Category Archives: cryptids

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.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 389: Updates 7 and the Lava Bear

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

Further reading:

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

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

Bootlace Worm: Earth’s Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin

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

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

First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered

Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction

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

A (badly) stuffed lava bear:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 388: Washington’s Eagle

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Further reading:

Audubon’s Bird of Washington: Unraveling the fraud that launched The Birds of America

The Mystery of the Missing John James Audubon Self-Portrait

Washington’s eagle, as painted by Audubon:

The tiny detail in Audubon’s golden eagle painting that is supposed to be a self-portrait:

The golden eagle painting as it was published. Note that there’s no tiny figure in the lower left-hand corner:

Show transcript:

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

This past weekend I was out of town, or to be completely honest I will have been out of town, because I’m getting this episode ready well in advance. Since July 4 was only a few days ago, or will have been only a few days ago, and July 4 is Independence Day in the United States of America, I thought it might be fun to talk about a very American bird, Washington’s eagle.

We talked about it before way back in episode 17, and I updated that information for the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book for its own chapter. When I was researching birds for episode 381 I revisited the topic briefly and realized it’s so interesting that I should just turn it into a full episode.

We only have two known species of eagle in North America, the bald eagle and the North American golden eagle. Both have wingspans that can reach more than 8 feet, or 2.4 meters, and both are relatively common throughout most of North America. But we might have a third eagle, or had one only a few hundred years ago. We might even have a depiction of one by the most famous bird artist in the world, James Audubon.

In February 1814, Audubon was traveling on a boat on the upper Mississippi River when he spotted a big eagle he didn’t recognize. A Canadian fur dealer who was with him said it was a rare eagle that he’d only ever seen around the Great Lakes before, called the great eagle. Audubon was familiar with bald eagles and golden eagles, but he was convinced the “great eagle” was something else.

Audubon made four more sightings over the next few years, including at close range in Kentucky where he was able to watch a pair with a nest and two babies. Two years after that he spotted an adult eagle at a farm near Henderson, Kentucky. Some pigs had just been slaughtered and the eagle was looking for scraps. Audubon shot the bird and took it to a friend who lived nearby, an experienced hunter, and both men examined the body carefully.

According to the notes Audubon made at the time, the bird was a male with a wingspan of 10.2 feet, or just over 3 meters. Since female eagles are generally larger than males, that means this 10-foot wingspan was likely on the smaller side of average for the species. It was dark brown on its upper body, a lighter cinnamon brown underneath, and had a dark bill and yellow legs.

Audubon named the bird Washington’s eagle and used the specimen as a model for a life-sized painting. Audubon was meticulous about details and size, using a double-grid method to make sure his bird paintings were exact. This was long before photography.

So we have a detailed painting and first-hand notes from James Audubon himself about an eagle that…doesn’t appear to exist.

Audubon painted a few birds that went extinct afterwards, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, along with less well-known birds like Bachman’s warbler and the Carolina parakeet. He also made some mistakes. Many people think Washington’s eagle is another mistake and was just an immature bald eagle, which it resembles.

But here’s the problem. Audubon wasn’t always truthful. He painted some birds that he never saw but claimed he did, because another bird illustrator had painted them first. Once he claimed he went hunting with Daniel Boone in Kentucky in 1810, but at that time Boone would have been in his 70s and was living several states away.

Audubon also claimed that he discovered a little bird called Lincoln’s sparrow, but this wasn’t the case. His wife’s transcript of his diary doesn’t match up with the account that Audubon published about the discovery, but magically, when his granddaughter published her version of the diary later, Audubon’s discovery of the sparrow was in it. Historians think his granddaughter changed the diary entry to match up with Audubon’s published claim, and then she burned the original diaries. Further research into Audubon’s published writings have revealed plagiarism, false data, outright lies, and even completely fake species.

Audubon was also patriotic, as evidenced by his naming the eagle after George Washington. His journals and letters are full of praise for Washington, who died in 1799, only fifteen years before Audubon first saw the “great eagle.” There’s always a chance that Audubon wanted to name a bird after his idol, but not just any bird. It had to be majestic and bold, the largest eagle in the world! Maybe he decided to invent one.

Audubon also needed money to continue his work of painting birds, and most of the money came from English nobility. His painting and notes about a gigantic eagle made a real splash, bringing him money and fame for the rest of his life. But no evidence of the eagle’s existence has been discovered in the last 200 years. All we have are one man’s notes, a painting, and some stories of other specimens here and there. What we don’t have are the specimens, not even any feathers.

While we’re talking about one Audubon eagle mystery, let’s learn about another mystery. While Audubon was an incredible painter of birds, he wasn’t all that great at painting people. Only two of his famous bird paintings contain human figures, and one of them is his painting of the golden eagle. The other is a hunter painted in the background of the snowy egret, but Audubon didn’t paint that figure himself. He painted the bird, but hired another artist to paint the background. But this isn’t the case for the golden eagle painting, and that’s where the mystery lies. Even though it’s not technically anything to do with the bird, I know we’re all here for a good mystery too, so let’s talk about this painting.

Most of the time Audubon shot the birds he painted, which isn’t a great thing to do but which was common back then for scientists and collectors to shoot even very rare animals. Few people really understood conservation at the time. In the case of the golden eagle, though, the bird was already so rare in the early 19th century that Audubon couldn’t find one to shoot. He eventually bought one from a museum in 1833—but the bird wasn’t dead. It was injured, and Audubon was so impressed by its beauty that he almost set it free. But he needed to paint the bird, and in order to do that to his own meticulous standard, the bird had to be dead so he could really examine it in detail. So, after wrestling with his conscience, he killed the bird.

He spent the next two weeks drawing, studying, and eventually painting the bird. As soon as he finished, he reportedly had a mental breakdown. Not only had he been painting almost nonstop for years at that point, he really didn’t like killing birds. Plus, in the case of the golden eagle, instead of shooting it from a distance, he had killed it up close in person—as humanely as possible, but he still ended its life, and that bothered him.

The mystery comes from a detail in the painting’s background. The golden eagle is shown in front of a dramatic background of snowy mountains, with a dead snowshoe hare in its talons. But in a tiny detail in the lower left-hand corner, a man is shown crossing a gorge on a fallen tree trunk. Strapped onto the man’s back is a dead golden eagle.

The man is awkwardly rendered, but experts believe it’s a self-portrait of Audubon himself. Some experts believe Audubon included himself with a dead eagle, navigating a perilous climb, to indicate his emotional struggle in killing the bird. But when the painting was eventually included in Audubon’s famous book of bird illustrations, the figure was gone. The gorge with the fallen tree remains, but the little man carrying the dead bird has been painted out.

The question is why. Who made that decision, Audubon himself or the publisher? If Audubon did it, was it because he was embarrassed that he’d included a self-portrait, or was he embarrassed at the poor rendering of his figure, or did he just think it detracted from the painting, or some other reason? If the publisher did it, did he dislike the badly painted little man, or did Audubon ask him to remove the figure, or some other reason? We don’t know, and very likely we’ll never know.

While Audubon reportedly loved birds, it turns out he wasn’t a great human. Besides shooting a whole lot of birds and other animals, sometimes hundreds in a single day, and lying in published scientific papers, he “owned” enslaved people and reportedly made money selling them. (Just saying that sentence makes me so mad. You cannot own people.) In 2023, members of the National Audubon Society called for the group to change its name and drop any mention of Audubon, and when the board of directors said no, a lot of members resigned.

I came into this topic really hoping Washington’s eagle was a real bird, and believing that James Audubon was an artist who loved birds and was an honest man who made some mistakes. Now I’ve discovered that Audubon was a liar and a bad person, and that Washington’s eagle was probably just the result of one of his lies. At least we still have golden eagles, bald eagles, and lots of other amazing birds to admire!

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

Thanks for listening!

 

Episode 387: The Link Between Fossils and Folklore

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Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode!

Further reading:

Paleontologists Debunk Popular Claim that Protoceratops Fossils Inspired Legend of Griffin

The Fossil Dragons of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland

The Lindworm statue:

A woolly rhinoceros skull:

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

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

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 386: The Greater Siren and the Anhinga

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Thanks to Kai and Emily for their suggestions this week!

The greater siren [photo by Kevin Stohlgren, taken from this site]:

The anhinga [photo by Tim from Ithaca – Anhinga, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15526948]:

An anhinga swimming [photo by Wknight94, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two animals, one suggested by Kai and the other suggested by Kai’s mom Emily. It’s so awesome to hear when families like to listen to the podcast together. This episode even includes a mystery animal I bet you’ve never heard of.

Let’s start with Kai’s suggestion, the greater siren. The greater siren is an amphibian, specifically a salamander, but it’s probably not the kind of salamander you’re thinking of. For one thing, it can grow over three feet long, or about a meter, which is pretty darn big for a salamander. It’s dark green or gray in color with tiny yellow or green speckles, and while it has short front legs, those are the only legs it has or needs. It also has external gills which it keeps throughout its life, unlike most salamanders who lose their external gills when they metamorphose into adults.

The greater siren lives primarily in Florida, but it’s also found in coastal wetlands throughout much of the southeastern United States. It’s mostly nocturnal and during the day it hides among water plants or under rocks, and will even burrow into the mud. At night it comes out to find food, which includes crayfish and other crustaceans, insects and spiders, little fish, other amphibians, snails, and even algae. It swallows its food whole, even snails and other mollusks. It poops out the shells and other undigestible pieces.

The grater siren’s body is long but thin, sort of like an eel, with a rounded tail that’s slightly flattened to help it swim. While it does spend its whole life in the water, it has small lungs that allow it to breathe air if it needs to. It can wriggle above ground for short distances if it needs to find a new pond or river, and sometimes it will sun itself on shore. In drought conditions when its water dries up, the greater siren will burrow into the mud and secrete mucus that mixes with dead skin cells to form a sort of cocoon. The cocoon covers everything but the siren’s mouth, so it can still breathe. Then it enters a state of torpor called aestivation, and it can stay in its mud cocoon for a long time, possibly as much as five years, and still be fine once the water returns. It does lose a lot of its body fat and its gills wither away, but it regenerates them quickly once it has water, and will gain weight quickly too once it has food.

In early spring, the female siren lays her eggs in shallow water. The male fertilizes them and takes care of them for the next two months, when they hatch into little bitty sirens that go off on their own right away.

The greater siren has tiny eyes and probably doesn’t see very well. It has a good sense of smell instead, and it can also sense movement and vibrations around it with its lateral line system. This is an organ found in many fish and a lot of larval amphibians, although the greater siren retains it throughout its life. It allows the animal to sense the movement of water in extremely fine detail. The greater siren can probably also sense electrical impulses, which is something that all animals generate when they use their muscles.

If there’s a greater siren, you may be thinking, there must be a lesser siren too. There is, and it’s very similar to the greater siren, just not as big. It only grows about two feet long at most, or 61 cm.

Kai mentioned that the greater siren looks a lot like the axolotl, a critically endangered salamander found only in Mexico. I checked to see if the two salamanders were closely related and was actually surprised to find that they’re not. They’re both salamanders and therefore share the same order, but that’s all. The greater siren and its close relations do share one important trait with the axolotl, though, which is neotony. Neotony is when an adult organism retains juvenile traits, which in the case of the salamander means it retains gills and lives underwater as an adult.

Next, Emily wanted to learn more about a bird called the anhinga. It’s sometimes called the snakebird because it has a long, serpentine neck. But before we learn about the anhinga, let’s learn about a mystery animal from Kentucky. I promise this will make sense in a minute.

In 1993 a man named Barton Nunnelly and his wife were sitting in their back yard in Stanley County, Kentucky. It was a nice day and their house was close to the Ohio River, so as they often did they just relaxed and watched the river. On this particular day, they both noticed a strange animal in the water. It was snake-like with a bill similar to a duck’s, but it obviously wasn’t a duck. It swam with its head and neck above the water, but its body was never visible. It frequently sank into the water, then surfaced elsewhere. The couple watched the animal for half an hour before it disappeared downstream.

For most people, that sighting would just be an interesting story to tell at parties, but Barton Nunnelly was a cryptozoologist. That’s someone who likes to investigate mystery animals, and while it’s a great word, it’s not an official branch of science. Zoologists, biologists, and other scientists study mystery animals all the time as part of their jobs. Nunnelly investigated—and in fact still does investigate, since he’s alive and well—mystery animals that are a lot more mystery than animal, like Bigfoot. He wrote about his sighting of what he thought might be a young freshwater sea serpent in his book Mysterious Kentucky.

Now, with Nunnelly’s sighting in mind, let’s return to the anhinga and learn a little more about this unusual bird. It can grow almost three feet in length, or about 90 cm, with a nearly four-foot wingspan, or 115 cm. A lot of its body length is due to the long neck. The male is black all over with a white tail-tip, while the female looks similar but has a brown head and neck. It looks similar to the double-crested cormorant, a close relation, but it has a longer, sharper bill. It lives throughout much of South and Central America, and is also common around the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the southeastern United States. In North America it usually stays near the coast or around wetlands, but sometimes it’s found farther inland, especially along rivers.

The most interesting feature of the anhinga is the way it hunts. It has big webbed feet and swims extremely well, and it hunts fish, frogs, and other small animals underwater. Unlike other water birds, which have water-repellent oils coating their feathers, as soon as the anhinga gets in the water, its feathers get all wet. This causes it to lose buoyancy and sink, but that’s just fine with the anhinga. It also has dense bones compared to most birds, which helps it stay underwater. The bird swims underwater until it gets close to a fish or other prey animal. Then it stabs the animal with its sharp bill, before bringing it above water to swallow. Often it will swim with its body completely submerged but its head and neck sticking up out of the water.

One interesting fact about the anhinga is that it has no nostrils. It can only breathe through its mouth. It can hold its breath underwater for about four minutes and during that time can travel quite a distance, up to about 100 yards, or 90 meters, completely underwater. In addition to fish and frogs, it will eat crayfish, crabs, insects, water snakes, and lots of other small animals. After it’s done hunting, or if it wants a rest, it will stand in the sun with its wings spread in order to dry its feathers. Cormorants do this too for the same reason.

Now, think back to Barton Nunnelly’s sighting of a duck-billed water serpent. It sounds to me an awful lot like Nunnelly saw an anhinga hunting in the river. It’s a rare visitor that far inland, but not unheard of. Naturally, not everyone knows every single bird in the world, but I feel like if you’re going to write a book about mystery animals, you should do a little research first. But maybe that’s just me.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 381: Out of Place Birds

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

Further reading:

ABA Rare Bird Alert

One Reason Migrating Birds Get Lost Is Out of This World

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

A Vagrant European Robin Is Drawing Huge Crowds in China

Bird migration: When vagrants become pioneers

A red-cockaded woodpecker:

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

Steller’s sea eagle:

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

A robin:

Mandarin ducks:

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!