Category Archives: cryptids

Episode 448: Tennessee water mysteries

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While I’m at Dragon Con, here’s an old Patreon episode about Tennessee water mysteries, including some spooky sightings of what were probably bears, and some mystery fish!

Show transcript:

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

As this episode goes live, I should be at Dragon Con, so I decided to go ahead and schedule an old Patreon episode to run instead of trying to get a new episode ready in time. It’s about some water mysteries in my home state of Tennessee, although I actually just moved away from Tennessee to Georgia.

Tennessee is in the southeastern United States, a long thin state divided into three geographical sections. East Tennessee borders the southern Appalachian Mountains, Middle Tennessee is on the Cumberland Plateau, and West Tennessee borders the Mississippi River. The only natural lake in the state is Reelfoot in northwestern Tennessee, a shallow, swampy body of water formed in the early 19th century.

Before 1811, instead of a lake a small river flowed through the area, a tributary of the Mississippi. In earlier accounts, Reelfoot River is called Red Foot River. Most of the residents of the area at the time were Choctaw, although white settlers lived in the small town of New Madrid near the bank of the Mississippi.

From December 1811 through February 1812, a series of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone changed the land radically. There were three main quakes and innumerable smaller ones, ranging from an estimated 6.7 for the smallest quake to a possible 8.8 for the largest.

In the initial quake and aftershocks on 16 December 1811, chimneys collapsed, trees fell, and fissures opened and closed, projecting water or sand high in the air. Boats on the Mississippi capsized as huge waves crashed from bank to bank.

A woman named Eliza Bryan, who lived in New Madrid, wrote an account of the quakes:

On the 16th of December, 1811, about 2 o’clock a.m., a violent shock of earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but hoarse and vibrating, followed by complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the inhabitants, the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species, the falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi, the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as it is supposed, to an eruption in its bed, formed a scene truly horrible.

From this time on until the 4th of February the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea. On that day there was another shock…and on the 7th, at about 4 o’clock a.m., a concussion took place so much more violent than those preceding it that it is denominated the ‘hard shock.’

The Mississippi first seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like a mountain… Then, rising 15 or 20 feet perpendicularly and expanding, as it were, at the same time, the banks overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent.

A riverboat captain reported in another account that his boat was caught in a ferocious current on the Mississippi, crashing across waves he estimated as six feet high, or 1.8 m. He also reported whirlpools that he estimated were 30 feet deep, or 9 m. He saw all the trees on either bank fall at once.

The December quake was so large it was felt across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then, only five weeks later, it happened again, followed by the third major earthquake on 7 February. Only 15 miles, or 24 km, from the epicenter, the land dropped 20 feet, or 6 m, and created a basin that immediately filled with water. Reelfoot Lake was formed, Tennessee’s only natural lake.

Reelfoot is a state park these days, popular with boaters, fishers, hunters, and birdwatchers. The only cryptid sighting I could find took place in the Glass community near Obion, within ten miles, or 16 km, of the lake. A man who grew up in Glass reported in 2009 that a bipedal creature 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, and covered in off-white hair was well-known to the residents of the community. They referred to it as “the white thing.” The man had seen it several times as a child and his father, who was initially a skeptic, changed his mind when he found huge tracks in the woods.

Technically, Tennessee has two natural lakes, but the “Lost Sea” is underground. It’s located in a large cave system called Craighead Caverns in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s one of the largest underground lakes ever found, although it hasn’t been fully explored so its actual size isn’t known. The lake doesn’t support any known animals, although scientific explorations haven’t been conducted as far as I could find. In the 1960s the cave owners stocked the lake with rainbow trout in hopes that they would discover an exit to the surface. They didn’t, and the fish have to be fed and restocked since they have no natural food sources and won’t spawn in the lake. The cave, and the lake, are a local tourist attraction.

Besides Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee is home to many man-made lakes. Most are in East Tennessee. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt set up the New Deal plan, creating government-funded projects to employ out-of-work Americans. The Tennessee Valley Authority was founded in 1933 to improve the lives of people who lived along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. To curb seasonal flooding and stop the spread of malaria, and to bring electricity to residents, TVA built numerous hydroelectric dams.

I grew up in a town built in the 1930s to house workers on Norris Dam, which formed Norris Lake from the Clinch River. Norris Dam was TVA’s first large project, completed in 1936. This makes the lake only 85 years old, but that’s certainly long enough for local lore to grow up around it. As a kid I heard about monster catfish—as big as a VW Beetle—living at the bottom of the spillway. The largest fish ever caught in the lake, however, was a 49.5 pound, or 22.45 kg, striped bass in 1978. The largest catfish ever caught in Tennessee was a blue catfish that weighed 112 pounds, or 50.8 kg. That’s huge, but not the size of a car.

There are other strange reports from around Norris Lake. On the night of 3 March 2012, two men went to a clearing near the first man’s house, in a swampy area near the lake’s edge, to build a bonfire and talk. They noticed footsteps and the sound of a large animal moving around in the trees nearby but assumed it was a white-tailed deer, although both men did have the sensation of being watched throughout the evening. Around midnight, when the men decided to leave, they heard sticks breaking in the trees as though being stepped on. One of the men knocked on a tree with a piece of wood and heard knocking in response, and then both were frightened by a loud, deep, long growl.

Black bears do occasionally stray into the Norris area from the nearby Smoky Mountains, but black bears don’t growl—they make distinctive moaning or chuffing noises instead. They also usually stay away from humans and fire.

In the late 1980s, possibly September of 1988, a woman returning to her car after a day of fishing with her family saw a huge hairy Bigfoot-type figure cross the trail ahead of her at speed. She only caught a quick glimpse of it at dusk but estimated it was 8 or 9 feet tall, or 2.5-2.7 m, with long arms that swung oddly as it took huge strides.

Other Tennessee lakes have their share of mysteries too. The “catzilla” legend is repeated in just about every waterway, with the catfish’s size usually compared to that of a small car. There really are some enormous fish in Tennessee’s lakes, though. In January of 2021 a man caught and released an American paddlefish in Cherokee Lake that might have approached the world record weight of 151 pounds, or 68.5 kg. It was six feet long, or 1.8 m.

There’s also a 19th century mystery associated with the Tennessee River. The earliest report of it I could find is from April 1878 in the Chattanooga Daily Times, an account from an old resident about river monster sightings from earlier that century. The first sighting by a white settler is from 1822, when a man named Buck Sutton was fishing and sighted the monster. The next reported sighting was near the same area five years later, when a man named Billy Burns saw the monster while crossing the ferry. Jim Windom was fishing in 1829 when he saw it. All three men died the summer after their encounters, although subsequent sightings (including 1836 and 1839) didn’t lead to anyone’s death.

The sightings all apparently took place in a part of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, now dammed to form Chickamauga Lake. At the time the river there was relatively sluggish and shallow, with many shoals.

The monster was described as serpent-like and about the length of a canoe, or around 20 to 25 feet long, or 6 to 7.6 m. At least one report says it had a doglike head. Billy Burns reported that its belly was yellow and its back was blue. The most interesting detail comes from at least two reports, that of a tall black fin on its back that stood at least 18 inches high, or 45 cm, or possibly two feet high, or 61 cm.

The Tennessee River has its share of unusual animals, from tiny freshwater jellyfish to the paddlefish, a filter feeder with an elongated rostrum, but nothing with such a large and prominent dorsal fin. The lake sturgeon, which can grow well over seven feet long, or 2.2 m, has bony plates on its back and an elongated snout, which doesn’t fit the description given by witnesses. The alligator gar can grow 10 feet long, or 3 m, but like the lake sturgeon, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on the body. The longnose gar can grow six feet long, or 1.8 m, but again, its dorsal fin is small and set far back on its body, and as its name implies, its jaws are elongated.

In shallow water the tail fins of any of these fish or others can show above the surface higher than the dorsal fin, but not two feet out of the water. Moreover, all these fish were much more common in the early 19th century than they are now, and locals would likely recognize all of them.

Alligators do occasionally show up in Tennessee, although not historically. Most alligator sightings are quite recent. The American alligator can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.5 m, but even if one occasionally strayed into the Tennessee River in the 19th century, it has no structure on its back that could be mistaken for a tall fin.

On rare occasions, a bull shark could find its way into the Tennessee River. The Tennessee is a tributary of the Ohio River, which in turns flows into the Mississippi, which then empties into the Gulf of Mexico. While bull sharks do occasionally swim up the Mississippi, no genuine sighting of one in the Ohio or Tennessee rivers has ever been documented. It’s not impossible, though. An exceptionally large bull shark can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 m, and it prefers shallow water. Tennesseans in the early 19th century would have no knowledge of sharks and might consider it a monster, not an ordinary fish.

It’s possible that the Tennessee River was once home to a large fish with a tall dorsal fin, one that was already rare in the early 19th century and which went extinct soon after. It’s also possible that the story was just a newspaper hoax, written to fill space on a slow news day. The article from 1878 was a “contribution…from an old citizen of Chattanooga” who was not named, talking about events that took place more than fifty years before. In 1885 another newspaper, the Chattanooga Daily Commercial, ran a nearly identical article—obviously taken from the 1878 one, often word-for-word—that claims the reporter heard the story “yesterday while listening attentively to the conversation of one of Chattanooga’s oldest citizens.”

We may never know what the strange Tennessee River animal was, just as we may not know whether bigfoot-type creatures live near Tennessee’s lakes. I have my doubts that there are catfish in Tennessee bigger than cars, though—but just to be on the safe side, I’m staying in the boat.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 435: The Narwhal and the Unicorn

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

Further reading:

Where did the unicorn myth come from?

The narwhal is my favorite whale:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 430: The Fake and the Real Coelacanth

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

Further reading:

Fake California Coelacanth

First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia

A real coelacanth photo:

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

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 421: Australian Animals

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Thanks to Nora, Holly, Stephen, and Aila for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

How ‘bin chickens’ learnt to wash poisonous cane toads

Monkeys in Australia? Revisiting a Forgotten Furry Mystery Down Under

The Australian white ibis:

The greater glider looks like a toy:

The thorny devil is very pointy:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about some animals native to Australia, which is Nora’s suggestion. We’ll learn about animals suggested by Holly, Stephen, and Aila, along with a mystery animal reported in the 1930s in northern Australia.

Australia isn’t currently connected to any other landmass and hasn’t been for about 50 million years. That means that most animals on the continent have been evolving separately for a very long time. While in other parts of the world placental mammals took over many ecological niches, marsupials are still the dominant mammal type in Australia. Most marsupial females give birth to tiny, helpless babies that then continue their development outside of her body, usually in a pouch.

But let’s start the episode not with a marsupial but with a bird. Stephen suggested the Australian white ibis, a beautiful bird that doesn’t deserve its nickname of bin chicken.

The white ibis is related to ibises from other parts of the world, but it’s native to Australia, and is especially common in eastern, northern, and southwestern Australia. It’s a large, social bird that likes to gather in flocks. Its body is mostly white with a short tail, long black legs, and a black head. Like other ibises, the adult bird’s head is bare of feathers. It also has a long, down-curved black bill that it uses to dig in the mud for crayfish and other small animals. When the bird spreads its magnificent black-tipped wings, it displays a stripe of featherless skin that’s bright red.

The Australian white ibis prefers marshy areas where it can eat as many frogs, crayfish, mussels, and other animals as it can catch. But at some point around 50 years ago, the birds started moving into more urban areas. They discovered that humans throw out a lot of perfectly good food, and before long they started to become a nuisance to people who had never encountered raccoons and didn’t know they should clamp those trash barrels closed really securely.

But no matter how annoying the Australian white ibis can be to people, it’s been really helpful in another way. In the 1930s, sugarcane plantation owners wanted to control beetles and other pests that eat sugarcane plants, so they released a bunch of cane toads in some of their fields in Queensland. But the cane toads didn’t do any good eating the beetles. Instead, they ate native animals and spread like wildfire. Since the toads are toxic, nothing could stop them, and there are now an estimated two billion cane toads living in Australia. But the Australian white ibis eventually figured out how to deal with cane toads.

The ibis will grab a cane toad, then whip it around and throw it into the air so that the toad secretes its toxins in hopes that the bird will leave it alone. Then the ibis will wash the toad in water or wipe it in wet grass, which washes away the toxins. Then the ibis eats the toad. Goodbye, toad!

Our next Australian animal is one suggested by Holly, the greater glider. When I saw the picture Holly sent, I was convinced it wasn’t a real animal but a toy plushie, but that’s just what the greater glider looks like. It’s incredibly cute!

The greater glider lives in eastern Australia, and as you might guess from its name, it is the largest of the three glider species found in Australia, and it can glide from tree to tree on flaps of skin between its front and back legs. Until 2020 scientists thought there was only one species of glider with local variations in size and coat color, but it turns out those differences are significant enough that it’s been split into three separate but closely related species.

The greater glider is nocturnal and only eats plant material, mostly from eucalyptus trees. It has a long fluffy tail, longer than the rest of its body is. Its tail can be as much as 21 inches long, or 53 cm, while its body and head together can measure as much as 17 inches long, or 43 cm. It has dense, plush fur, a small head with big round ears, black eyes, and a little pinkish nose, and it superficially looks like a big flying squirrel. But the greater glider isn’t a rodent. It’s a marsupial, closely related to the ringtail possum. Some individuals have dark gray or black fur and some have lighter gray or brown fur, but all greater gliders have cream-colored fur on their tummies.

The greater glider’s gliding membranes, also called patagia, are connected at what we can refer to as their elbows and ankles. It uses its long tail as a rudder and it’s very good at gliding from tree to tree. It almost never comes down to the ground if it can avoid it. When it glides, it folds its front legs so its little fists are under its chin and its elbows are stuck out, which stretches the membranes taut.

Aila suggested we learn more about the thorny devil, an Australian reptile we talked about way back in episode 97. It’s a spiky lizard that grows to around 8 inches long, or 20 cm. In warm weather its blotchy brown and yellow coloring is paler than in colder weather, when it turns darker. It can also turn orangey, reddish, or gray to blend in to the background soil. Its color changes slowly over the course of the day as the temperature changes. It also tends to turn darker if something threatens it.

It has a thick spiny tail that it usually holds curved upward, which makes it look kind of like a stick. It moves slowly and jerkily, rocking back and forth on its legs, then surging forward a couple of steps. Researchers think this may confuse predators. It certainly looks confusing.

As if that wasn’t enough, the thorny devil has a false head on the back of its neck. It’s basically a big bump with two spikes sticking out of its sides. When something threatens the lizard, it ducks its head between its forelegs, which makes the bump on its neck look like a little head. But all its spines make it a painful mouthful for a predator. If something does try to swallow it, the thorny devil can puff itself up to make it even harder to swallow, like many toads do. It does this by inflating its chest with air.

The thorny devil eats ants, specifically various species of tiny black ants found only in Australia. It has a sticky tongue to lick them up. This is very similar to the horned lizard of North America, also called the horny toad even though it’s not a toad, which we talked about most recently in episode 376. But despite their similarities in looks, behavior, and diet, the horned lizard and the thorny devil aren’t closely related. It’s just yet another example of convergent evolution.

Now, let’s finish with a strange report from the 1930s about a colony of hundreds, if not thousands, of monkeys in Australia. Australia doesn’t have very many native placental mammals, and no monkeys. But several Australian newspapers reported in 1932 that a party of gold prospectors encountered the monkeys in northern Australia, specifically Cape York Peninsula. The monkeys were reportedly gathered in one area to eat a huge crop of red nuts, and they appeared to be large monkeys that weighed up to 30 lbs, or 13 kg. Another gold prospector said in follow-up articles that he too had seen the monkeys and even shot a few of them, although he hadn’t saved any part of the bodies.

Newspaper hoaxes were pretty common back in the day, but by the 1930s things had mostly settled down and papers were more interested in imparting actual news instead of making it up. Cape York Peninsula was quite remote at the time, with rivers, rainforests, and savannas where a lot of animals unknown to science probably still live. But not monkeys!

One thing to remember is that at the end of the 19th century, it was a fad to release animals from one area into another. That’s how the European starling was introduced to North America, where it has become incredibly invasive. In the early 1890s, a group of people released a hundred starlings into New York City’s Central Park, because they wanted all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s writings to be present in the United States. This fad included Australia, where colonizers tried to release all sorts of animals. Most of the animals didn’t survive long, and we don’t have any records of monkeys being released, but it’s possible that someone just did it for fun and didn’t tell anyone.

Another suggestion is that the prospectors saw tree kangaroos and thought they were monkeys, even though tree kangaroos don’t actually look like monkeys. They look like little kangaroos that live in trees, not to mention they’re mostly nocturnal. Besides, the local Aboriginal people reportedly told the prospectors about the monkeys, and they would have identified tree kangaroos easily if that’s what they were. No other native Australian animal known to live in the area resembles a monkey either.

Zoologist Karl Shuker suggests the monkeys might have been macaques native to New Guinea. New Guinea isn’t all that far away from Australia, and macaques were often kept as pets too. It would have been pretty easy for someone to buy a bunch of macaques, import them on a ship, and release them into the wilderness. Or the macaques might have gotten there on their own, rafting to Australia on fallen trees washed out to sea during storms.

If there really were monkeys in Australia 90 years ago, of course, the big question is: are they still there?

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 419: The Elephant Seal

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Thanks to Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Seal whiskers, the secret weapon for hunting

Elephant seals drift off to sleep while diving far below the ocean surface

Scientists Discover Remains of Antarctic Elephant Seal in Indiana River

The elephant seal and its proboscis:

The bunyip carving:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have an animal suggested by three different listeners, Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC. So, by popular demand, let’s learn about the elephant seal, including some elephant seal mysteries.

The elephant seal gets its name because it’s big, grayish-brown, and wrinkled. Adult male elephant seals even have a proboscis, although it’s not anywhere near as long as an elephant’s trunk. It’s basically an enlarged and elongated nose that allows the animal to make loud roaring noises to intimidate other males. This is what that sounds like:

[elephant seal roars]

There are two species of elephant seal, the northern and southern. The southern elephant seal is larger on average while the northern male has a larger proboscis on average. We talked about elephant seals briefly in episode 155, about sexual dimorphism, because males and females are much different in size. A big male southern elephant seal can grow up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh about 9,000 lbs, or 4,000 kg. Females are about half that length and much lighter in weight. A big male northern elephant seal can grow up to 16 feet long, or almost 5 meters, and weigh around 5,500 lbs, or 2,500 kg, while females are much smaller.

There are many reasons why male elephant seals are bigger than females, but it’s mainly because the males spend a lot of energy fighting each other. The bigger and stronger a male is, the more likely he is to win a fight and the more likely it is that other males won’t bother to challenge him. Meanwhile, females are smaller so they need less food.

The elephant seal has thick fur that helps keep it warm, but it also has a layer of blubber like whales do. The blubber also helps make the seal streamlined so it can swim faster. Since the elephant seal spends most of its life in the water, and it does a lot of diving, it needs to be as streamlined as possible. It eats animals like fish, squid, and octopuses, but it especially likes sharks and rays.

Since a lot of the elephant seal’s favorite prey lives on or near the ocean floor, it has to dive to find it. The deepest recorded dive of an elephant seal was almost 5,700 feet, or about 1,700 meters. That’s just over a mile deep, the deepest dive made by a mammal that isn’t a whale. The elephant seal can hold its breath for well over an hour and a half. To conserve energy and maximize its time, quite often an elephant seal will actually sleep while it’s swimming downward, since a really deep dive can take a long time to descend. It might only wake up when it bumps into the sea floor, but sometimes it’s sleeping so soundly that it will just lie there at the bottom of the ocean and continue to sleep. I guess that’s why the sea floor is sometimes called the seabed.

Because the elephant seal hunts for food where there’s not much light, it often can’t rely on its vision to find its prey. Instead, it has really good hearing underwater, and it has whiskers on its upper lip that are extremely sensitive, with more nerve fibers in each whisker than in any other mammal studied. Its whiskers can sense tiny movements of water that indicate an animal moving around nearby.

Once a year, the elephant seal molts and new fur grows in, but unlike most mammals it doesn’t just lose its fur. The outer layer of its skin peels off too. It takes a lot longer for its fur to regrow because blubber doesn’t contain any blood vessels. New blood vessels have to grow around the blubber to supply the skin with extra nutrients, and during that time the seal can’t spend time in the water or it will get too cold. It stays on land during molting, cuddled up with its friends so they can all stay warmer.

It can take a month to complete the molt, and the seals don’t eat the whole time. The males also don’t eat during mating season and the females don’t eat once their pups are born, not until the pup is a month old and doesn’t need its mother constantly. Elephant seals are adapted to be able to fast for long periods, but they do lose a lot of weight and have to eat plenty of extra food afterwards to regain it.

The elephant seal is well adapted to cold. The southern elephant seal lives in the southern ocean, around Antarctica, the southern tip of Patagonia, and south of New Zealand. The northern elephant seal lives in the eastern Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Canada and Alaska. Sometimes they roam farther, though, into warmer waters, and sometimes an elephant seal will investigate a river mouth and end up traveling far inland in the river. But sometimes a seal will make a really, really long journey.

About 1,260 years ago, one particular southern elephant seal started swimming north. It swam from the Southern Ocean along the South American coast, crossed the equator, and just kept swimming. It swam into the Gulf of Mexico and eventually came to the mouth of the Mississippi River. It swam up the mighty Mississippi and into a tributary river, and eventually it ended up in what is now Indiana, where it died.

We know all this because in 1965, construction workers found a jawbone near the Wabash River and donated it to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It wasn’t properly studied until decades later except to test its age. In 2020, a team of three scientists examined what was left of the jawbone after destructive radiometric testing in the 1970s, and they were shocked to realize it came from a southern elephant seal.

There are a lot of questions associated with the discovery. Why did the seal keep swimming? Was it lost and confused, and thought it was swimming back to its home? Was it just a ramblin’ seal, tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best it could feel? There’s no way to know, but there is a clue about what happened to it at the end. There are marks on the jawbone that might be cut marks.

At the time, over 1,500 years ago, that part of North America was inhabited by the Mississippian culture, a vast empire and the ancestor of many of the modern indigenous North American peoples. This was the culture who made giant earth mounds that still exist today in parts of North America, and when they were still being used, the mounds had grand buildings on top. Scientists aren’t sure if fishers or hunters spotted the elephant seal and killed it, or if someone found it already dead and decided to not let perfectly good meat go to waste. There’s even a theory that the animal didn’t swim to North America but that its skull was brought there by traders and at some point it ended up in the river.

The two elephant seal species do look very similar, and the scientists didn’t have the full original jawbone to study, so they also suggest it might actually have been a northern elephant seal. For a northern elephant seal to travel to Indiana without human help would be just as hard or even harder than a southern elephant seal, because there is no easy water passage from the Pacific coast of North America to Indiana. The seal would actually have to travel through the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic, then swim south to the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

There is a big possibility that at least some stories of river monsters from the olden days were actually elephant seals that swam so far upstream in a river that the people who saw it didn’t know what the animal was. Even today, when many of us carry around tiny computers in our pockets that allow us to access all of humanity’s knowledge and also make phone calls, seeing an elephant seal in a place where it doesn’t belong would be terrifying.

We think that’s what happened long ago in Victoria in Australia. We talked about it in episode 351, in our episode about the bunyip. An Aboriginal sacred site near Ararat, Victoria once had the outline of a bunyip carved into the ground and the turf removed from within the figure. Every year the local indigenous people would gather to re-carve the figure so it wouldn’t become overgrown, because it symbolized an important event. At that spot, two brothers had been attacked by a bunyip. It killed one of the men and the other speared the bunyip and killed it. When he brought his family and others back to retrieve his brother’s body, they traced around the bunyip’s body.

The bunyip carving was 26 feet long, or 8 meters. Unfortunately it’s long gone, since eventually the last Aborigine who was part of the ritual died sometime in the 1850s and the site was fenced off for cattle grazing. But we have a drawing of the geoglyph from 1867. It’s generally taken to be a two-legged sea serpent type monster with a small head and a relatively short, thick tail. Some people think it represents a bird like an emu.

But if you turn it around, with the small head being the end of a tail, and the blunt tail being a head, suddenly it makes sense. It’s the shape of a seal.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 405: Anteaters and the Capelobo

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Thanks to Molly and Mila for suggesting the anteater and its relations this week!

Further reading:

How anteaters lost their teeth

The giant anteater has a long tongue and a little mouth, and adorable babies:

The giant anteater has a weird skull [photos by Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72183871]:

The tamandua is like a mini giant anteater that can climb trees:

The silky anteater looks like a weird teddy bear [photo by Quinten Questel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30287945]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about some unusual mammals, suggested by Molly and Mila. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for almost two years and now we’re finally going to learn about it! It’s the anteater and its close relations, including a creepy anteater cryptid that would have fit in just fine during monster month.

A lot of animals are called anteaters because they eat ants, but the anteaters we’re talking about today belong to the suborder Vermilingua, meaning “worm tongue.” That’s because they all have long, sticky tongues that they use to lick up ants, termites, and other insects. Anteaters are native to Central and South America and are closely related to sloths, and more distantly related to armadillos.

The sloth and anteater share a common ancestor who lived around 60 million years ago, a little animal that mainly ate worms and insect larvae and probably lived in burrows. Because its food was soft and didn’t need a lot of chewing, when a mutation cropped up that caused its teeth to be weak, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t using its teeth anyway. When the first anteaters evolved from this ancestral species, they didn’t need teeth either, and gradually they lost their teeth entirely. Modern anteaters have no teeth at all.

Sloths also evolved from this weak-toothed ancestor, and sloths eat plants. Plants need a lot of chewing, and most animals that eat plants have really strong teeth, but sloths retained the genetics for weak teeth. They don’t even have an enamel coating on their teeth, and instead of grinding molars, their teeth are basically soft little pegs. Luckily for the sloth, the little peg teeth do continue to grow throughout its life, so it never wears its teeth down so far it can’t chew.

Anteaters, sloths, and their distant relation the armadillo all share the same type of vision from their shared ancestor too. They can’t see colors at all but have good vision in low light, which is why scientists think they all evolved from an animal that spent most of its time underground hunting for worms. Anteaters have strong claws that allow them to dig into termite and ant nests, and armadillos spend a lot of time in burrows they dig. We don’t actually know what the common ancestor of these related animals looked like because we haven’t found any fossils of it yet.

In the past, scientists thought that pangolins and aardvarks were related to anteaters because they all have similar adaptations to a similar diet, but that’s just another example of convergent evolution. We talked about pangolins and aardvarks back in episode 65, as well as the giant anteater.

The giant anteater is the one most people know about. It earns the name giant because it can grow almost eight feet long, or 2 1/2 meters, if you include the tail. Its fur is brown and cream with a distinctive black stripe from its chest to its back that scientists used to think acted as camouflage. Because the black fur is outlined with white, making it stand out, scientists now think it’s used as a warning to potential predators, because the giant anteater can be dangerous. If it feels threatened, it will rear up on its hind legs, using its long tail as a prop, to slash at a predator. Its claws are so big that it knuckle-walks on its forepaws.

The female anteater has one baby at a time and while it’s small, it rides on her back. Its black stripe matches hers exactly so that potential predators don’t notice it. The giant anteater’s tail has especially long, thick fur, and it will wrap the tail over its head like a blanket in cold weather.

You know how a cartoon character can cram its head into a bottle and its head stays bottle-shaped? It kind of looks like the giant anteater did that. Its head is small and its snout is shaped like a tube, with nostrils and a tiny mouth at the end. It can’t open its jaws very far.

Anteaters eat ants, although they also love termites and will eat other small insects and insect larvae. The giant anteater uses its massive front claws to dig into anthills. Then it flicks its tongue really fast, catching insects with a combination of tiny hooklets on the tongue and sticky saliva. An anteater’s tongue is over two feet long, or 60 cm, so long that when the anteater isn’t actually eating, the tongue rolls up at the back of its skull. The base of its tongue is attached not to its throat but to its sternum, also called the breastbone.

A feeding anteater eats as many insects as it can catch in a minute or two, then moves on to find a new anthill. It does this to avoid as many stings and bites as possible. Because the anteater doesn’t have teeth, it crushes insects against the top of its mouth before swallowing them, and its stomach acts like a bird’s crop. The anteater may deliberately eat sand or grit the way birds do to help pulverize the insects it’s eaten. Its eyesight isn’t very good so it hunts mostly by scent.

To conserve energy, the anteater’s body temperature is low to start with and drops when the animal is asleep. This is another trait it shares with its relations, the sloth and the armadillo.

There are three other species of anteater alive today, the silky anteater, and the northern and southern tamanduas. The tamandua, both northern and southern, looks like a miniature giant anteater but is typically less than half its size. The southern tamandua lives throughout much of South America while the northern tamandua lives throughout Central America, and both species look very similar. They don’t have the black warning stripe that the giant anteater has, though, and because they’re smaller and lighter, they can climb trees to find insects, which allows them to live in the same areas as giant anteaters without competing with them for food. They eat ants, termites, and the larvae of lots of other insects, and will also eat fruit. The tamandua has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb trees.

The silky anteater is also called the pygmy anteater, because it’s the smallest species, only growing about 18 inches long, or 45 cm. That includes its partially prehensile tail. It lives in Central America and much of northern South America, and unlike the giant anteater that prefers savannas and open forests, the silky anteater lives in lowland rainforests because it spends its life in trees.

The silky anteater also doesn’t look much like the giant anteater. It kind of looks like a weird teddy bear with a long tail, and kind of looks like a weird sloth with a long tail. Its fur is short but fluffy, light brown or cream-colored, and some scientists think this makes it look like the seed pod of the silk cotton tree that’s common throughout its range and which it prefers. It sleeps curled up in a ball that also helps it look more like a seed pod.

The silky anteater has two long, sharp claws on its front feet, which it uses to climb trees, break open wasp nests, and defend itself from predators. Its hind feet have four claws that aren’t as long. It eats lots of wasps and wasp larvae, but it also eats other insects and even fruit. It has a tiny head and a long snout, but its snout is nowhere near as long as the giant anteater’s, or even the tamandua’s.

You might not think of any of these anteaters as scary, and in fact the silky anteater is so cute I want to pet it even though that would be a bad idea, but they can definitely be dangerous. The giant anteater in particular can kill jaguars and has even killed humans who try to capture or hurt it. Maybe that’s why one of the forms of the cryptid called the capelobo is a hairy man with a giant anteater’s head and claws.

The capelobo is a legend from Brazil that’s sort of like a Brazilian werewolf. In its animal form it looks like a tapir but with a dog-like head, but it can transform into its humanoid form where it looks like a monstrous giant anteater. It’s supposed to scream in the woods like someone in danger, and when people come to help, it catches them and squeezes them to death. Then it drinks their blood and eats their brains like some sort of terrible anteater zombie-vampire, which is not a phrase I ever thought I’d utter.

One suggestion about the capelobo squeezing people to death is that this is a story to help children stay away from giant anteaters. Remember that they stand up on their hind legs with their arms outstretched when they’re ready to fight. To a little kid, that looks an awful lot like a person with their arms out for a big hug. Don’t hug the capelobo, and don’t hug the giant anteater either.

The capelobo’s body is supposed to be heavily armored or even made of stone, except for its belly button. That’s the only place where it’s vulnerable, so to kill the capelobo, someone has to shoot it right in the naval. That sounds really hard, especially if it’s chasing you. Fortunately, it’s not a real animal—although to be on the safe side, maybe don’t go wandering into the Brazilian forest at night.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 404: The Kraken and Chessie

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Thanks to Ezra and Leo for suggesting these two sea monsters this week! Happy Halloween!

Further reading:

Legend of Chessie alive, well in Maryland

Here be sea monsters: We have met Chessie and…is it us?

Not actually a kraken, probably:

Not actually Chessie but an atmospheric photo of a toy brontosaurus:

Show transcript:

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

Just a few days remain in October, so this is our Halloween episode and the end of monster month for another year! We had so many great suggestions for Halloween episodes that I couldn’t get to them all, but I might just sprinkle some in throughout the other months too. We have two great monsters to talk about this week, suggested by Ezra and Leo, the kraken and Chessie the sea serpent.

First, as always on our Halloween episode, we have a few housekeeping details. If anyone wants a sticker, feel free to email me and I’ll send you one, or more than one if you like. That offer is good all the time, not just now. I don’t have any new stickers printed but I do have lots of the little ones with the logo and the little ones with the capybara.

I also don’t have any new books out this year, but you can still buy the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book if you like. I am actually working on another book about mystery animals, tentatively titled Small Mysteries since it’s going to be all about mysteries surrounding small animals like frogs and invertebrates that often get overlooked. I’m hoping to have it ready to publish in early 2026 or so. I don’t know that I’ll do another Kickstarter for it since that was a lot of work, and I just finished a Kickstarter for more enamel pins and just can’t even think about the stress of doing another crowdfunding campaign anytime soon. Also, I hate to keep asking listeners for money.

Anyway, one of the things I don’t like about Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie is that I didn’t cite my sources properly, so for the Small Mysteries book I’m being very careful to have footnotes on pretty much every page so that anyone who wants to double-check my information can do so easily.

But all that is in the future. Let’s celebrate Halloween now with a couple of sea monsters!

We’ll start with Ezra’s suggestion, the kraken. It’s a creature of folklore that has gotten confused with lots of other folklore monsters. We don’t know how old the original legend is, but the first mention of it in writing dates to 1700, when an Italian writer published a book about his travels to Scandinavia. One of the things he mentions is a giant fish with lots of horns and arms, which he called the “sciu-crak.” This seems to come from the Norwegian word meaning sea krake.

“Krake” is related to the English word crooked, and it can refer to an old dead tree with crooked branches, or tree roots, or something with a hook on the end like a boat hook, or an anchor or drag, or various similar things related to hooks or multiple prongs. That has led to people naturally assuming that the kraken had many arms and was probably a giant squid, and that may be the case. But there’s another possibility, because in many old uses of the word krake, it means something weak or misshapen, like a rotten old dead tree. In the olden days in Norway, people thought that if you spoke about an animal by name, the spirit that protected that animal would hear you. Some historians think that whale-hunters referred to whales as krake so the whale’s protective spirit wouldn’t guess that they were planning a whale-hunt. Who would refer to a huge, strong animal like a whale as weak and crooked, after all?

Whatever its origins, the kraken’s modern form is mainly due to a Danish bishop called Erik Pontoppidan. He wrote about the kraken in 1753, and embellished the story by saying the kraken could reach out of the ocean with its long arms to grab sailors or just pull an entire ship down into the water and sink it. He also said the kraken was so big that when it rested at the water’s surface, sailors would mistake it for an island. This is a common story in many cultures, always referring to whales. Pontoppidan suggested the kraken might be a giant octopus, but also thought it might be a giant starfish or even a giant crab. He seemed to think the word kraken should be krabben, and I swear I didn’t make that up.

Either way, the kraken is a monster of folklore, not a real animal. That’s a relief! Now you don’t have anything to worry about in the ocean at all, right?

Next, let’s learn about another water monster, Chessie, suggested by Leo. Leo also suggested we talk about Chesapeake Bay in general.

Chesapeake Bay is located on the east coast of North America, specifically where the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware meet. On the map it looks sort of like a huge crack in the land, but while rivers and streams empty into it like they would a gigantic lake, it’s connected to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s about 200 miles long, or 320 km, and up to 30 miles wide, or 48 km.

It formed about 35 million years ago when a small meteor struck the area. During the Pleistocene, AKA the ice ages, the Susquehanna River flowed through the crater and into the sea. Around 10,000 years ago, ocean levels rose due to melting glaciers, and flooded the river valley that had started out as an impact crater. Now it’s a bay.

Chesapeake Bay isn’t technically a lake, but it’s also not really part of the ocean. Part of the bay is freshwater from the rivers that flow into it, while at the end that connects to the Atlantic Ocean, it’s salty. In between it’s brackish water that’s kind of salty but not nearly as salty as the ocean. It’s home to hundreds of animals, with many more visiting the bay during migration. Sometimes whales are even spotted in the bay.

We could literally talk about the animals and the history of Chesapeake Bay all day and not run out of topics, so I have plans to revisit some of the animals in future episodes. Today we mainly want to focus on the sea monster known as Chessie.

As you may have already guessed, the name Chessie isn’t just short for Chesapeake, it also echoes the name Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. The first Nessie sighting was in 1933, leading to a lake monster craze in Scotland and many other parts of the world. Suddenly people were seeing monsters everywhere, such as Champ from Lake Champlain, which we talked about in episode 29 along with Nessie.

No one’s sure when the first Chessie sighting happened. Some people say it was as early as 1936, while others claim it wasn’t until 1980. In 1943 two fishermen reported seeing a strange creature in the water about 75 yards from their boat, or 68 meters. At first they thought there was something black floating in the water, with the visible part of it about 12 feet long, or 3 ½ meters. Then they realized it was alive. Its head was shaped like a horse’s but was only about the size of an American football. It’s not clear if it raised its head completely out of the water like a sea serpent in a cartoon, but the men did say that it turned its head almost all the way around several times.

There are also reports from 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1997, and 2014. In 1978 a retired CIA officer saw what looked like a 15-foot, or 4 ½ meter, snake swimming in the water. In 1982 a man named Bob Frew took some grainy videocamera footage of something that he described as “a telephone pole that swims.” The video shows a brown object swimming like a marine snake, with a side to side motion.

In the 1980s people in the state of Maryland tried to get Chessie listed as a protected species. It didn’t work, but it did bring attention to the state of the Chesapeake Bay. The bay was increasingly polluted by industrial and agricultural waste that was allowed to enter the bay untreated, leading to algal blooms that deoxygenated the water and killed everything around them. The once-famous oyster reefs in the bay started to be overharvested too, and since oysters are natural water filters, their absence has caused an extra decrease in water quality. With Chessie acting as a mascot for water quality and ecology, people paid more attention to what was happening to the bay.

Chessie the monster doesn’t have a lot of sightings, and most likely they’re all misidentifications of ordinary animals or items, like whales or floating logs. There are some amazing creatures that live in or visit the bay, including a fish called the sturgeon that can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters, bull sharks that can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 meters, bottlenose dolphins, sea turtles, even manta rays. Most people agree that Chessie probably isn’t an actual sea serpent.

But there is another Chessie that’s definitely real, although you can’t actually call him a monster. A Florida manatee was spotted in the summer of 1994 swimming around in the bay and exploring some of the river mouths. Since Chesapeake Bay is nice and warm in summer, the manatee was fine at first. But by October he was still there, and the water was getting too cold for a manatee to tolerate.

Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources worked with the Coast Guard and a lot of volunteers to find the manatee, capture him safely, and get him back to Florida. He was given a clean bill of health by veterinarians and was tagged and released.

The following summer, he swam back to Chesapeake Bay. But who can blame him? It’s a beautiful place!

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 402: The Hoop Snake and Friends

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Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC this week as we learn about some scary-sounding reptiles, including the hoop snake!

Further reading:

The Story of How the Giant “Terror Skink” Was Presumed Extinct, Then Rediscovered

San Diego’s Rattlesnakes and What To Do When They’re on Your Property

Snake that cartwheels away from predators described for the first time

Giant new snake species identified in the Amazon

The terror skink, AKA Bocourt’s terrific skink [photo by DECOURT Théo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116258516]:

The hoop snake according to folklore:

The sidewinder rattlesnake [photo taken from this article]:

The dwarf reed snake [photo by Evan Quah, from page linked above]:

The green anaconda [photo by MKAMPIS – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62039578]:

Show transcript:

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

As monster month continues, we’re going to look at some weird and kind of scary, or at least scary-sounding, snakes and lizards. Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

We’ll start with the terror skink, whose name should inspire terror, but it’s also called Bocourt’s terrific skink, which is a name that should inspire joy. Which is it, terror or joy? I suppose it depends on your mood and how you feel about lizards in general. All skinks are lizards but not all lizards are skinks, by the way.

The terror or possibly terrific skink lives on two tiny islets, which are miniature islands. These islets are themselves off the coast of an island called the Isle of Pines, but in French, which I cannot pronounce. The Isle of Pines is only 8 miles wide and 9 miles long, or 13 by 15 km, and is itself off the coast of the bigger island of New Caledonia. All these islands lie east of Australia. Technically the islets where the skink lives are off the coast of another islet that is itself off the coast of the Isle of Pines, which is off the coast of New Caledonia, but where exactly it lives is kept a secret by the scientists studying it.

The skink was described in 1876 but only known from a single specimen captured on New Caledonia around 1870, and after that it wasn’t seen again and was presumed extinct. Colonists and explorers brought rats and other invasive animals to the New Caledonian islands, which together with habitat loss have caused many other native species to go extinct.

But in December 2003, a scientific expedition studying sea snakes around the New Caledonian islands caught a big lizard no one recognized. Once the expedition members realized it was a terror skink, alive and well, they took lots of pictures and videos of it and then released it back into the wild. Since then, more specimens have been discovered during four different expeditions, but only on the islets, not on any of the bigger islands. It’s so critically endangered that its location has to be kept secret, because if someone captures some of the lizards to sell on the illegal pet market, the species could easily be driven to extinction.

The terror skink is gray-brown with darker stripes, a long tail, and a slightly downturned mouth that makes it look grumpy. It grows about 20 inches long, or 50 cm, including its tail. This is really big for a skink, so technically it’s a giant skink.

It gets the name terror skink from its size and from its teeth, which are large and curved like fangs. It mainly eats one particular species of land crab, which is why its jaws are so strong and its teeth are so sharp, so it can bite through the crab’s exoskeleton.

Another lizard with a spooky name that has been presumed extinct is the gray ghost lizard, suggested by Richard from NC. It’s more properly called the giant Tongan ground skink, and it’s native to some more South Pacific islands—specifically, the Tongan Islands. These islands are even farther east from Australia than the New Caledonian islands, and are actually closer to New Zealand than to Australia, although they’re not really very close to either.

The giant Tongan ground skink was described in 1839 from two specimens collected in the late 1820s on Tongatapu Island. They’re the only two specimens known and the lizard is considered extinct, especially considering that these days, the island is almost completed deforested and rats, dogs, and cats have been introduced to it, which has driven many species to extinction.

But after the terror skink was rediscovered, scientists started to wonder if the gray ghost might still be around. It was called the gray ghost because it was so hard to see, since it was dark gray in color. The native Tongan people considered it a good omen if someone saw one, since it was so rare.

A paper published in early 2024 suggests that the gray ghost might be living on some smaller islands where forests still remain, and also suggested that it might be nocturnal and a burrowing skink. That would explain why it was so rarely seen by the people who lived on its island when it was still alive.

We know basically nothing about the gray ghost. Hopefully an expedition to the smaller Tongan islands will rediscover it so we can learn more about it and protect it.

Richard from NC also suggested we talk about the hoop snake, an animal of folklore. I remember reading about it as a kid in a book about American folklore animals, most of which were clearly jokey and not meant to seem real. The hoop snake sounded more realistic.

The hoop snake was supposed to be a long, slender snake that slithered around normally most of the time, but when it needed to move faster, it would grab the end of its tail in its mouth and roll like a wheel, or a hoop. Some versions of the story had the snake rolling along with the tip of its tail pointed forward, and since the tail was supposed to be sharp and venomous, it would roll after you so fast that when its tail stabbed you, you’d drop dead. The only way to escape would be to jump behind a tree. The tail would stab the tree instead and you could run away while the hoop snake was trying to unstick its tail. The venom in its tail was supposed to be so deadly that the tree would turn black and die. Other versions of the story said you had to jump through the snake’s hoop to confuse it, which would allow you to get away safely.

All this is weird, to say the least, but some snakes do have ways of traveling that are unusual. The sidewinder, for instance, is a real species of rattlesnake from the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. It grows around 2 ½ feet long, or 80 cm, and has pointy scales, called keeled scales, including a pair above its eyes that make it look like it has little horns. Since it’s a type of rattlesnake, it has a rattle that it can shake to make a loud warning noise. It’s mostly brown in color, or sometimes pinkish, yellowish, or even whitish, with darker stripes or blotches down its back. Its coloration helps camouflage it against the ground, and it will actually change color slightly depending on the temperature. This is something other rattlesnakes can do too.

The sidewinder lives in desert conditions where it has to travel through loose sand, and the sand is also extremely hot. While the snake can travel normally when it wants to, it sidewinds to move quickly over loose sand or very hot sand that might burn it. It lifts most of its body up so that it’s only touching the ground in two places, then undulates its body so that the sections touching the ground constantly move. That way no part of its body has to stay in contact with hot sand for more than a split second. It travels in a path that runs diagonal to the direction its body is pointing. That sounds complicated, but it’s easy for the snake. It’s not even the only snake that can travel by sidewinding. Other desert-living snakes travel across hot sand by sidewinding, including several species from Africa, but just about any snake can do it if they need to. It allows a snake to travel over surfaces that are too slippery for its belly scales to get a grip.

The story of the hoop snake might be based on garbled reports of sidewinders, but it might just be a completely invented animal. The hoop snake story is found in other parts of the world too, especially Australia, although it dates back to at least the late 18th century in the United States.

No snake in the world has the anatomy to allow it to roll like a hoop without hurting itself. But there is one other snake that does something very similar, called cartwheeling. It’s the dwarf reed snake that lives in Malaysia and other parts of southeast Asia. Reed snakes aren’t very well known to science, so this cartwheeling activity wasn’t documented scientifically until recently, with the study published in 2023. Reed snakes are nocturnal and spend most of the daytime hiding under rocks or logs, or buried in dead leaves or sand, so they’re not seen very often by people. The dwarf reed snake is slender and only grows about 10 inches long, or 25 cm.

Some small snakes can jump short distances by pushing their tails against the ground. The dwarf reed snake does something similar, but more complicated. It pushes off with its tail, with its body curved in a sort of S shape. It lands on its head and rolls over completely, head to tail, and then pushes off the ground again with its tail. It can move extremely fast in this way to get away from predators, but it takes a whole lot of energy. But when it’s moving downhill, with gravity on its side, it can continue to cartwheel longer.

Cartwheeling isn’t something the snake does often, and it’s rare that a human would ever observe it. But just like sidewinding, some scientists think cartwheeling might be a motion that more snakes can do if they really need to. Maybe that’s where the hoop snake legend started.

Let’s finish with a suggestion from Nora, who wanted to learn more about the green anaconda. That’s a scary snake for sure, because it happens to be the biggest snake alive today, and almost the longest, as far as we know.

The green anaconda lives throughout much of South America, although not in Patagonia because like most reptiles, it needs warm weather to function. It’s a beautiful olive green with black blotches, and it’s a big, bulky snake. It spends a lot of time in the water, which helps it stay cool in hot weather and helps support its weight comfortably, and its eyes are near the top of its head so it can watch for prey while it’s mostly submerged.

The anaconda is a member of the boa family and is a constrictor. It’s not venomous, but you really don’t want a hug from a hungry anaconda. Its body is bulky because it’s incredibly strong, and once it starts to contract its muscles, whatever it’s constricting has only minutes left to live. It can kill animals as large as caimans, which are a type of crocodile, tapirs, capybaras, deer, and even jaguars. For the most part, though, an anaconda doesn’t want to bother with prey that could potentially hurt it, so it will stick with smaller animals that are still big enough to make it worth the effort. And yes, it is possible that an anaconda in the wild could kill and eat a human, but there’s no reliable evidence that it’s ever happened.

It’s hard to know exactly how long and how heavy an anaconda can get. There are lots of stories of 30-foot, or 9-meter snakes, but that seems to be a wild exaggeration. Snakes are stretchy, and a healthy live snake doesn’t really want to stretch out straight to be measured. A dead snake is even stretchier than a live snake. A shed snakeskin is the stretchiest of all, and usually has stretched out quite a bit when the snake was shedding. A good estimate is that a big female anaconda can grow about 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh around 250 lbs, or 114 kg. Males are smaller on average, and a wild snake will weigh less than one kept in captivity.

There are definitely larger individual anacondas, especially considering that reptiles continue to grow throughout their lives, but they’re probably not that much longer. This is only a little shorter than the reticulated python, which can definitely grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters.

One important detail about the size of the green anaconda is that the biggest snakes live in the Amazon rainforest–but the Amazon rainforest is really hard for humans to navigate safely and most anacondas killed or kept in captivity lived in other parts of South America. So there might easily be anacondas in the rainforest that are much bigger than the ones scientists have been able to measure so far.

In February of 2024, a journal article was published about a 2022 National Geographic nature documentary and scientific expedition to the Amazon basin to find a rumored population of extra-large anacondas. The expedition was led by hunters from the Waorani people, who consider the snakes sacred, and the hunters and their chief were credited as co-authors of the paper, as they should be since they provided so much information.

The scientists were able to examine several fully grown anacondas and take tiny tissue and blood samples to test later. They were astounded at the size of the snakes they found, including one that measured 20 and a half feet long, or 6.3 meters. The hunters reported seeing snakes that they estimated as over 24 feet long, or 7.5 meters, that might have weighed as much as 500 pounds, or 226 kg.

Beyond mere size, though, is something very interesting, which the scientists learned when they got home and ran genetic tests. The anacondas are actually quite different genetically from other anacondas known to science, that live farther south. They described the snake as a new species, which they refer to as the northern green anaconda, but it has actually resulted in a lot of controversy. Some scientists agree that the northern green anaconda is a separate species, others think it’s only a subspecies of the green anaconda, while others think the genetic differences are minor and separating the northern green anaconda from other anacondas isn’t justified by the evidence.

Obviously scientists need to follow up and learn more about the anacondas, but one thing is clear. There are some really, really big snakes out there in the Amazon.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 401: El Gran Maja and Other Giant Eels

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Thanks to Murilo for suggesting El Gran Maja for our first monster month episode of 2024!

Further reading:

The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel?

Further watching:

Borisao Blois’s YouTube channel [I have not watched very many of his videos so can’t speak to how appropriate they all are for younger viewers]

El Gran Maja, YouTube star:

The European eel [photo by GerardM – http://www.digischool.nl/bi/onderwaterbiologie/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=284678]:

A supposed 21-foot eel, a product of trick photography:

The slender giant moray eel [photo by BEDO (Thailand) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40262310]:

Show transcript:

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

It’s monster month, where we talk about weird, mysterious, and sometimes spooky creatures! This year I’ve decided to be less spooky and more weird, so let’s kick off the month with an episode all about gigantic eels. Thanks to Murilo for suggesting our first giant eel, El Gran Maja.

El Gran Maja is an eel that is supposed to live off the coast of northern Puerto Rico, and it’s supposed to grow 675 meters long. That’s 2,215 feet, or almost half a mile. That is an excessive amount of eel.

Obviously, an eel that big couldn’t actually exist. By the time its front end noticed danger, its back end could already be eaten by a whole family of sharks. But maybe it was based on a real eel that grows really long. Let’s take a look at some eels we know exist, and then we’ll return to El Gran Maja and learn some very interesting things about it.

Eels are fish, but not every animal that’s called an eel is actually an eel. Some are just eel-shaped, meaning they’re long and slender. Electric eels aren’t actually eels, for instance, but are more closely related to catfish. Most eels live in the ocean at the beginning and end of their lives, and freshwater in between.

For example, the European eel has a life cycle that’s pretty common among eels. It hatches in the ocean into a larval stage that looks sort of like a transparent leaf. Over the next six months to three years, the larvae swim and float through the ocean currents, closer and closer to Europe, feeding on plankton and other tiny food. Toward the end of this journey, they grow into their next phase, where they resemble eels instead of leaf-shaped tadpoles, but are still mostly transparent. They’re called glass eels at this point. The glass eels make their way into rivers and slowly migrate upstream. Once a glass eel is in a good environment it metamorphoses again into an elver, which is basically a small eel. As it grows it gains more pigment until it’s called a yellow eel. Over the next decade or two it grows and matures, until it reaches its adult length—typically around 3 feet, or about a meter. When it’s fully mature, its belly turns white and its sides silver, which is why it’s called a silver eel at this stage. Silver eels migrate more than 4,000 miles, or 6500 km, back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, lay eggs, and die.

One place where European eels live is Loch Ness in Scotland, and in the 1970s the idea that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster might actually be sightings of unusually large eels became popular. A 2018 environmental DNA study brought the idea back up, since the study discovered that there are a whole, whole lot of eels in Loch Ness. The estimate is a population of more than 8,000 eels in the loch, which is good since the European eel is actually critically endangered. But most of the eels found in Loch Ness are smaller than average, and the longest European eel ever measured was only about 4 feet long, or 1.2 meters.

An eel can’t stick its head out of the water like Nessie is supposed to do, but it does sometimes swim on its side close to the water’s surface, which could result in sightings of a string of many humps undulating through the water.

But the Loch Ness monster aside, the European eel isn’t very big compared to many species of eel. The European conger eel is the heaviest eel known, although not the longest. It lives off the coast of Europe down to northern Africa, and also in the Mediterranean Sea. An exceptionally large female might be as much as 10 feet long, or 3 meters, but it’s also chonkier than other eels. The largest conger ever measured reportedly weighed 350 lbs, or almost 159 kg, and was caught in a net off the coast of Iceland, although that report isn’t very reliable.

In 2015, a lot of newspaper reports talked about a huge eel caught off the coast of Devon, England. They printed pictures of a massively huge eel hung up in front of the fishermen who caught it. The articles said the eel was as much as 21 feet long, or 6.4 meters, and weighed 160 lbs, or just over 72 kg.

But if you think about it, there’s something fishy (sorry) about the story. If you picture a big man, say a football player who’s fit and strong, he might be about six feet tall, or 1.8 meters, and weigh a bit more than 200 lbs, or maybe 95 kg. But the eel weighed a lot less than that hypothetical man, and eels are strongly muscled even though they’re slender in shape. A 21 foot eel should weigh much more than a football player.

Most likely, reporters looked at the photo and compared it to the fishermen, and came up with the 21 foot length themselves. But it’s a trick photo, even if the trick wasn’t planned, because the eel was hung up very close to the camera while the fishermen were much farther back, which makes the eel look huge in comparison. Not only that, but when you hang a dead eel up by its head, it stretches so that it looks longer than it really was when it was alive. Other pictures of the eel make it look much shorter.

As it turns out, the fishermen who caught the eel didn’t even measure it. They thought it might have been up to 10 feet long, but it might have been closer to 7, or 2 meters. That’s still a big eel, and the weight may be close to a reliable record of heaviest eel, but it’s nowhere near the longest eel ever measured.

That record goes to the slender giant moray eel, which lives in muddy coastal water of the Pacific Ocean. It’s brown and isn’t especially exciting to look at unless you’re an eel enthusiast or an actual eel yourself, but the longest eel ever reliably measured was a slender giant moray. That was in 1927 in Queensland, Australia. The eel measured just shy of 13 feet long, or 3.94 meters.

In other words, the longest eel ever measured is approximately 2,202 feet, or 671 meters, shorter than El Gran Maja. But to learn more about El Gran Maja we have to talk about something called the bloop.

The bloop is a sound recorded in 1997 off the tip of South America by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, AKA NOAA. The sound itself came from the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, and was so loud that it was recorded by sensors 3,000 miles away, or 5,000 km. But it was also an ultra-low-frequency sound, so that humans and most other animals wouldn’t be able to hear it at all.

This is what the bloop sounds like, sped up 16 times so that people can hear it:

[bloop sound]

It turns out that the bloop was made by a big iceberg breaking into pieces, and similar sounds have been recorded since by NOAA and other researchers. But when the bloop was first made public, its source was still a mystery, and pretty much everyone on the internet lost their minds with excitement thinking it was a deep-sea creature far bigger than a blue whale. People speculated about the size of the bloop monster and estimated it had to be about 705 feet long, or 215 meters, for it to make such a loud call.

A film-maker and artist named Borisao Blois was interested in the bloop monster and wanted to animate it, but decided it needed a rival to fight—and he wanted the rival to be even bigger. He invented El Gran Maja and animated a fight between the two. Because Blois wanted his monster to be exciting to look at during his films, he gave it a huge wide mouth filled with sharp, comb-like teeth, and six all-white eyes. The first video was released in 2001 and has more than 89 million views. Many more videos followed, along with creations made by other artists who were inspired by the original.

The videos Blois has made about El Gran Maja are popular, and some people even think it might be a real monster. Considering that an eel that big would need to eat an astounding amount of food every day to survive, and it’s big enough to swallow entire ships whole, it’s probably a good thing that it’s just a made-up monster.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 400: Four no wait Five Mysteries!

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To donate to help victims of Hurricane Helena:

Day One Relief – direct donation link

World Central Kitchen – direct donation link

It’s the big 400th episode! Let’s have a good old-fashioned mystery episode! Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting two of our animal mysteries today.

Further reading:

A 150-Year-Old Weird Ancient Animal Mystery, Solved

The Enigmatic Cinnamon Bird: A Mythical Tale of Spice and Splendor

First ever photograph of rare bird species New Britain Goshawk

Scientists stumbled onto toothy deep-sea “top predator,” and named it after elite sumo wrestlers

Bryde’s whales produce Biotwang calls, which occur seasonally in long-term acoustic recordings from the central and western Pacific

A stylophoran [drawing by Haplochromis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10946202]:

A cinnamon flycatcher, looking adorable [photo by By https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/ – https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/9728856384, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30338634]:

The rediscovered New Britain goshawk, and the first photo ever taken of it, by Tom Vieras:

The mystery fish photo:

The yokozuna slickhead fish:

The Biotwang maker, Bryde’s whale:

Show transcript:

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

We’ve made it to the big episode 400, and also to the end of September. That means monster month is coming up fast! To celebrate our 400th episode and the start of monster month, let’s have a good old-fashioned mysteries episode.

We’ll start with an ancient animal called a stylophoran, which first appears in the fossil record around 500 million years ago. It disappears from the fossil record around 300 million years ago, so it persisted for a long time before going extinct. But until recently, no one knew what the stylophoran looked like when it was alive, and what it could possibly be related to. It was just too weird.

That’s an issue with ancient fossils, especially ones from the Cambrian period. We talked about the Cambrian explosion in episode 69, which was when tiny marine life forms began to evolve into much larger, more elaborate animals as new ecological niches became available. In the fossil record it looks like it happened practically overnight, which is why it’s called the Cambrian explosion, but it took millions of years. Many of the animals that evolved 500 million years ago look very different from all animals alive today, as organisms evolved body plans and appendages that weren’t passed down to descendants.

As for stylophorans, the first fossils were discovered about 150 years ago. They’re tiny animals, only millimeters long, and over 100 species have been identified so far. The body is flattened and shaped sort of like a rectangle, but two of the rectangle’s corners actually extend up into little points, and growing from those two points are what look like two appendages. From the other side of the rectangle, the long flat side, is another appendage that looks like a tail. The tail has plates on it and blunt spikes that stick up, while the other two appendages look like they might be flexible like starfish arms.

Naturally, the first scientists to examine a stylophoran decided the tail was a tail and the flexible appendages were arm-like structures that helped it move around and find food. But half a billion years ago, there were no animals with tails. Tails developed much later, and are mainly a trait of vertebrates.

That led to some scientists questioning whether the stylophoran was an early precursor of vertebrates, or animals with some form of spinal cord. The spikes growing from the top of the tail actually look a little bit like primitive vertebrae, made of calcite plates. That led to the calcichordate hypothesis that suggested stylophorans gave rise to vertebrates.

Then, in 2014, scientists found some exceptionally well preserved stylophoran fossils in the Sahara Desert in Africa. The fossils dated to 478 million years ago and two of them actually had soft tissue preserved as the mineral pyrite. Pyrite is also called fool’s gold because it looks like gold but isn’t, so these were shiny fossils.

When the soft tissue was observed through electron microscopes in the lab, it became clear that the tails weren’t actually tails. Instead, they were more like a starfish arm, with what may be a mouth at the base. The arm was probably the front of the animal, not the back like a tail, and the stylophoran probably used it to grab food and maybe even to crawl around.

Most scientists today agree that stylophorans are related to modern echinoderms like starfish and urchins, but there is one big difference. Echinoderms show radial symmetry, but no stylophoran found so far does. It doesn’t really even show bilateral symmetry, since the two points aren’t really symmetrical to each other. We’re also not sure what the points were for and how such an unusual body plan really worked, so there are still a lot of mysteries left regarding the stylophoran.

Next let’s talk about a mythical bird, called some variation of the word cynomolgus, or just the cinnamon bird. Naturalists from the ancient world wrote about it, including Pliny the Elder and Aristotle, and it appeared in medieval bestiaries. It was said to be from Arabia and to build its nest of cinnamon sticks in the tops of very tall trees or on the sides of cliffs.

Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of cinnamon trees, various species of which are native to southern Asia and Oceania. It’s an evergreen tree that needs a tropical or subtropical climate to thrive, and it smells and tastes really good to humans. You might have seen cinnamon sticks, which are curled-up pieces of dried cinnamon bark, and that’s the same type of cinnamon people used in the olden days. Ground cinnamon is just the powdered bark. Like many other spices, it was highly prized in the olden days and cost a fortune for just a little bit of it. Ancient Egyptians used it as part of the embalming process for mummies, ancient Greeks left it as offerings to the sun god Apollo, ancient Romans burnt it during the funerals of nobility, and it was sought after by kings throughout the world.

One interesting thing is that if you live in the United States, the cinnamon in your kitchen cupboard is probably actually cassia, also called Chinese cinnamon because it’s native to southern China. Cassia is often mentioned alongside cinnamon in old writings, because they’re so similar, but true cinnamon comes from a tree native to Sri Lanka. It’s usually marketed as Ceylon cinnamon and is more expensive, but cassia is actually better for baking. True cinnamon has a more subtle flavor that’s especially good with savory dishes, but it loses a lot of its flavor if you bake with it.

Anyway, back in the olden days, no one outside of subtropical Asia and Oceania knew where cinnamon came from. The traders who bought it from locals to resell definitely weren’t going to tell anyone where it was from. They made up stories that highlighted just how hard cinnamon was to find and harvest, to discourage anyone from trying to find cinnamon on their own and to keep prices really high. As Pliny the Elder pointed out 2,000 years ago, the cinnamon bird was one of those stories.

The cinnamon bird was supposedly the only animal that knew where cinnamon trees grew, and it would peel pieces of the bark off with its beak, then carry them to the Arabian desert or somewhere just as remote, where it would build a nest of the bark. The birds were supposed to be enormous, sometimes so big that their open wings stretched from horizon to horizon. Their nests were equally large, but so hard to reach that no human could hope to climb up and collect the cinnamon. Instead, cinnamon hunters left dead oxen and other big animals near the area where the birds had nests. The birds would swoop down and carry the oxen back to their nests to eat, and the extra weight would cause the nests to fall. In other stories, cinnamon hunters would shoot at the nests with arrows with ropes attached. Once several arrows were lodged into a nest, the hunters would pull the ropes to dislodge the nest and cause it to fall, so they could collect the cinnamon.

Of course none of that is true. Some scholars think the cinnamon bird is probably the same mythical bird as the phoenix, but without any magical abilities. Others agree with Pliny the Elder that it was just a way for traders to raise their prices for cinnamon even more. Either way, the cinnamon bird is probably not a real animal.

There are birds with cinnamon in their name, but that’s just a reference to their coloration. Cinnamon is generally a reddish-brown in color, and in animals that color is often referred to as rufous, chestnut, or cinnamon. For example, the cinnamon flycatcher, which lives in tropical and cloud forests along the Andes Mountains in South America. It’s a tiny round bird, only about 5 inches long including its tail, or 13 cm. It’s dark brown and red-brown in color with black legs and beak, and a bright cinnamon spot on its wings. It eats insects, which you could probably guess from the name.

This is what a cinnamon flycatcher sounds like:

[tiny bird sound]

Next, we need to talk about the New Britain goshawk, which Richard from NC told me about recently. It lives in tropical forests of Papua New Guinea, and is increasingly threatened by habitat loss. In fact, it’s so rare that it was only known from four specimens, and it hadn’t been officially spotted since 1969 and never photographed—until March of 2024.

During a World Wide Fund for Nature expedition, a wildlife photographer named Tom Vierus took lots of pictures of birds. One bird he photographed was a hawk sitting in a tree. He didn’t realize it was a bird that hadn’t been seen by scientists in 55 years, until later when he and his team were going through his photographs.

The goshawk is large, and is gray and white with an orange face and legs. We know very little about the bird, naturally, but now that scientists know it’s alive and well, they can work with the local people to help keep it safe. It’s called the keango or kulingapa in the local languages.

Next, we have a bona fide mystery animal, and a deep-sea mystery animal at that—the best combination!

In 1965, the U.S. Navy teamed up with Westinghouse to build a submersible designed by the famous diver and naturalist Jacques Cousteau. The craft was called Deepstar 4000 and between 1965 and 1972 when it was retired, it conducted hundreds of dives in different parts of the world, allowing scientists to learn a lot about the ocean. It could safely dive to 4000 feet, or 1200 meters, which isn’t nearly as deep as many modern submersibles, but which is still impressive.

This was long before remotely operated vehicles, so the submersible had to have a crew inside, both scientists and pilots. One of the pilots of Deepstar 4000 was a man named Joe Thompson. In 1966 Thompson maneuvered the craft to the ocean floor off the coast of California to deploy water sensors, in an area called the San Diego Trough. They touched down on the ocean floor and Thompson looked out of the tiny porthole, only to see something looking in at him.

Thompson reported seeing a fish with mottled gray-black skin and an eye the size of a dinner plate. He estimated it was 25 feet long, or over 7 ½ meters, which was longer than the Deepstar 4000 itself. Within seconds, the fish swam away into the darkness.

But that’s not the end of the story, because the water sensors the craft had already placed sensed the animal’s movement. There was definitely something really big near the craft. Even more interesting, an oceanographer had placed some underwater cameras in the area, and soon after Thompson’s sighting, the cameras took pictures of a huge gray fish.

While Thompson was positive the fish had scales, which he described as being as big around as coffee cups, the photo shows a more shark-like skin criss-crossed with scars. The oceanographer consulted with an ichthyologist, who identified the fish as a Pacific sleeper shark. We’ve talked about other sleeper sharks in episode 74. We don’t know a lot about these sharks, but they are gray, live in deep water, and can grow over 23 feet long, or 7 meters.

But Thompson was never satisfied with the identification of his mystery fish as a big Pacific sleeper shark. He was adamant that his fish had scales, a much larger eye than sharks have, and a tail that was more reminiscent of a coelacanth’s lobed tail than a shark’s tail.

One suggestion is that Thompson saw a new species of slickhead fish. Slickheads are deep-sea fish that can grow quite large, but we don’t know much about them since they live in such deep waters. The largest known species grows at least 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, and possibly much longer. That’s the yokozuna slickhead, which was only discovered in 2021 by a scientific team studying cusk eels off the coast of Japan.

Most slickheads are small and eat plankton. This one was purplish in color, had lots of small sharp teeth, and was a strong, fast swimmer. When it was examined later, its stomach contents consisted of other fish, so it’s definitely a predator. Its eyes are also proportionately larger than a shark’s eyes. The slickhead gets its name because it doesn’t have scales on its head, but it does have scales on the rest of its body.

The yokozuna slickhead was discovered in a bay that’s well-known to both scientists and fishers, so the team didn’t believe at first that they could possibly have found a new species of fish there, especially one that was so big. But it definitely turned out to be new to science. More individuals have since been spotted, but they live very deep in the ocean, which explains why no one had seen one before. Interestingly, when the scientists first pulled the slickhead out of the water, they thought it looked a little like a coelacanth.

This episode was going to end there, but Richard from NC sent me another article about a whale mystery I’ve been talking about for years! It’s the so-called biotwang that we covered way back in episode 27.

In 2016 and early 2017, NOAA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Oregon State University dropped a titanium-encased ceramic hydrophone into Challenger Deep. To their surprise, it was noisy as heck down there in the deepest water on earth. The hydrophone picked up the sounds of earthquakes, a typhoon passing over, ships, and whalesong—including the call of a whale researchers couldn’t identify. This is what it sounds like:

[biotwang whale call]

Well, as of September 2024, we now know what animal produces the biotwang call. It’s a whale, and one already known to science, although we don’t know much about it. It’s Bryde’s whale, a baleen whale that can grow up to 55 feet long, or almost 17 meters. The calls have all been associated with groups of Bryde’s whales, or a mother with a calf, so the scientists think the whales might use the unusual call to communicate location with its podmates. Bryde’s whales make lots of other sounds, and the scientists also think they might be responsible for some other mystery whale calls.

If you remember episode 193, about William Beebe’s mystery fish, he reported spotting a massive dark fish from his bathysphere a few decades before the Deepstar 4000 was built. He didn’t see it well enough to identify it and never saw it again. It just goes to show that there are definitely mystery animals just waiting to be discovered, whether it’s in the deep sea or perched in a treetop.

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

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