

In late 2020 paleontologists announced they’d found a fossil skull on the island of Madagascar, dated to 85 million years ago, that shows an animal with a beak. The animal resembles a small theropod dinosaur in some ways and resembles an early bird in other ways, but it has features never before seen in either. Its snout is elongated but deep with a heavy bill that looks a little like a toucan’s bill. The bill doesn’t have teeth along the jaws, although other early birds found from around the same time do. That means that not only did birds stop needing teeth as early as 85 million years ago, toothlessness must have evolved repeatedly in various species. However, the new animal’s beak does have teeth at the very tip of its mouth.

Recent research suggests that birds and their ancestors evolved toothless beaks instead of toothy snouts because they had such specialized diets. There were probably also other benefits to having beaks instead of teeth. Some research suggests it might have helped speed up egg hatching. Other studies suggest the lack of teeth lightened the bird’s head and improved flight.

Occasionally a chicken embryo bears a recessive trait called talpid. It’s a lethal mutation, but talpid chick embryos do sometimes live in the egg for a couple of weeks before dying. Genetic researchers study talpid chickens for various reasons, and at one point a researcher named Matthew Harris noticed something odd on the beak of a talpid chicken embryo. It had tiny bumps along the edge that looked like teeth.

Harris took his findings to biologist John Fallon, who verified that the structures are actually teeth, not just serrations. They develop from the same tissues that form teeth in mammals, but the teeth don’t resemble mammal teeth. Instead they’re conical and pointy like a dinosaur’s teeth.

Harris eventually engineered a virus that mimicked the mutation’s molecular signals. Introducing the virus into chickens without the talpid mutations resulted in the chickens developing teeth, although they were reabsorbed into the beak after developing.

So I guess hen’s teeth are still as scarce as hen’s teeth. Also, I don’t really know how we made it here from springtime animals, but here we are.

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 268: Rediscovered Animals!

My little cat Gracie got lost but she’s home! Let’s learn about some other rediscovered animals this week!

A very happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever!

Further listening:

The Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!)

Further reading:

Bornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years

Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead

Rediscovery of the ‘extinct’ Pinatubo volcano mouse

Gracie, home at last! She’s so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she’s eating lots now:

The Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above):

The djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould’s mouse (photo from article linked above):

The Pinatubo volcano mouse:

Show transcript:

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

While I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again!

A couple of quick things before we get started, though.

First, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three.

Next, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great podcast that I really recommend if you’re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff.

Finally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I’m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn’t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn’t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home!

So I’ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She’s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she’s very happy to be home.

The person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we’ll start with a rediscovered bird.

There are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia, Borneo and Sumatra. The subspecies that lives in Sumatra is fairly common throughout the mountains on that island, where it lives in the lower branches of trees in higher elevations. It’s a tiny owl that only weighs about 4 ounces, or 100 grams. As the article I link to in the show notes points out, that’s about the weight of four AA batteries.

The subspecies that lives on Borneo, though, was always much rarer and had a much smaller range. In fact, no one had seen one since 1892 and researchers thought it was probably extinct. There’s another owl that lives in the mountains of Borneo, the mountain scops owl, that’s fairly common.

In May of 2016, a team of scientists started a 10-year study of birds that lived on Mount Kinabalu in the country of Malaysia in northern Borneo. One team member, Keegan Tranquillo, was checking bird nests that very same month and noticed an owl that didn’t look like the mountain scops owl. It was larger and its plumage was different.

Tranquillo contacted ecologist and bird expert Andy Boyce, who came out to take a look. When he saw the owl, Boyce was excited at first but then filled with anxiety. He knew the owl must be incredibly rare and would be in great danger of going extinct if conservation efforts weren’t put into place. Many areas of Borneo are under pressure from logging, mining, and palm oil plantations, which is leading to habitat loss all over the island.

Not only that, the more Boyce looked at the owl, the more he noticed differences from the Sumatran subspecies of Rajah scops owl. He suspected it might not be a subspecies but a completely separate species. That made it even more important to protect the owl and study it.

The owl’s rediscovery was announced in May 2021. Studies of the owl are ongoing but hopefully will soon result in more information about it and its habitat.

Next, let’s talk about a rodent, since Gracie likes to play with toy mice. This rediscovery came from Australia, where a study of extinct Australian rodents and their living relations found something surprising. It’s the opposite of the owl we just talked about, that might end up being a separate species of its own.

The mouse in question was once called Gould’s mouse. It used to be common throughout Australia, where it’s a native mammal, but it was declared extinct in 1990 after no one had seen it since the 1840s. Researchers suspected it had gone extinct after colonizers brought cats to Australia, although diseases and competition from introduced species of mice and rats also had a big impact.

Meanwhile, another native mouse, called the djoongari or Shark Bay mouse, was driven nearly to extinction. Fortunately, the djoongari survived on a few islands off western Australia. Conservation efforts in 2003 introduced it to more islands, where it spread and did well. It’s a social mouse that lives in family groups in a burrow it digs under bushes. It lines the burrow with dry grass to make it warmer and more comfortable.

The djoongari is a large mouse, up to 4.5 inches long not counting the tail, or 11.5 centimeters. The tail is a little longer than the head and body combined. It has long, shaggy fur that’s a mixture of dark and light brown with a paler belly and feet, and it has a tuft of dark fur at the end of its tail like a tiny lion.

In early 2021, the researchers studying native rodent DNA realized that the living djoongari and the extinct Gould’s mouse had the exact same genetic profile! They were the same animal! That means Gould’s mouse didn’t go extinct, although technically it didn’t exist in the first place.

That doesn’t mean the djoongari is perfectly safe, of course. Its range is still extremely restricted and it’s vulnerable to the same factors that nearly drove it to extinction in the first place. But at least it’s still around and can be protected.

We’ll finish with another mouse. In 1991, a volcano in the Philippines erupted. The volcano was called Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon, and the eruption was enormous. It was ten times stronger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Lava and ash filled valleys up to 600 feet deep, or 183 meters. More than 800 people died from the eruption itself and the devastation afterwards, during landslides caused by all the ash every time it rained.

In addition to the awful situation for people, animals were affected too. Most of the forests near the volcano were completely destroyed. Scientists thought the Pinatubo volcano mouse had probably gone extinct since it only lived on that one volcanic mountain, which had just blown up. Surveys of the area a few years after the eruption didn’t turn up signs of any of the mice.

The Pinatubo volcano mouse was only described in 1962 from a single specimen collected in 1956. It was a large mouse, almost the size of a rat, with long hind legs for jumping and climbing and a tail much longer than the length of its head and body together. It mostly ate earthworms and other small animals, but not a lot was known about it.

More than 20 years after the eruption, a team of scientists surveyed the animals living on the mountain. The conditions were difficult for the team to navigate, since there was still a lot of ash and erosion in the area that made the steep slopes unstable. The lush forests were gone, replaced by grass and bamboo, shrubs, a few trees, and other plants. They didn’t expect to find a lot of animals, although they thought they’d find introduced species of rats and mice that had moved into the disturbed areas from other parts of the island.

But to their surprise, they found 17 species of mammal on the mountain. Eight were bats, there were wild pigs and deer, and the rest were rodents. And the rodents were mostly native species, not introduced ones—including the Pinatubo volcano mouse!

Researchers theorize that a mouse that lives on an active volcano as its only habitat must have evolved to weather occasional eruptions. The mice were actually most numerous in the places that had been the most destroyed. The term for a species that thrives in environments that have seen widespread natural destruction is “disturbance specialist,” and that’s just what these mice are.

It just goes to show that no matter how bad things may be, there is life. And where there’s life, there’s hope. And probably mice.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make a chocolate cake to take to the person who found Gracie.

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!