Category Archives: cryptids

Episode 067: More Sea Monsters

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Finally, it’s the follow-up to our first sea monsters episode that sounds so terrible now that I know how to put a podcast together!

Here’s the published drawings of a strange animal seen from the HMS Daedalus:

Here’s Drummond’s sketch of what he saw:

Here’s a sketch of the HMS Plumper animal sighted:

And here’s a sei whale rostrum sticking up out of the water while it’s skim feeding:

Sei whales are neat and have gigantic mouths:

The rotten “sea serpent” that’s actually a decomposing baleen whale:

The Naden Harbour Carcass. It’s the black thing on the table with a white backdrop. It doesn’t look like much, but you probably wouldn’t look like much either after being eaten by a sperm whale:

Unexpected seal says “Hello, I am not a sea serpent, I am a stock photo”:

Hagelund’s sketch of the little animal he caught:

A pipefish with a lollipop tail and some drawings of pipefish:

The strange animal seen from the Valhalla:

Show transcript:

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

Recently I listened to episode six, about sea monsters. It’s climbed to our third most popular episode and when I heard it again, oh man, I winced. I was still really new to podcasting then and that episode sounds like someone reading a book report out loud to the class. So it’s time to do a new sea monsters episode and explore more mysteries of the world’s oceans, hopefully with a lot more vocal expression.

On August 6, 1848, about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the captain and some of the crew of HMS Daedalus saw something really big in the water. The ship was sailing between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena on the way back to England from the East Indies. It was an overcast day with a fresh wind, but nothing unusual. The midshipman noticed something in the water he couldn’t identify and told the officer of the watch, who happened to be walking the deck at the time with the captain. Most of the crew was at supper.

This is what the captain, Peter M’Quhae, described in his report when the ship arrived at Plymouth a few months later.

“On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and, as nearly as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal à fleur d’eau [that means at the water’s surface], no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed in our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the S.W., which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose.

“The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake; and it was never, during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like a mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back.”

The original Times article also mentioned large jagged teeth in a jaw so large that a man could have stood up inside the mouth, but this seems to be an addition by the article’s writer, not the captain or crew.

The officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, also published an excerpt from his own journal about the sighting, which appeared in a journal called the Zoologist in December 1848. It reads, “In the 4 to 6 watch, at about five o’clock, we observed a most remarkable fish on our lee quarter, crossing the stern in a S.W. direction; the appearance of its head, which, with the back fin, was the only portion of the animal visible, was long, pointed, and flattened at the top, perhaps ten feet in length, the upper jaw projecting considerably; the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head, and visible occasionally; the captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin about the same distance behind it; the upper part of the head and shoulders appeared of a dark brown colour, and beneath the under jaw a brownish white. It pursued a steady undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the surface of the water, and in rather a raised position, disappearing occasionally beneath a wave for a very brief interval, and not apparently for purposes of respiration. It was going at the rate of perhaps from twelve to fourteen miles an hour, and when nearest, was perhaps one hundred yards distant. In fact it gave one quite the idea of a large snake or eel. No one in the ship has ever seen anything similar, so it is at least extraordinary. It was visible to the naked eye for five minutes, and with a glass for perhaps fifteen more. The weather was dark and squally at the time, with some sea running.”

To translate some of this into metric, 60 feet is a little more than 18 meters, the 15 inch diameter the captain reported of the neck just behind the head is about 38 cm, and the speed of 13 mph is almost 21 km per hour.

A lot of people wrote in to the Times to discuss the sighting and suggest solutions. One writer claimed the animal couldn’t be a snake or eel, since a side to side undulating motion would have been obvious as the animal propelled itself with its tail. Another said it had to have been a snake but the undulations were only in the tail, which was below the water. Yet another article suggested it was a monstrous seal or other pinniped. Captain M’Quhai took exception to that one and wrote back stressing that he was familiar with seals and this definitely had not been one. Other suggestions included a basking shark or some other unknown species of shark, a plesiosaur, or a giant piece of seaweed.

Other similar sightings are on record, including a very similar one from the very end of 1849 off the coast of Portugal. In that one, an officer on HMS Plumper reported seeing “a long black creature with a sharp head, moving slowly, I should think about two knots, through the water, in a north westerly direction, there being a fresh breeze at the time, and some sea on. I could not ascertain its exact length, but its back was about twenty feet if not more above water; and its head, as near as I could judge, from six to eight. I had not time to make a closer observation, as the ship was going six knots through the water, her head E. half S., and wind S.S.E. The creature moved across our wake towards a merchant barque on our lee-quarter, and on the port tack. I was in hopes she would have seen it also. The officers and men who saw it, and who have served in parts of the world adjacent to whale and seal fisheries, and have seen them in the water, declare they have neither seen nor heard of any creature bearing the slightest resemblance to the one we saw. There was something on its back that appeared like a mane, and, as it moved through the water, kept washing about, but before I could examine it more closely, it was too far astern.”

Illustrations of the Daedalus sea serpent, which M’Quhai approved, were published in the Times. But the original sketch made by Drummond in his journal the day he saw the animal gives us a much better idea of what it looked like and what it probably was. The sketch accompanying the Plumper sighting reinforces the solution. It’s probable that both sightings, and probably many others, were of a sei whale skim feeding.

The sei is a baleen whale that’s generally considered the fourth largest whale, with some individuals growing almost 65 feet long, or nearly 20 meters. Females are larger than males. It lives all over the world although it likes deep water that isn’t too cold or too hot. It’s a mottled dark grey. Its fins are relatively short and pointed, its dorsal fin is tall and fairly far back on the animal’s body. Its tail flukes aren’t usually visible. Its rostrum, or beak, is pointed and short baleen plates hang down from it. The sei whale’s baleen is unusually fine, with a fringe that is curly and white and looks something like wool.

Unlike some whales, it doesn’t dive very deeply or for very long, and it’s usually relatively solitary. It spends a lot of its time at or near the surface, frequently skim feeding to capture krill and other tiny food. It does this by cruising along with its mouth open, often swimming on its side. It has throat pleats that allow its huge mouth to expand and hold incredible amounts of water. The whale closes its mouth and raises its huge tongue, forcing the water out through its baleen plates. Whatever krill and fish are caught by the baleen, the whale swallows.

A lot of baleen whales skim feed occasionally, but the sei is something of a skim feeding specialist. And it has a narrow, pointed rostrum that often sticks up out of the water as it skim-feeds, with pale baleen hanging down. This might easily look like a long snakey animal with a small head held up out of the water, especially in poor viewing conditions when the people involved are convinced they’re looking at a sea serpent. The sei whale is a fast swimmer too, easily able to cruise at the speeds described by the Daedalus and Plumper crews.

It’s not a perfect match, of course. The sei whale’s dorsal fin is pretty distinctive and if seen properly would have immediately told the crew they were looking at a whale. No one reported seeing anything that could be considered a whale’s breath either, sometimes called a spout. Since whales exhale forcefully and almost empty their lungs when they do, the cloud of warm air expelled looks like steam and is a tell-tale sign of a whale. Whales also don’t have hair on their rostrum that could wash around like a mane on a sea serpent’s neck. So while it seems likely that the Daedalus and Plumper sightings were of sei or other baleen whales skim feeding, we can’t know for sure.

Incidentally, the sei whale wasn’t fully protected from whaling until 1986. Japan still hunts sei whales, supposedly for scientific purposes but no one’s really fooled. The whales they catch are sold for meat. In 2010, a restaurant in Los Angeles closed after being caught serving sei whale meat. The sei whale is still endangered but if people would stop killing it maybe it would be doing better. Whalers reported that when harpooned, sei whales would cry audibly, which apparently disturbed the whalers. Maybe if your job involves making animals cry you should go back to school and get a degree in nursing or teaching or something else that will make the world a better place, not worse.

Another whale is responsible for a mystery carcass washed up in the Philippines in 2017. The carcass looks like a dragon-like sea monster, but that’s due to decomposition. It’s actually a baleen whale, probably a gray whale, that had apparently been floating around for a while, getting nastier and more nibbled on every day.

Speaking of nasty, nibbled-on dead things, and whaling, in 1937 a sperm whale brought to Naden Harbor Whaling Station on a small Canadian island for processing turned out to have something so extraordinary in its stomach that the whalers took pictures of it. It was about ten feet long, or three meters, with a head said to be horselike or camel-like in shape with a drooping nose. Its body was long and thin, and it had short pectoral flippers and a single fluke or spade-shaped end on its tail. Its skin was either smooth or furry depending on which witness you believe, and there were signs it may have had baleen or gill rakers.

The carcass wasn’t kept, but pieces of it were reportedly sent to the British Columbia Provincial Museum, whose museum director suggested it might be a fetal baleen whale. Locals thought it might be a young cadborosaurus, a sea serpent occasionally sighted off the coast of British Columbia. It gets its name from Cadboro Bay, and is usually called Caddy. Caddy is generally described as 5 to 15 meters long, or 16 to almost 50 feet long, with a horse-like or camel-like head, big eyes, and a tail with horizontal flukes like a whale’s. Some witnesses say it has brown fur and horns or ears of some kind.

In 1992, a retired museum researcher named Ed Bousfield found three photos of the Naden Harbor carcass, long believed lost. This sparked up lots of debate, naturally, and lots of suggestions as to what the animal might be—a basking shark, a sea lion or other pinniped, an eel, an oarfish, and many others.

The problem, of course, is that the pictures aren’t very clear, we don’t have the actual body to examine, and the carcass had spent some time in the belly of a sperm whale so was in the process of being digested. But the whalers who found it had never seen anything like it before.

In 1968, a man called William Hagelund was yachting with his family when he heard splashing and saw a strange creature in the water. It was small, only about 16 inches long, or 40 cm, so he lowered a dinghy and caught it in a net. It had what appeared to be armored plates on its back, its flippers were odd-shaped, its snout was elongated but widened at the end, and it had a downy yellow fuzz or fur underneath. Hagelund put it in a bucket but it was so frantic to get out that he worried it would die. He made a drawing of it and released it.

Hagelund thought he’d caught a baby Caddy. But he didn’t share his story until twenty years later, when he wrote a book called Whalers No More.

But while Hagelund’s creature probably wasn’t a baby Caddy, it might have been something almost as strange. The pipefish is a fish related to the seahorse, and it resembles a seahorse that has straightened out. Some species have prehensile tails, some have little paddles at the end of their tails. Some are stripey. Like seahorses, the pipefish male has a brood pouch where he broods the female’s fertilized eggs. Not only does he protect the eggs, he supplies them with nutrients from his body while they grow. Because the female can lay more eggs than the male can hold in his brood pouch, females of some species of pipefish will have more than one mate. Pipefish rarely grow longer than around 16 inches, or 40 cm and have armored plating. The yellow fuzz Hagelund reported might have been algae.

It’s probable that at least some Caddy sightings are of moose swimming to or from one of the many small islands in the area. Moose will also dive to reach aquatic plants. Other Caddy sightings are probably of the Northern sea lion or Northern elephant seal, both of which are common in the area for at least part of the year.

Pinnipeds, in fact, may be the biggest factor to consider in any sea serpent or sea monster sightings. I learned this interesting fact after doing the research for the previous sea monster episode, but pinnipeds will stand vertically in the water to look around above the surface, and a big elephant seal can raise its head over three feet, or one meter, out of the water. If you’re in a boat and a big head and neck pops up out of the water nearby, your first thought is not going to be, “Oh, that’s an unexpected seal.” It’s going to be, “THIS GIANT ANIMAL IS GOING TO EAT ME.”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t definite sea monsters out there. Far from it. On December 7, 1905, two naturalists spotted an animal they couldn’t recognize off the coast of Brazil.

The pair were Michael Nicholl and Edmund Meade-Waldo, part of a research team on the Valhalla. The ship was about 15 miles, or 24 km, from the mouth of the Parahiba River. At 10:15 a.m. Nicoll spotted a dorsal fin above the water that he didn’t recognize, about 100 yards away, or 91 meters. He asked Meade-Waldo to take a look, and he couldn’t identify the fish either. The fin was roughly rectangular, close to two feet high and six feet long, or 61 cm and 1.8 meters, and dark brown with an edge Meade-Waldo described as crinkled.

Meade-Waldo was looking at the fin through his binoculars when a head and long neck emerged from the water in front of the fin. He estimated it as 7 or 8 feet high, or over 2 meters, with a brown, turtle-like head. The animal moved its neck from side to side. They watched it until it was out of sight as the ship sailed away, but early the next morning, around 2 am, three crew members spotted what they thought was the same animal swimming underwater.

Nicholl and Meade-Waldo published their report in 1906. We still have no idea what they saw.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 064: Updates and the Nandi Bear

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It’s update week! I call myself out for some mistakes, then catch us all up on new information about topics we’ve covered in the past. Then we’ll learn about the Nandi bear, a mystery animal that is probably not actually a bear.

Check out Finn and Lila’s Natural History and Horse Podcast on Podbean!

Check out the Zeng This! pop culture podcast while you’re at it!

A new species of Bird of Paradise:

Buša cattle:

Further reading/watching:

http://www.sci-news.com/biology/vogelkop-superb-bird-of-paradise-05924.html

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to dig into some updates to previous episodes! Don’t worry, it’ll be interesting. We’re also going to look at a mystery animal we haven’t examined before.

First, though, a big shout-out to Sir Finn Hayes, a long-time listener who has started his own podcast! It’s called Finn’s Natural History, although now I see it’s been renamed Finn and Lila’s Natural History and Horse Podcast, and you can find it on Podbean. I’ll put a link in the show notes. The great thing is, Finn is just ten years old but he and his younger sister Lila are already dropping knowledge on us about animals and plants and other things they find interesting. So give their podcast a listen because I bet you’ll like it as much as I do.

Before we get into the updates, let me call myself out on a few glaring mistakes in past episodes. In episode four, I called my own podcast by the wrong name. Instead of Strange Animals, I said Strange Beasties, which is my Twitter handle. In episode 29, I said Loch Ness was 50 miles above sea level instead of 50 feet, a pretty big difference. In episode 15 I called Zenger of the Zeng This! podcast Zengus, which is just unforgiveable because I really like that podcast and you’d think I could remember the cohost’s name. There’s a link to the Zeng This! podcast in the show notes. It’s a family-friendly, cheerful show about comics, movies, video games, and lots of other fun pop culture stuff.

If you ever hear me state something in the podcast that you know isn’t true, definitely let me know. I’ll look into it and issue a correction when appropriate. As they say on the Varmints Podcast, I am not an animal expert. I do my best, but sometimes I get things wrong. For instance, in episode 60, I said sirenians like dugongs and manatees have tails in place of hind legs like seals do, but sirenian tails actually developed from tails, not hind legs. Pinniped tails developed from hind legs and have flipper-like feet.

Anyway, here are some updates to topics we’ve covered in past episodes. It isn’t all-inclusive, mostly just stuff I’ve stumbled across while researching other animals.

In episode 47 about strange horses, I talked a lot about Przewalski’s horse. I was really hoping never to have to attempt that pronunciation again, but here we are. A new phylogenetic study published in February of 2018 determined that Przewalski’s horse isn’t a truly wild horse. Its ancestors were wild, but Przewalski’s horse is essentially a feral domestic horse. Its ancestors were probably domesticated around 5,500 years ago by the Botai people who lived in what is now northern Kazakhstan. The Przewalski’s horse we have now is a descendant of those domestic horses that escaped back into the wild long after its ancestors had died out. That doesn’t mean it’s not an important animal anymore, though. It’s been wild much longer than mustangs and other feral horses and tells us a lot about how truly wild horse ancestors looked and acted. Not only that, its wild ancestor is probably a different species or subspecies of the European wild horse, which was the ancestor of most other domestic horses. The next step for the team of researchers that conducted this study is figuring out more about the ancestors of domestic horses.

The mystery cattle episode also has an update. I didn’t mention Buša cattle in that episode, but I just learned something interesting about it. The Buša is a rare breed of domestic cow that developed in southeastern Europe. It’s a small, hardy animal well adapted to mountainous terrain, and it turns out that it’s the most genetically diverse breed of cattle out of sixty studied. The research team is working to help conserve the breed so that that genetic diversity isn’t lost.

Right after episode 61, where we talked about birds of paradise, researchers announced a new species of bird of paradise! The bird was already known to scientists, but they thought it was just a subspecies of the Superb Bird-of-Paradise. But new video footage of a unique mating dance helped researchers determine that this wasn’t just a subspecies, it was different enough to be its own species. It’s called the Vogelkop Superb Bird of Paradise, and the Superb Bird of Paradise is now called the Greater Superb Bird of Paradise to help differentiate the two species. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that has the video embedded if you want to watch it. It’s pretty neat.

In episode 25 we learned about Neandertals, and I said we didn’t have much evidence of them being especially creative by human standards. That was the case when I did my research last summer, but things have definitely changed. In February 2018 archaeologists studying cave paintings in Spain announced that paintings in at least three caves were made by Neandertals and not humans. The paintings have been dated to over 64,000 years old, which is 20,000 years before humans showed up in the area. The precise dating is due to a new and much more accurate dating technique called the uranium-thorium method, which measures the tiny deposits that build up on the paintings. So Neandertals might have been a lot more creative than we’ve assumed. Researchers are now looking at other cave art and artefacts like jewelry and sculptures to consider whether some might also have been made by Neandertals.

New studies about human migration out of Africa have also been published since our humans episode. Human fossils and stone tools found in what is now a desert in Saudi Arabia have been dated to 90,000 years ago, when the area was lush grassland surrounding a lake. Until this finding, researchers thought humans had not settled the area until many thousands of years later.

I think it was episode 27, Creatures of the Deeps, where I mentioned the South Java Deep Sea Biodiversity Expedition. Well, in only two weeks that expedition discovered more than a dozen new species of crustacean, including a crab with red eyes and fuzzy spines, collected over 12,000 animals to study, and learned a whole lot about what’s down there.

One thing I forgot to mention in episode 11 is that the vampire bat’s fangs stay sharp because they lack enamel. Enamel is a thin but very hard mineral coating found on the teeth of most mammals. It protects the teeth and makes them stronger. But vampire bats don’t chew hard foods like bones or seeds, and not having enamel means that their teeth are softer. I tried to find out more about this, like whether the bat does something specific to keep its teeth sharp, like filing them with tiny tooth files, but didn’t have any luck. On the other hand, I did learn that baby bats are born bottom-first instead of head-first, because this keeps their wings from getting tangled in the birthing canal.

Many thanks to Simon, who has sent me links to several excellent articles I would have missed otherwise. One is about the controversy about sea sponges and comb jellies, and which one was the ancestor of all other animals. We covered the topic in episode 41. Mere weeks after that episode went live, a new study suggests that sponges win the fight. Hurrah for sponges!

Simon also sent me an article about the platypus, which we learned about in episode 45. There’s a lot of weirdness about the platypus, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that platypus milk contains a unique protein so potently antibacterial that it could lead to the development of powerful new antibiotics. Researchers think the antibacterial properties are present in platypus milk because as you may remember, monotremes don’t have teats, just milk patches, and the babies lick the milk up. That means the milk is exposed to bacteria from the environment, so the protein helps keep platypus babies from getting sick.

Simon also suggests that in our mystery bears episode, I forgot a very important one, the Nandi bear! So this sounds like the perfect time to learn about the Nandi bear.

I had heard of the Nandi bear, but I had it confused with the drop bear, an Australian urban myth that’s used primarily to tease tourists and small children. But the Nandi bear is a story from Africa, and it might be based on a real animal.

It has a number of names in Africa and sightings have come from various parts of the continent, but especially Kenya, where it’s frequently called the chemosit. There are lots of stories about what it looks like and how it acts. Generally, it’s supposed to be a ferocious nocturnal animal that sometimes attacks humans on moonless nights, especially children. Some stories say it eats the person’s brain and leaves the rest of the body. That’s creepy. Also, just going to point this out, it’s extremely unlikely. Its shaggy coat is supposed to be dark brown, reddish, or black, and sometimes it will stand on its hind legs. When it’s standing on all four legs, it’s between three and six feet tall, or one to almost two meters. Its head is said to be bear-like in shape. Sometimes it’s described as looking like a hyena, sometimes as a baboon, sometimes as a bear-like animal. Its front legs are often described as powerful.

The first known sighting by someone who actually wrote down their account is from the Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society, published in 1912. I have a copy and I’m just going to read you the pertinent information. The account is by Geoffrey Williams. The Nandi expedition Williams mentions took place in 1905 and 1906, and while it sounds like it was just a bunch of people exploring, it was actually a military action by the British colonial rulers who killed over 1,100 members of the Nandi tribe in East Africa after they basically said, hey, stop taking our land and resources and people. During the campaign, livestock belonging to the Nandi were killed or stolen, villages and food stores burned, and the people who weren’t killed were forced to live on reservations. Anyway, here’s what Geoffrey Williams had to say about the Nandi bear, which suddenly doesn’t seem quite so important than it did before I learned all that:

“Several years ago I was travelling with a cousin on the Uasingishu just after the Nandi expedition, and, of course, long before there was any settlement up there. We had been camped on the edge of the Escarpment near the Mataye and were marching towards the Sirgoit Rock when we saw the beast. There was a thick mist, and my cousin and I were walking on ahead of the safari with one boy when, just as we drew near to the slopes of the hill, the mist cleared away suddenly and my cousin called out ‘What is that?’ Looking in the direction to which he pointed I saw a large animal sitting up on its haunches not more than 30 yards away. Its attidue was just that of a bear at the ‘Zoo’ asking for buns, and I should say it must have been nearly 5 feet high. It is extremely hard to estimate height in a case of this kind; but it seemed to both of us that it was very nearly, if not quite, as tall as we were. Before we had time to do anything it dropped forward and shambled away towards the Sirgoit with what my cousin always describes as a sort of sideways canter. The grass had all been burnt off some weeks earlier and so the animal was clearly visible.

“I snatched my rifle and took a snapshot at it as it was disappearing among the rocks, and, though I missed it, it stopped and turned its head round to look at us. It is in this position that I see it most clearly in my mind’s eye. In size it was, I should say, larger than the bear that lives in the pit at the ‘Zoo’ and it was quite as heavily built. The fore quarters were very thickly furred, as were all four legs, but the hind quarters were comparatively speaking smooth or bare. This distinction was very definite indeed and was the first thing that struck us both. The head was long and pointed and exactly like that of a bear, as indeed was the whole animal. I have not a very clear recollection of the ears beyond the fact that they were small, and the tail, if any, was very small and practically unnoticeable. The colour was dark and left us both with the impression that it was more or less of a brindle, like a wildebeeste, but this may have been the effect of light.”

A couple of years later, in the same journal, a man saddled with the name Blayney Percival wrote about the Nandi bear. He said, “The stories vary to a very large extent, but the following points seem to agree. The animal is of fairly large size, it stands on its hind legs at times, is nocturnal, very fierce, kills man or animals.” Percival thought the differing stories referred to different animals, known or unknown. He wrote, “An example of a weird animal was the beast described to me in the Sotik country; the name I forget, but the description was very similar to that of the chimiset. Fair size—my pointer dog being given as about its size; stood on hind legs; was very savage. Careful inquiries and a picture of the ratel settled the matter, then out came the information that it was light on the back and dark below, points that would have settled it at once.” The ratel, of course, is the honey badger.

In 1958, cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans wrote in his seminal work On the Track of Unknown Animals that the Nandi bear was probably based on more than one animal. Like Percival, he thought the different accounts were just too different. He thought at least some sightings were of honey badgers, while some were probably hyenas.

So if at least some accounts of the Nandi bear are of an unknown animal, what kind of animal might it be? Is it a bear? Do bears even live in Africa?

Africa has no bears now, but bear fossils at least three million years old have been found in South Africa and Ethiopia. Agriotherium africanum probably went extinct due to increased competition when big cats evolved to be fast, efficient hunters.

So it’s not likely that the Nandi bear is an actual bear. It’s also not likely it’s an ape of some kind, since apes are universally diurnal and the Nandi bear is described as nocturnal. Cryptozoologists have suggested all sorts of animals as a possible solution, but this episode is already getting kind of long so I’m not going to go into all of them. I’m just going to offer my own suggestion, which I have yet to see anywhere else, probably because it’s a bit farfetched. But hey, you never know.

The family of carnivores called Amphicyonidae are extinct now, as far as we know, but they lived throughout much of the world until about two million years ago. They’re known as bear-dogs and were originally thought to be related to bears, but are now considered more closely related to canids, possibly even the ancestors of canids. They are similar but not related to the dog-bears, Hemicyoninae, which are related to bears but which went extinct about 5 million years ago. Someone needs to sort out this bear-dog/dog-bear naming confusion.

Anyway, Amphicyonids lived in Africa, although we don’t have a whole lot of their fossils. The most recent Amphicyonid fossils we have date to about five million years ago and are of dog-sized animals that ate meat and lived in what are now Ethiopia and Kenya. Generally, Amphicyonids were doglike in overall shape but with a heavier bear-like build. They probably had plantigrade feet like bears rather than running on relatively small dog-like paws—basically, canids walk on their toes while bears walk on flat feet like humans. They were probably solitary animals and some researchers think they went extinct mainly because they couldn’t adapt to a changing environment and therefore different prey species, and couldn’t compete with smarter, faster pack hunting carnivores.

Maybe a species of Amphicyonid persisted in parts of Africa until recently, rarely seen but definitely feared for its ferocity. Probably not, because five million years is a long time to squeak by in an area with plenty of well-established carnivores. But maybe.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 061: The Qilin and the Phoenix

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This week we’re going to find out some surprising possible inspirations for the qilin, sometimes called the kirin or the Chinese unicorn, and the phoenix! Strap in, kids. We’re going to do history!

A qilin:

A giraffe:

My beautiful art of tsaidamotherium, both subspecies, with their weird horns:

A saiga antelope

A takin:

A bird of paradise:

Another bird of paradise:

Further reading:

Dale Drinnon’s Frontiers of Zoology about the qilin

An online Bestiary. This is where I got the quotes from Herodotus.

The Book of Beasts, trans. T.H. White

The Lungfish, The Dodo and the Unicorn by Willy Ley

Extraordinary Animals Revisited by Karl P.N. Shuker

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about two animals that most people consider mythological—but they might be based on real animals that are as extraordinary as the folktales surrounding them.

The first is the qilin, also called the kirin or some other close variation. These days it’s usually depicted with a pair of antlers like a deer, but in older legends and artwork it often only had one horn, so is sometimes called the Chinese unicorn. It can resemble a dragon with cloven hooves, or a bull-like or deer-like animal with scales or a scaly pattern on its body. In Japan it’s usually depicted with one horn that curves backwards from its forehead.

The qilin legend is thousands of years old, with the first references dating back to the 5th century BCE. It has traditionally been considered a gentle animal whose appearance foretold the birth or death of a great ruler, or if it appeared to a ruler, it foretold a long, peaceful reign. Supposedly it first appeared to the Emperor Fu Hsi 5000 years ago as he walked along the banks of the Yellow River. A single-horned animal emerged from the water and walked so daintily that its cloven hooves didn’t leave prints in the mud. A scroll on its back was miraculously not wet, and when Fu Hsi unrolled the scroll he saw a map of his kingdom and written characters that taught him written language.

In 1414, explorer Zheng He brought a giraffe to China for the first time and presented it to the emperor as a qilin. The emperor wasn’t fooled, but it was a good PR move to treat the animal as a qilin. But the qilin was never depicted with a long neck before then, and even after, long-necked qilins were rare in art and sculpture. On the other hand, the Japanese word for giraffe is kirin, so there was some overlap.

The qilin was supposed to be solitary and lived high in the mountains and in deep forests. It ate plants and was described in various ways, as having a deer’s body and a lion’s head, or a horse’s body with a dragon’s head, or some other combination. It always had cloven hooves.

In 398 BCE, so more than 2,400 years ago, Greek historian Ctesias wrote a book about India, including the animals found in that land. Ctesias had never actually visited India, although he had traveled to a lot of other countries. This is what he wrote about the animal we now know as the unicorn: “There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.” Then he talks about the horn for a few more sentences, especially its supposed ability to cure diseases and neutralize poisons. If you’re interested in this aspect of the unicorn legend, I go over it at length in episode five, about the unicorn.

Most researchers think Ctesias was talking about the rhinoceros. But maybe he was referring to another animal, one that possibly contributed to both the unicorn legend and also to the legend of the qilin.

Tsaidamotherium was a bovid that lived during the late Miocene, around half a million years ago. Its fossils have been found in Northwestern China. It was probably most closely related to the musk ox and was adapted for life in cold mountainous regions. It had a high nasal cavity, which would have helped warm air before it reached the lungs. Other bovids found in cold areas tend to have similar structures. The Saiga antelope has a bulbous-looking face due to its large nasal passages, as does the takin, both of which also live in and around the Himalayas. But both the saiga and the takin have a pair of clearly separated horns. The saiga’s horns are long and look like typical antelope horns, while the takin’s horns resemble those of a musk ox, curving to the sides in a sort of U shape.

The really striking thing about Tsaidamotherium is its horns, and no animal living today has horns even slightly like it. It had a pair, but only the right horn grew large. The left one was much smaller, so that from a distance it looked like it only had one large horn on its head. These are not slender unicorn horns, though. They’re not even bull-like cow horns. There are actually two species of Tsaidamotherium that we know of, and they had differently shaped horns. T. hedini had thick horns that grew upward from the head like cones. The other, T. brevirostrum, with fossilized remains only described in 2013, had the same mismatched horns but both were short and squat and probably bent forward. I’ll put a couple of drawings in the show notes to give you an idea.

There are hints that Tsaidamotherium may have survived well into the modern era, probably in isolated pockets in the Himalayan Mountains. Until the mid-19th century there were reports of animals matching T. hedini’s description in Tibet, although even there it was considered rare to the point of near-legend. The first fossilized remains of Tsaidamotherium weren’t discovered until the early 20th century, in 1932. One interesting note is that the larger horn of T. hedini would probably have resembled the conical Yeti skullcaps sometimes found in monasteries in the Himalayas, although that’s probably a coincidence.

The Tsaidamotherium as Qilin is a theory put forth by Dale Drinnon, and I’ll link to the relevant post in the show notes if you want to read more.

Like the unicorn legend, which in one form or another has spread throughout much of the world, the phoenix has a long and complicated history. The modern story is still very close to what people believed in the middle ages and even before. It’s a mythical bird that every so often, usually every 500 years, would burst into flame, burn to ashes, and be reborn from those ashes into a new phoenix. There is only ever one phoenix. It’s usually depicted as eagle-like but not an eagle, and is usually red or gold.

Medieval writers loved the phoenix, because its cycle of rebirth from its own dead body practically wrote itself as a strong allegory to the Christian idea of redemption and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In T.H. White’s translation of a 12th century bestiary, The Book of Beasts, the phoenix was supposed to live in Arabia and its big event is described like this:

“When it notices that it is growing old, it builds itself a funeral pyre, after collecting some spice branches, and on this, turning its body toward the rays of the sun and flapping its wings, it sets fire to itself of its own accord until it burns itself up. Then verily, on the ninth day afterward, it rises from its own ashes!”

After drawing the parallel with Christian symbolism, the book repeats itself with more detail, “it makes a coffin for itself of frankincense and myrrh and other spices, into which, its life being over, it enters and dies. From the liquid of its body a worm now emerges, and this gradually grows to maturity, until, in the appointed cycle of time, the Phoenix itself assumes the oarage of its wings, and there it is again in its previous species and form!”

Note that the second version of the story doesn’t mention fire. Instead of a fire, the phoenix builds itself a coffin from spices and dies inside it. Frankincense and myrrh are both plant resins used to make perfume and incense, by the way.

All this is interesting, but is the phoenix based on a real bird? People have been trying to figure that out for centuries. The problem is that the story is so old, so widespread, and so entrenched in popular culture that it’s hard to know what details point to real birds and what details are pure human imagination.

Some researchers even suggest that the phoenix might be based not on a bird at all, but a palm tree. In Greek the word phoenix also means palm tree. There are a lot of phoenix palms, including the kind that produce dates, and dates are delicious, so the tree may have been given a special status by associating it with the phoenix story. In ancient Egypt the symbol for the word benu was a stork-like bird that represented the sun but could also indicate a palm tree.

The word Phoeniceus was once a term for the color purple, so T.H. White thought the phoenix might be based on the purple heron, which he also thought might be the bird the Egyptians called benu. He suggested its rebirth story came about from its connection with the sun, which can be said to die every night and be reborn every morning.

Back in the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the phoenix in Egypt. He said, “The plumage is partly red, partly golden, while the general make and size are almost exactly that of the eagle. They tell a story of what this bird does, which does not seem to me to be credible: that he comes all the way from Arabia, and brings the parent bird, all plastered over with myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and there buries the body. In order to bring him, they say, he first forms a ball of myrrh as big as he finds that he can carry; then he hollows out the ball, and puts his parent inside, after which he covers over the opening with fresh myrrh, and the ball is then exactly the same weight as the first; so he brings it to Egypt, plastered over as I have said, and deposits it in the temple of the Sun.”

This just sounds like a weird version of the phoenix story, about the phoenix making its own coffin out of myrrh and other spices. But there may be some strange truths hidden in the middle of this story and the others. It’s about the bird of paradise.

The bird of paradise is a real bird—or, rather, 42 species of real bird. You can go look them today in zoos and in their native homes in eastern Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. They’re actually related to crows, although not closely, but they don’t look a thing like crows. Where crows are somber goth birds, the various birds of paradise are glorious in their coloring and plumage. Males of many species grow cascades of brightly-colored feathers during breeding season, which they display for the females in mating dances.

It was once thought that birds of paradise were unknown outside their home range until the early 16th century, when Magellan’s fleet limped back to Spain with a lot of exotic items, including the skins of some birds of paradise. The skins were apparently complete, except that they had no legs and appeared never to have had legs. Since almost nothing was known of the birds, people assumed they were so beautifully adapted to the air that they didn’t need legs, that the birds never landed.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that scientists actually saw living birds of paradise, complete with feet. It turns out that the natives of New Guinea were masters of preparing bird skins, removing the feathered skins from the body so skillfully that the bird appeared intact even though the legs had been removed.

Not only that, Australian researchers discovered during in-depth 1957 study of the bird of paradise skin trade, the natives of the region had been preparing birds for a long, long, long time—as far back as 1000 BCE. And they’d been trading them with seafarers who visited their islands long before Magellan was even born. The skins were prized for their beauty and transported all over, including to Phoenicia, a country famous for its purple dye. This is all starting to come together, isn’t it?

But it gets better. The bird of paradise skins were delicate, naturally, as were the long plumes still attached to the skins. To preserve them during voyages, they were packaged by the New Guinea natives like this: each skin was carefully wrapped in myrrh to make an egg-shaped parcel, and this was put in a larger parcel padded with burnt banana leaves.

Aromatic ashes containing an egg-shaped coffin made of myrrh, in which is the body of a glorious unknown bird? That sounds like a phoenix to me.

Like so many other legends, the phoenix is far more than just its original inspiration. Many birds probably inspired details of the story, just as many animals probably inspired stories of the qilin. Human imagination did the rest.

The legend of the phoenix and that of the qilin tell us as much about the people who have shared their stories for millennia than they tell us about any bird or animal. Humans are storytellers, no matter what culture and no matter how far back you look. After thousands of years, we’re still talking about the phoenix and the qilin, and we’ll continue to talk about them for thousands of years more. That’s an immortality worthy of the phoenix itself.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 060: Steller’s Menagerie

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This week we’re going to learn about all sorts of animals first described by Georg Wilhelm Steller in the mid-18th century and named after him, from the common Steller’s jay to the mysterious Steller’s sea ape.

Steller’s jay. It looks like someone photoshopped a frowny line over its eye:

A male Steller’s eider in breeding plumage, looking spiffy:

Steller’s sea eagle will MESS YOU UP:

Steller’s sea lions. Looks like the cover of their latest album:

A drawing of a Steller’s sea cow, one of the only drawings that was probably made from an actual animal before it went extinct:

An alive dugong, just to show you what Steller’s sea cow probably looked like, only bigger and fatter because it lived in colder water:

A Northern fur seal not taking any of your crap:

Baby Northern fur seal, just because it’s so cute:

A shih-tzu. Look at those whiskers! Also, adorable topknot:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about animals named after Georg Wilhelm Steller. Steller was a German botanist and zoologist who lived in the 18th century. In 1740 he was part of an expedition to the Bering Sea between Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, which you may remember from our mystery bears episode, and Alaska. On the way back from an unscheduled trip to Alaska after they got lost, they were shipwrecked on what is now called Bering Island, where half the crew died of scurvy, and the other half managed to build a boat from the wreck of their ship and sailed it back to Kamchatka. During the several years of this expedition, Steller took careful notes on the animals and plants he encountered.

A number of animals are named after Steller. We’ll look at a bunch of those today. Four are still around, one is extinct, and two… are mysteries.

Let’s start with the birds. Steller’s jay is closely related to the blue jay. The bottom half of the bird looks a lot like a blue jay, blue with black banding on the wings and tail, but with blue underneath instead of white. The top half of the bird looks like a completely different bird, gray with a darker head, white or blue streaks on its face, and a tall floofy crest. It lives in western North America as far north as Alaska, and a bluer version also lives in Central America. It likes forests although like blue jays, it lives around people comfortably and eats pretty much anything, from acorns, seeds, and berries to bugs, small animals, and the eggs and babies of other birds.

Next, Steller’s eider is a type of sea duck that lives off the coasts of Alaska and eastern Siberia. The hen ducks are brown and black like the females of most duck species, but the drake is a lot more interesting to look at. His tail is black, wings are iridescent purply-black laced with white, his breast is cinnamon brown with a black spot on the sides, and his head is white with a black eye ring, a dark green tuft of feathers on the back of his head, and a black throat band. That is one flashy duck. Of course, that’s just during spring and early summer when the males are trying to attract mates. The rest of the year, males look a lot more like females. The term for the opposite of breeding plumage is eclipse plumage.

Steller’s eider dives for its food, mostly crustaceans, clams and mussels, and insects. In the winter, it gathers in huge flocks, and all the ducks in the flock will dive and surface at the same time, creating a huge splash and spray of water. It likes tidal flats, bays, and shallow lagoons, and builds its nest on the edge of ponds.

Steller’s sea eagle is closely related to the bald eagle. It’s a big, stocky bird that’s dark brown with white leg feathers and tail, and white on the shoulders of its wings. It has a heavy yellow bill and huge yellow talons. It lives off the coast of northeastern Asia most of the year, but nests around eastern Russia and on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It mostly eats fish, especially salmon, although it also eats a lot of water birds like gulls and ducks, small mammals, and carrion. Its wingspan is as much as 8 feet across, or 2.5 meters, but there are reports of some birds with wingspans over nine feet across, or 2.8 meters. That’s not much bigger than a bald eagle’s wingspan, but Steller’s sea eagle is much heavier and larger-bodied than the bald eagle. Steller’s sea eagle lives up to the bald eagle’s reputation of being kind of a jerk, though, because it steals food from other Steller’s sea eagles.

Both Steller’s eider and Steller’s sea eagle are threatened by habitat loss. Fortunately, Steller’s jay is doing just fine.

There’s another bird named after Steller that has never been definitively identified, Steller’s sea-raven. During the winter he spent shipwrecked on Bering Island, Steller wrote in his journal about a bird he called a white sea-raven. He didn’t say much about it, just that it was new to him and that it only landed on cliffs along the island’s coast, so he couldn’t get a close look at it. No one knows what bird he was talking about.

A lot of people have made suggestions, of course. One researcher thinks it might be a type of cormorant, since the word for cormorant in German means sea-raven, and in fact that’s what the word cormorant means in the original Latin too—corvus marinus. Cormorants are black birds with usually small white markings, so the cormorant Steller saw might be a white or mostly white species that is now extinct, or he might have seen an albino bird flying around. Then again, the bird might have been something else entirely. Since we don’t have more to go on than this brief description of a white sea-raven that likes ocean-facing cliffs, it’s hard to know what to look for.

Now let’s move on to mammals. Steller’s sea lion is a giant pinniped, the word for members of the seal family. It lives along the coasts of Russia and Alaska as far south as central California. Females grow to about ten feet long, or 3 meters, and males are a little longer and much heavier. Males have thick manes around the neck, which is why it’s called a sea lion. It mostly eats fish and sometimes swims up rivers to feed on salmon and trout. Commercial fishermen used to kill Steller’s sea lions, because clearly no one but humans should be allowed to catch fish, and that and overfishing led to a steep decline in sea lion numbers in the late 20th century. Fortunately, though, after it was listed as a protected species its numbers started to recover.

Steller’s sea cow was not so lucky. It was a sirenian, related to dugongs and manatees. Sirenians evolved around 50 million years ago and share a common ancestor with elephants. Their front flippers have toenails that look like elephant toenails, which is neat. They’re fully aquatic like whales, have a tail instead of hind legs like seals, and like both they’re mammals that breathe air. They live in shallow water and graze on aquatic plants. Occasionally they do eat a jellyfish, but who hasn’t accidentally eaten a jellyfish, right? The sirenians living today grow to around 13 feet long at most, or 4 meters, but Steller’s sea cow was more than twice that length, up to 30 feet long, or 9 meters.

Steller’s sea cow was a type of dugong, and had a whale-like notched tail instead of a rounded tail like a manatee’s. Instead of teeth, it had chewing plates made of keratin that it used to chomp lots and lots of kelp and other plants. Its hide was thick with a thick layer of blubber underneath to keep it warm in the cold water. It had a long upper lip covered in bristles that helped it grab plants. Its forelegs were flipper-like and small.

Like the mysterious sea-raven, Steller discovered the sea cow while he was shipwrecked on Bering Island in 1741. It lived there and around some of the other islands in the Bering Sea, although fossil and sub-fossil remains have been found that indicate it used to be much more widespread. Unfortunately, once it was discovered by Europeans, it was hunted to extinction within 30 years of its discovery, killed for its oil-rich blubber and for food. But Steller’s sea cows have occasionally been spotted after that, although no one has provided actual proof. Many of the sightings may have been of hornless female narwhals, which live in the area and are about the same color and shape as the Steller’s sea-cow when seen from the surface. But in 1962, some whalers spotted six animals in shallow water off the coast of Kamchatka, and whalers can probably be relied upon to recognize a whale when they see it. These animals looked like dugongs. In 1976, a sea-cow carcass reportedly washed up on shore not that far from where the whalers’ sighting had taken place. Some workers at a nearby salmon factory went out to look at it and described it as more like a dugong than a whale, but no one thought to keep the body. After that there were a couple of expeditions to look for surviving Steller’s sea-cows, but while none were found, the coast of Kamchatka and its numerous islands are rugged and hard to explore.

The last animal we’ll talk about is the real mystery, called Steller’s sea ape. He only saw it once off the Shumagin Islands in Alaska on August 10, 1741, but he did watch it for more than two hours and took careful notes. I’ll quote part of his description.

“It was about two ells in length; the head was like a dog’s head, the ears pointed and erect, and on the upper and lower lips, on both sides, whiskers hung down which made it look almost like a Chinaman The eyes were large; the body was longish, round and fat, tapering gradually towards the tail. The skin was covered thickly with hair, gray on the back, reddish white on the belly, but in the water it appeared entirely reddish and cow-colored. The tail was divided into two fins, of which the upper, as in the case of sharks, was twice as large as the lower. Nothing struck me more surprising than the fact that neither forefeet as in the marine amphibians nor, in their stead, fins were to be seen… For over two hours it swam around our ship, looking, as with admiration, first at the one and then at the other of us. At times it came so near to the ship that it could have been touched with a pole, but as soon as anybody stirred it moved away a little further. It could raise itself one-third of its length out of the water exactly like a man, and sometimes it remained in this position for several minutes. After it had observed us for about half an hour, it shot like an arrow under our vessel and came up again on the other side; shortly after, it dived again and reappeared in the old place; and in this way it dived perhaps thirty times.”

Two ells would be somewhere around five feet long, maybe a bit more, or just over 1.5 meters.

This description sounds a lot like a seal of some kind, but all seals have forelimbs. One suggestion is that it was a young Northern fur seal, and that either Steller missed seeing its forelimbs or it was an individual born without them. I’m not sure why the suggestion is that it was a young seal, though. Baby Northern fur seals are black at birth and lighten to brown as they grow, with older males having some gray patches. All appear black in the water, not reddish. Adult females only grow to about 4 ½ feet long, or 1.4 meters, and males about seven feet long, or 2.1 meters, so at five feet long Steller’s animal was already a fully grown female or a nearly full-grown male. Young and female Northern fur seals don’t have the long whiskers Steller describes, although males do—but only when full grown.

So while it’s possible Steller’s sea ape was a small male Northern fur seal with no front flippers or flippers that Steller inexplicably didn’t see, there is one other issue. Steller would have known perfectly well what a Northern fur seal looked like. They’re threatened now due to overhunting and habitat loss, but in the mid-18th century they were plentiful throughout the Bering Sea.

So either Steller saw a Northern fur seal that was so malformed that Steller didn’t recognize it, or he described a different animal. Or, as deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler suggests, it was a hoax.

Here’s the situation: Steller and the Danish captain of the ship St. Peter, Vitus Bering, did not get along. The expedition was primarily for charting and exploring the region, not describing new animals, and Bering considered Steller primarily the ship’s physician. When the ship got lost from the rest of the expedition and ended up off the coast of Alaska, Steller had to beg Bering to let him explore this new land. He only got ten hours to do so. And when the crew was stricken with scurvy, Bering refused to allow Steller to treat the crew. I don’t know why he didn’t think the ship’s physician shouldn’t be allowed to do his job. This was before people understood what vitamins were, and while many cures for scurvy were available, no one knew why they worked. When people don’t know how things work, sometimes they’re suspicious of them.

We have Steller’s journals so we know how he described Bering. It wasn’t flattering. Steller’s sighting of the sea ape was only about six weeks after his ten-hour shore leave, and the description of the animal was similar in many ways to his description of Bering. Three months later the ship wrecked and the crew was marooned for eight months. Steller spent the time turning his notes into a book. Bering spent the time dying of scurvy. Steller didn’t include the sea ape in his book.

Thaler points out that Steller didn’t just name his mystery animal a sea-ape, he named it the Danish sea ape, Simnia marina danica. Bering was Danish, the only Dane on the ship in fact.

I have no doubt that Steller was poking fun at Bering in the name, but I’m hesitant to say he made the whole sighting up. For one thing, the details not only point to a real animal, they aren’t malicious or even humorous. He described the sea ape playing with some kelp, swimming back and forth under the ship, things like that.

I think Steller sighted a real animal and took notes, probably because he was so bored he would have taken detailed notes on anything. Maybe he knew he was watching a Northern fur seal and amused himself by comparing it to Bering. Maybe he didn’t know what the animal was but some aspects of it reminded him of Bering. Maybe he left it out of his book because he knew it was a caricature. Maybe he left it out of his book because he didn’t have enough information to include it. Maybe he meant to add it later, when he hopefully would sight more of the animals. I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that someone else saw a Steller’s sea ape in 1965.

In June of 1965, a British man named Miles Smeeton, which was apparently his real name, was sailing his yacht near the Aleutian Islands when he, his wife, his daughter, and a friend all saw a strange animal they couldn’t identify. It was around five feet long with reddish-yellow fur, a dog-like head, and long whiskers like a shih-tzu. It dived underwater when the ship got near. No one saw any limbs and they were all convinced it wasn’t a seal or a sea otter.

So who knows? Maybe there’s a limbless mammal swimming around in the frigid waters of the Bering Sea, just waiting to be discovered.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 059: The Onza and the Yemish

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This week we’re going to learn about some more big cats, especially the mysterious onza of Mexico and the yemish of Patagonia.

And you should totally check out the charming podcast Cool Facts about Animals.

A jaguar:

A jaguarundi:

A puma, not dead:

The Rodriguez onza, dead:

A giant otter:

Further reading:

The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

Monsters of Patagonia by Austin Whittall

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a couple of mystery cats that you might not have heard of, and learn about a few non-mystery animals along the way.

There are several cats native to Mexico. We’ve talked about the puma recently, in episode 52. It’s the same cat that’s also called the cougar or mountain lion, and it lives throughout most of the Americas. It’s tawny or brownish in color with few markings beyond dark and white areas on the face, and sometimes faint tail rings and mottled spots on the legs.

The jaguar is a spotted cat related to lions, tigers, leopards, and other big cats. It lives throughout much of Central and South America, and in North America as far north as Mexico, and was once common in the southwestern United States too but was hunted to extinction there. It prefers tropical forests and swamps, likes to swim, and is relatively stocky with a shorter tail than its relatives. Its background color is tawny or brownish with a white belly, and its spots, called rosettes, are darker. But melanistic jaguars aren’t especially uncommon. They look all black at first glance, but their spots are visible up close. Oh, and a big shout-out to the charming podcast Cool Facts About Animals who did a show about jaguars recently. I definitely recommend it, especially if you’ve got younger kids who love animals.

In 2011, a hunter and his daughter in Arizona took pictures of a spotted cat treed by their dogs, and alerted wildlife officials. The officials studied the photos and said yes, that’s a jaguar. Since then, he’s been monitored by trail cam and conservationists working in the Santa Rita Mountains. Since jaguars have unique spot patterns, we know it’s the same cat, a male that local elementary school kids have named El Jefe. Officials think El Jefe moved to Arizona from a nearby jaguar sanctuary in Mexico, and for years he was the only known jaguar in the United States. In late 2017, a second male jaguar was caught on camera in southern Arizona. Researchers hope that more jaguars will move into the area, which was part of their original range.

Pumas and jaguars are the two biggest cats found in Mexico. But there is a third big cat, a mystery big cat. The onza has been reported in Mexico for centuries. It’s supposed to look like a puma but more lightly built with longer legs and possibly darker fur or dark markings, especially striping on the legs.

The first problem is the name onza. The term is applied to a lot of different big cats in Mexico and other Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. For instance, in Brazil the word onça means jaguar, and in fact the jaguar’s scientific name is Pathera onca. The related English word ounce was once the name of the lynx and is now sometimes used for the snow leopard, Panthera uncia. So it’s possible that old reports of onzas just refer to pumas or jaguars, or one of the many other cats that live in the area, such as the jaguarundi.

The jaguarundi sometimes lives in Mexico as far north as southern Texas, although it’s much more common in South and Central America. It’s black or brownish-grey, which is called the grey phase, or red-brown or tawny, called the red phase. In the past the two phases were thought to be separate species. Adult jaguarundis don’t usually have any markings, but cubs have spots on their bellies. That is adorable. It’s closely related to the puma but is smaller, not much bigger than a domestic cat, and unlike most cats it’s diurnal instead of nocturnal, which means it’s mostly active during the day.

The jaguarundi has a flattish head, more like an otter than a cat. A gray phase jaguarundi may be the animal referred to in the writings of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who in the early 16th century wrote about a lion that resembled a wolf in Montezuma’s menagerie, in 1519. It also happens to be called an onza in some parts of Mexico.

Some animals labeled onzas have been killed and examined. On January 1, 1986 a big cat killed in Sinaloa State in Mexico, called the Rodriguez onza, was examined by a team of experts, including Stephen O’Brien, an expert in feline molecular genetics. They reported that the animal’s DNA was indistinguishable from that of a puma. But it definitely didn’t look like an ordinary puma. I have a picture of it in the show notes. It was long-bodied and slender with dark markings. So it’s possible that stories of onzas arose from sightings of pumas with this sort of coat color variation, or it’s possible there is a remote population of pumas with a leggier build than ordinary pumas, and every so often one wanders out where it’s seen or killed. Pumas can show considerable variance in appearance, so it wouldn’t be that unusual for an occasional individual to be born that’s longer legged than most and that also has more or darker markings than usual.

Then again, who knows? There might be a subspecies of puma or a completely different species of cat out there. If so, hopefully we’ll find out more about it soon so it can be protected and studied.

Jaguarundis make a lot of different vocalizations. Here’s one. It sounds more like a bird than a cat, but I promise you, that’s a jaguarundi.

[cat sound]

Way back in episode 22 I touched on the yemish, or Patagonian water tiger. I think it’s time to revisit it in more detail. Look, I have a fantastic book called Monsters of Patagonia so you’re going to be hearing about Patagonia on this podcast for a long, long time.

The iemisch, or hyminche, or lemisch, or some other variation, is often called a water tiger but linked not with a feline at all, but with a ground sloth. This is entirely the fault of a single man, Florentino Ameghino.

Ameghino lived in the late 19th century and died in 1911. He was from Argentina, born to Italian immigrants, and is still highly regarded as a paleontologist, anthropologist, zoologist, and naturalist, from back in the days when you could specialize in lots of disciplines and still do tons of field work. He has an actual crater on the moon named after him. You don’t get a moon crater unless you’re pretty awesome. But Ameghino had at least one bee in his bonnet, and it involved giant ground sloths like megatherium. He was convinced they were still alive in the remote areas of South America, especially Patagonia.

In an 1898 paper he wrote about the yemish in Patagonia, which he said was a “Mysterious four legged massive beast, of a terrible and invulnerable appearance, whose body cannot be penetrated by missiles or burning branches. They call it Iemisch or ‘water tiger’ and mentioning its name terrorizes them; when interrogated and asked for details, they become grim, drop their heads, turn mute or evade answering.”

I got this quote from the Monsters of Patagonia book, of course. You can find a link in the show notes if you want to order your own copy of the book. It’s a fun read, but I should point out that I do a lot of fact-checking before I include information from the book because there are some inaccuracies and fringey theories. Also, it has no index.

Ameghino said his brother Carlos, who was also a paleontologist, had sent him a piece of hide reputedly from a yemish, which he had gotten from a Tehuelche hunter. The hide had tiny bones embedded in it, called osteoderms, which are a feature of giant ground sloths. Ameghino claimed that the yemish was a giant ground sloth, which he named Neomylodon.

Mylodon, as opposed to Ameghino’s Neomylodon, was a 10 foot long, or 3 meter, ground sloth that did indeed have osteoderms embedded in its thick hide. It had long, sharp claws and ate plants, probably dug burrows, and lived throughout Patagonia and probably most of South America. The important thing here is that mylodon remains, including dung as well as dead animals, have been found in caves in Patagonia, and the remains look so fresh that the discoverers thought they were only a few years old. It turns out that they’re all about 10,000 years old, but were preserved by cold, dry conditions in the caves.

So the piece of hide was probably really from a giant ground sloth, but not one that had been alive recently. Most researchers think that the sloths of Patagonia were already extinct when the area was first settled by humans, but discoveries of what looked like recently dead animals with fearsome claws and a hide that couldn’t be pierced with arrows might very well have contributed to stories of local monsters.

But that’s beside the point, because once you get past Ameghino’s obsession with the yemish being a real live giant ground sloth, it’s clear it’s something completely un-slothlike. The exact term yemish isn’t known from any language in Patagonia, but it might be a corruption of hymché, a water monster, or yem’chen, which means water tiger in the Aonikenk language. An even closer match from the same language means sea wolf and is pronounced ee-m’cheen [iü’mchün]. Other languages in the area call the elephant seal yabich, which also sounds similar to yemish. In other words, it’s pretty clear that the yemish is a water animal of some sort.

The sea wolf is what we call a sea lion, a type of huge seal. Sea lions and elephant seals sometimes come up rivers and into freshwater lakes, which may account for some of the numerous lake monster legends in Patagonia. As for the hymché, it may have a natural explanation too that is nevertheless just as mysterious as just calling it a monster.

French naturalist André Tournouer explored Patagonia in 1900, and at one point while following a stream, he and his expedition saw what their guide called a hymché. It was the size of a large puma but with dark fur, rounded head, no visible ears, and pale hair around the eyes. It sank under the water when Tournouer shot at it, and later they found some catlike tracks in the sand along the bank.

From the description, it’s possible that the hymché was a spectacled bear. We learned about it in episode 42. It lives in the Andes Mountains of South America but was formerly much more widespread, and is usually black with lighter markings around the eyes that give it its name. Its ears are small and its head is more rounded than other bears. While it spends most of its time in the treetops, it actually does swim quite well. But as far as we know, spectacled bears don’t live in Patagonia.

So, back to the yemish. According to Ameghino’s 1898 paper, he said the Tehuelche referred to it as the water tiger. Since there is no local word for tiger in South America, since tigers live in Asia, this is probably a translation of the local word for puma. The jaguar did formerly live in Patagonia but was hunted to extinction there over a century ago. The yemish supposedly spent much of its time in the river and dragged horses and other animals into the water when they came down to drink. Its feet were flat, its ears tiny, it had big claws and fangs, and its toes were webbed for swimming. It had shorter legs than a puma but was bigger than one.

This sounds like one specific animal that does live in Patagonia, and it’s not a tiger or any kind of feline at all. It may be an otter. Flat feet with claws and webbed toes? Check. Tiny ears and scary teeth? Check. Longer than a puma but with much shorter legs? Check. Otters don’t kill animals as big as horses, of course, but this could be an exaggeration. Otters will scavenge on freshly dead animals, so the story of a mule that fell off a precipice onto a river bank, and was discovered dead and half-eaten the next morning with strange paw prints all around it, fits with an otter family having an unexpected feast delivered to their doorstep.

Not only that, but some tribes do call otters “river tigers.” Stories of monstrous otter-like animals are common throughout much of South America, not just Patagonia, and are frequently translated as “river tiger.” In Monsters of Patagonia, Whittall wonders why some tribes have two names for the otter in that case, an ordinary name and a name denoting a monster. It’s possible the monster version of the otter either refers to a folkloric beast, an animal like a sea lion that was once seen far from its ordinary home, or two kinds of otter in the area, one bigger and more ferocious than the other.

The southern river otter lives in Patagonia, both in rivers and along the seashore. It’s not especially big, maybe four feet long including the tail, or 1.2 meters. But the rare marine otter also lives along the western and southern coasts of Patagonia. Its scientific name, Lontra felina, means “otter cat, and in Spanish it’s often called gato marino, or sea cat. But the marine otter is small, typically smaller than the river otter and at the very most, around five feet long or 1.5 meters.

But if you remember episode 37, about the dobhar-chu, you may remember the giant otter. It lives in South America north of Patagonia and is now endangered, with only around 5,000 animals left in the wild after being hunted extensively for its fur for decades. It’s protected now, although loss of habitat and poaching are still big problems. It grows to around 6 feet long now, or 1.8 meters, but when it was more common some big males could grow over eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. If in the past an occasional giant otter—twice the length of an ordinary otter—strayed into the rivers of Patagonia, it would definitely be seen as a monster.

Whittall rejects the idea that the yemish is an otter, although he doesn’t mention the giant otter. He also rejects the jaguarondi as the yemish since it’s much too small, although it does like to swim and fish and, as mentioned earlier, it does look remarkably like an otter in many ways. He suggests the yemish might be an unknown giant aquatic rodent, citing as proof the existence of a cow-sized rodent that once lived in Patagonia during the ice age. I’m not convinced. Nothing about the yemish sounds like a rodent. It does sound like an otter, possibly a known otter, possibly a now extinct otter—or, maybe, a giant version of the jaguarondi, also now extinct. But maybe not.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 058: Mystery Cattle

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Join us this week to learn about the aurochs, the gaur, some mystery cattle of Patagonia, a farting monster cow, and a ghost cow that turned out to be not so ghostly!

The aurochs:

An aurochs skull:

A gaur. Holy cow (heh) those things are enormous!

A heck cow:

The bonnacon, famous for stink. I love how this one looks awfully embarrassed:

Show transcript:

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

We’re going to learn about some unusual cattle this week. You may not think cows are very interesting, but I think I can change your mind.

We’ll start with the aurochs, also sometimes called the urus. It was the wild ancestor of domestic cattle and also ancestor of the European bison. The European bison is still around and is sometimes called the wisent, but the aurochs is extinct.

The aurochs was a type of Ice Age megafauna. A big bull aurochs could stand almost six feet tall at the shoulder, or 180 cm, and some researchers estimate it could weigh as much as 3,300 lbs, or 1500 kg. Both cows and bulls grew horns. In shape the aurochs looked roughly like modern cattle, but the legs were longer, it was overall more muscular, and cows had small udders that weren’t especially visible. From cave paintings of aurochs, we know that calves were born reddish-brown with a lighter muzzle, but as they grew older, the bull calves became either dark brown or black, with a white stripe along the spine called an eel stripe.

The aurochs was strong, fast, and could be very dangerous. Bulls sometimes killed each other when fighting, and they were famously ferocious when hunted.

Sometime between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE—and BCE just means “before common era” and takes the place of the old term “before Christ” to make history a little more inclusive—a group of scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. This is the book that makes up the Christian Old Testament. The scholars were known as the Seventy, and they had to make a lot of decisions during their translation. In the case of the re’em, they mistranslated it as monokeros, which in English is unicorn. They didn’t know what the re’em was because it was already extinct in many parts of its former range. If you’ve guessed that it was the aurochs, pat yourself on the back.

The aurochs had started to go extinct in various places due to overhunting and habitat loss as early as the fifth century BCE. As it became rarer, only nobility were allowed to hunt it. But it was a tough animal that had once been common throughout much of Eurasia and the middle east, and even north Africa. It hung on for millennia, but by 1564, only 38 aurochs remained, all of them in one herd in Poland. The last one died in 1627 of natural causes.

If you listened to episode 47, about strange horses, you may remember the heck horse that was bred in the 1920s to look like the extinct wild horse. There’s also a heck cow bred by the same brothers, Heinz and Lutz Heck. Heck cattle resemble aurochs in many respects, although it’s still a domestic breed and not a perfect match. More recent projects to breed cattle that are as similar as possible to aurochs include ongoing genetic de-extinction attempts as well as more refined back-breeding projects than the heck cattle breeding.

There are a number of wild relatives of cattle, known as bovids overall and bovines for their closest relatives. Water buffalo, yak, gaur, bison, and many others are all bovids, and many of those species have been domesticated too. Some antelopes are also considered bovids.

The largest living bovid is the gaur, also called the Indian bison. It’s a wild cow native to southeast Asia, although it’s threatened due to habitat loss and overhunting. It’s protected these days, but poaching is still a problem. A big bull can grow over seven feet high at the shoulder, or 220 cm, and if you count the muscular hump just behind the shoulder, it’s even taller. It’s an incredibly heavy, massive animal in addition to being tall. Only elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes are heavier. It lives in forests and eats leaves, flowers, fruit, some types of grass and clover, and the bark of some trees.

Now let’s talk about some mystery cattle in one of my favorite places, Patagonia, which is the southern section of South America.

In the early 16th century, our old friend Antonio Pigafetta sailed around the world with Magellan and wrote a detailed account of the voyage once he returned to Spain in 1522. Pigafetta reported that the natives of Patagonia told him about devils with two horns and long hair, that breathed fire and also farted fire. These interesting fire details aren’t reported by anyone else, so it’s possible that Pigafetta added them to make the story better. He also would have been familiar with the bonnacon, an animal found in bestiaries at the time and written about by Pliny the Elder. I have learned that PLY-nee is an acceptable alternate pronunciation of his name, although it’s too late for me. They both sound wrong now.

The bonnacon was described as a bull with a long mane like a horse and horns that curled backwards. Because its horns couldn’t be used for defense, it was supposed to run away from danger and fart so prodigiously that the fumes would set fire to everything nearby, and poop would be scattered across three acres. Medieval bestiaries played this for laughs, with pretty epic illustrations, but people also believed it. It’s possible that Pigafetta thought the Patagons were describing the bonnacon. It’s also likely, incidentally, that the bonnacon was a type of buffalo or bison, many of which have small curved horns. Many hoofed animals will void their bowels when stampeding away from predators, so this could be the start of the story.

But while the farts of flame seem to be Pigafetta’s invention, it is definitely the case that many Patagonian tribes have stories of horned animals and spirits that seem remarkably bovine. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a man named Lucas Bridges collected many traditional stories of the people in Tierra del Fuego, which is at the very tip of Patagonia and which is remote even now, and was certainly remote a century ago. He reported that the Selk’nam people told stories about Hachai, a horned man with white fur and red stripes who acted as a fierce and powerful protective spirit along with his two sisters. Bridges witnessed a pantomime of Hachai that was a remarkable imitation of cow-like behavior. But the man performing it had never even seen a cow. Because here’s the thing: there is no known bovid native to South America. Tierra del Fuego doesn’t even have deer.

The Selk’nam were a nomadic people who hunted throughout southern Patagonia until the late 19th century, when British settlers moved in to raise sheep. The Selk’nam didn’t understand that the sheep belonged to anyone. They considered the sheep fair game, literally. In retaliation, the sheep ranchers paid armed militia to kill the Selk’nam—all of them. Lucas Bridges was one of the few who tried to help them by allowing them to live on his land without interference. But by the turn of the 20th century only a handful of Selk’nam survived. They are all gone now and all we have left are stories and traditions collected by anthropologists and missionaries.

Oh man.

So if the Selk’nam had never seen the cattle introduced by the Spanish, and there are no native bovids in Patagonia, how did they imitate cattle so perfectly? Bridges wasn’t the only one to remark on this. In 1833, in southern Chile, a man of the Chono tribe visited a ship and while there, he saw two powder-horns. He put them to his head and bellowed like a bull. Moreover, while in much of South America the local native languages borrow the word for cattle from Spanish, native Patagonian languages have their own words for cattle.

There are two theories. The first has to do with a shipwreck. In 1540 a ship belonging to the Bishop of Plasencia’s fleet sank in the Strait of Magellan. It carried livestock, and we know that some sheep survived. A 1557 expedition reported sheep in the area, and in 1741 some natives brought three freshly killed sheep to the leader of another expedition. It’s entirely possible that some cattle survived long enough to make an impression on the local population, and many stories of horned water monsters have been collected in Patagonia. But if we take Pigafetta’s report of the fire-farting horned spirit as inspired by cattle sightings, the shipwreck happened a few decades too late.

The other theory posits that there was once a bovid that lived in Patagonia. There are a few small hints that this may have been the case. A 1586 Spanish document refers to a buffalo-like animal with “horns with their tips curved backwards which this witness guesses must be buffalo and that they say that the males are black and the females white and that they have soft wool.” In 1598 explorer Oliver van Noort reported animals like stags and buffalo at Puerto Deseado. The stags were guanaco, which are related to llamas, but we don’t know what his buffalo might have been.

But we have no fossil remains. Bovids originated in Eurasia and entered North America relatively late, and as far as researchers can tell none ever made it as far as South America. None ever made it farther south than Mexico, in fact, until domestic cattle were brought to South America by the Spanish. By the mid-1500s cattle had been introduced into the Pampas, a vast prairie north of Patagonia, and feral herds may have made their way to Patagonia by the end of the century.

The Spanish cattle were tough and adaptable, and a small population still lives wild in the Andes. They have adapted to life in forests and to bitterly cold weather, including growing long fur in winter. And their horns are often described as resembling the horns of the aurochs. And with that, we have come full circle.

But we’re not done yet, because I’ve got a cow mystery that you’re going to just love. You know how one of the most frustrating things about cryptozoology is that no one gets good photographs of mystery animals? Well, listen to this story.

There’s a town in central New Jersey called Griggstown, and the Griggstown Cow was a legend told in the area. On foggy nights or rainy days, it was said, a solitary hunter or hiker might see a ghost cow in the mist near a canal outside of town. Occasionally someone would take a picture of the ghost cow, but the photos were all blurry, and no tracks or manure were ever found. The legend persisted for thirty years until November 23, 2002, when someone called the canal park office to report that the Griggstown Cow was stuck in a muddy ravine near the canal.

And sure enough, it was. It was a real live Holstein bull that had been living wild for decades after the area dairy farms closed, but he was old now and wasn’t strong enough to get out of the ditch. Rescuers managed to hoist him out and he was left lying on the grass to recover. But after two days he still hadn’t managed to stand, so the park brought in a veterinarian to examine him. Unfortunately it turned out he was in such poor condition that the vet euthanized him so he wouldn’t suffer, and he was buried in the park.

It’s a sad ending, but a thirty-year-old cow has lived a good long life. And if the Griggstown ghost cow can turn out to be a real animal, maybe other cryptids are real animals too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 056: Strange Snakes

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This week we’re going to learn about some strange snakes. Snakes in the air! Snakes in the water! Snakes on a pla–NO I am not going there

Thanks to sirfinnhayes and Mackin for the topic suggestions! Mackin is host of the podcast Species, which you should listen to.

A golden tree snake:

A snake flying, or rather gliding with style:

Northern water snake (left) and water moccasin (right). Note the head and neck differences:

The yellow sea snake (Hydrophis spiralis):

Belcher’s sea snake. Have I mentioned how much I love stripey animals? I do love them, I do:

Horned viper. Do not step:

The Vietnamese longnosed snake. I TOOK THESE PHOTOS MYSELF AT HELSINKI ZOO!

The spiny bush viper. I’m sorry, all other snakes, this one is now my favorite:

A rattlesnake showing off its rattle:

The spider-tailed horned viper:

LOOKIT THAT SPIDER TAIL:

Tsuchinoko real:

Okay that is just way too many pictures.

Show Transcript:

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

This week we’re going to find out about some strange snakes. This is a request from two different people, sirfinnhayes and Macken of the podcast Species. Sirfinnhayes is also the person who corrected my incomplete information on the definition of a subspecies, so thank you! Podbean still won’t let me reply to comments, but at least I can see who sent them now. If you don’t already listen to the Species podcast, I highly recommend it. It’s new, family friendly, and really interesting. The first episode of Species I listened to was about flying snakes, and I was already wondering if I could sneak in an episode of my own about flying snakes or if that would be really obvious and not cool, when the host, Macken, contacted me and said I ought to do an episode on flying snakes. Now I don’t have to feel guilty for copying!

So let’s start with flying snakes. You may be picturing Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake god of the Aztecs. But flesh and blood flying snakes, as opposed to divine ones, don’t have wings or feathers. The god did lend his name to one of the biggest flying reptiles ever known, by the way, and even though Quetzalcoatlus isn’t a snake, I have to tell you about it. It was a type of pterosaur that lived around 68 million years ago, and its wingspan was almost 40 feet, or 12 meters. It could probably fly extremely fast and far, but spent most of its time hunting small dinosaurs and other animals on land like a monster stork.

We’re not three minutes into this episode and I’m already off topic. Back to flying snakes.

Flying snakes don’t really fly, they glide, but they’re very good at it. There are five species of flying snake, all from India and the Indonesian archipelago. The longest is the golden tree snake that can grow four feet long, or a little over 1.2 meters. All flying snakes are venomous, but their venom is weak and not dangerous to humans. Besides, you’re not likely to encounter a flying snake since they spend most of their time far up in the rainforest tree canopy chasing small animals.

So how does such a slender snake glide? When a flying snake drops off a branch to glide to another, it flattens its body, actually pushing its ribs apart to make a broader surface to catch the air. As Macken describes it, when gliding, its body somewhat resembles the shape of a long, thin Frisbee. It wriggles as it glides, pointing its head in the direction it wants to go. It can even change direction midair if necessary.

If some snakes can fly, surely some snakes can swim, right? Definitely! Water snakes are actually pretty common. When I was a kid, everyone panicked whenever they saw a snake in the lake or a creek where we were always playing. We thought all water snakes were venomous water moccasins, but as I found out much later, water moccasins don’t even live in East Tennessee. Most freshwater snakes are harmless, but people kill them anyway out of fear.

The Northern water snake is common throughout much of eastern and central North America, for instance. It can grow more than four feet long, or about 135 cm, and varies in color from brown or reddish to gray or black. Sometimes it has a darker pattern, banding or splotches, and its belly is usually lighter in color. It resembles a water moccasin in many ways but it’s completely harmless to humans unless cornered, in which case it can give a bad bite but not a venomous one. It will also poop all over you if you try to pick it up. It eats small fish, frogs, leeches, crawdads, salamanders, and other small animals.

The easiest way to tell a Northern water snake from a water moccasin is the head and neck. A water moccasin hasd a broad, roughly arrow-shaped head with a much thinner neck just behind it. A Northern water snake has a head that’s barely wider than its neck.

The water moccasin is a type of pit viper, the only species of pit viper that spends time in the water, in fact. It lives in the American South and can grow as long as six feet, or 180 cm, although most are much shorter. It’s a bulky snake with a broad, blunt head, and in color and markings it usually resembles the Northern water snake. When it feels threatened, it will raise its head and gape its jaws wide, showing the white tissue inside its mouth as a warning. Keep in mind that like all snakes, it really doesn’t want to bite you. It needs to save its venom for the frogs, birds, rats and mice, and other snakes it eats. It just wants you to go away and not scare it.

Young water moccasins have a yellowish or greenish tail tip. The snake will lie perfectly still in shallow water, twitching its tail. When a frog or lizard or some other animal comes to investigate that worm moving around in the water, the snake strikes.

Freshwater snakes spend at least part of their time on land every day. Sea snakes are another thing. Some species of sea snake can’t even move on land. If they’re washed up, they’re as helpless as a fish. And they’re almost all venomous.

All species of true sea snakes have a tail that’s flattened at the end like a paddle to help it swim better, and its nostrils are on the top of its snout so it can breathe without raising its head out of the water. When it’s underwater, the nostrils close automatically. It has to breathe air, but its left lung is enormously large, almost the full length of its body, which allows it to stay underwater for over an hour at a time. It also has a special gland under the tongue that filters extra salt from its blood, and every time the snake flicks its tongue, it releases some of the salt back into the ocean. In fact, sea snakes in general are so well adapted to living in the ocean for a formerly terrestrial animal that only whales are better adapted.

As an example, let’s learn about the yellow sea snake, because it can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, the longest of all the sea snakes. It lives in shallow, warm water in the Indian Ocean and is yellow or yellow-green in color with narrow black bands all down its body. It’s really pretty. It gives birth to live babies who are fully developed and able to swim as soon as they’re born. Young snakes have a black head with a U-shaped yellow marking.

The yellow sea snake eats fish and eels that live among coral reefs and sea grasses. Its venom is fast-acting and not only kills its prey, it starts breaking down the prey’s tissues so that the snake can digest it faster. Occasionally a diver or fisher gets bitten, but most of the time the snake doesn’t inject venom when it bites a human.

The faint-banded sea snake, also called Belcher’s sea snake, also rarely injects venom into humans, and rarely bites humans at all. It even has the reputation as being kind of a friendly snake. At one time its venom was thought to be the most potent of any snake’s, but that honor actually belongs to three different snakes. The reef shallows sea snake is one. The others are the inland taipan, which is a land snake that lives in Australia, and the Eastern brown snake, which also lives in Australia as well as in southern New Guinea. Pretty much if you’re in Australia, don’t bother any snakes if you can possibly help it. Not that you need me to tell you that.

A lot of snakes have interesting facial decorations. The horned viper has a pointed horn over each eye that sticks almost straight up. It’s not really a horn, of course, but a modified scale. It lives in the desert in parts of the Middle East and northern Africa, is roughly the color of sand, and grows not quite three feet max, or 85 cm. Other snakes have nose horns, including the nose-horned viper, the rhinoceros viper, and many others. No one’s sure why some snakes have these decorations, but the best hypothesis is that they’re for display. In some species only the males have decorations, or the decorations are larger than in females; but in other species, females have larger or more decorations. One thing we do know, the horns are not used for fighting other snakes. They look sharp, but they’re actually relatively soft and flexible.

The spiny bush viper goes the extra step and has pointy spines all over its body that make it look bristly. It lives in central Africa and eats frogs, lizards, and small mammals. It’s not a big snake, not much more than two feet long, or around 60 cm, although males are usually a few inches longer than females. It’s typically yellowish in color with large dark eyes and black markings. It mostly stays in the trees and sometimes suns itself on top of big flowers, which is THE best thing I have heard all week.

The rattlesnake lives throughout North and South America, and just like in the cartoons, it has a rattle at the tip of its tail that it shakes to scare away potential predators. The rattle is made of keratin. Each segment of the rattle is hollow and vibrates against the rattles above and below it when the snake vibrates its tail. A rattlesnake has special muscles in the tail used just for this, and the muscles are incredibly fast. A snake can vibrate its tail as much as 50 times per second. Baby rattlesnakes only have a little button at the tip of their tail, but each time the snake sheds its skin, it grows a new segment of its rattle.

This is what a rattlesnake’s tail vibration sounds like.

[rattlesnake sound]

Both the Eastern and Western diamondback rattlesnakes can grow about eight feet long, or almost 2.5 meters. Other rattlesnake species are smaller.

The rattlesnake isn’t the only snake species with an interesting tail. The spider-tailed horned viper not only has horns above its eyes, the tip of its tail actually resembles a spider. Those of you who were already not real happy about a snake episode probably just threw your phone down in horror right about now. Sorry about that. The very tip of the snake’s tail ends in a little bulb like a spider’s round body, and the scales in front of it are elongated like a spider’s legs. It’s not just coincidence, either. The spider-tailed horned viper eats birds that eat spiders. Like a young water moccasin twitching its tail-tip like a worm, the spider-tailed horned viper twitches its tail around like a spider. When a bird comes close to grab the spider, chomp!

The spider-tailed horned viper, and I legit will never get tired of saying that, was discovered in 1968 but only recognized as a new species in 2006. It lives in western Iran but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet.

If people in the area had told stories about a snake with a tail that looked like a spider, probably no one would have believed it, but there it is. So what about actual mystery snakes?

In Croatia there are stories of a snake called the poskok, which is gray to reddish-brown in color, two or three feet long, or 60 to 90 cm, slender, aggressive, and venomous. But its real claim to fame is its ability to jump farther and higher than it is long.

Snakes can jump by making a striking motion and lunging forward, but while some snakes may actually leave the ground that way, notably the jumping viper, a small snake from Central America, no snake can jump very high.

If you search online for the poskok, you’ll get a lot of hits about the nose-horned viper. It spends at least part of the time in trees and shrubs hunting birds. If someone saw a nose-horned viper leaping after a bird, they might think it had jumped from the ground instead of a branch. But the poskok isn’t described as having a horn on its nose. Another suggestion for the poskok’s identity is one of various species of whip snake, which are slender, aggressive snakes that can move very fast, although they’re not venomous.

The tsuchinoko of Japan is supposed to be a short but wide-bodied snake with horns above its eyes, a broad head with sensory pits, and a thinner neck. Its pronounced dorsal ridge makes it seem somewhat triangular in shape instead of rounded like most snakes. It’s also said to be able to jump long distances. Some cryptozoologists suggest it might either be an unknown species of pit viper or a rare mutant individual of a known pit viper species. Stories of tsuchinoko sightings go back centuries, although more recent accounts describe it as a more ordinary-looking snake with a big bulge in its middle as though it has just swallowed something that it hasn’t digested yet. In 2017, a Tumblr post inspired a meme about the tsuchinoko. It’s a picture of three cats staring at a fat lizard with the legs photoshopped out and the caption “tsuchinoko real,” which I’m sure you can agree is meme GOLD.

Many cultures around the world believe some snakes have a magical stone in their heads that can cure poison or heal wounds. There are similar beliefs about toad-stones. In India some people believe some cobras have a glowing brown stone in their hood that heals snake bites, while in Sri Lanka it’s said that rarely, a cobra has a beautiful precious gem inside its belly that it pukes up and hides before it eats, then swallows again later. The ancient Celts believed that an adder-stone neutralized poison. But the adder-stone, it turns out, was just a fossilized sea urchin, while other snake stones were either semi-precious stones like agates with the value jacked up with a tall tale, or gastroliths.

And finally, to wrap things around to where we started, many cultures incorporate flying or winged snakes in various aspects of religion or folklore, but sometimes people report seeing snakes with wings flying overhead. These are probably all misidentifications of known animals since no snake has ever been found, alive or fossilized, with appendages that could be described as wings. Old newspaper accounts of flying snakes are probably all hoaxes. But new species of snake are discovered all the time. You wouldn’t think there’s anything big to be discovered in England, for instance, but a new species of snake was discovered there in 2017. It’s called the barred grass snake, although it actually spends a lot of its time hunting frogs and other amphibians in water. And it’s not small—it grows three feet long, or over a meter. So if a three-foot adder can hide in a country full of naturalists, maybe a snake with wings can hide in plain sight too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 055: Lungfish and the Buru

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Let’s learn about the LUNGFISH, which deserves capital letters because they’re fascinating and this episode took so flipping long to research! Mysteries abound!

The lovely marbled lungfish from Africa:

The South American lungfish:

The Australian lungfish CHECK OUT THOSE GAMS:

Another Australian lungfish:

Further Reading:

The Hunt for the Buru by Ralph Izzard

Show Transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about the lungfish, and I’m going in depth about some mystery lungfish later in the episode. So don’t give up on me if you think freshwater fish are boring.

Lungfish are unusual since they are fish but have lungs and can breathe air. Some fish species can get by for a short time gulping air into a modified swim bladder when water is oxygen poor, but the lungfish has real actual lungs that are more mammal-like than anything found in other fish. The ancestors of lungfish, which developed during the Devonian period nearly 400 million years ago, may have been the ancestors of modern amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is still a controversial finding, but a 2017 molecular phylogenetic study identified lungfish as the closest living relatives of land animals.

Africa has four species of lungfish, from the smallest, the gilled African lungfish that only grows around 17 inches long, or about 44 cm, to the largest, the marbled lungfish, which can grow more than six and a half feet long, or two meters. They all resemble eels, with long bodies and four thin, almost thread-like fins. They mostly eat crustaceans, molluscs, and insect larvae. The adults have small gills but breathe air through their lungs exclusively.

The South American lungfish is in a separate family from the African lungfishes, but it’s very similar in most respects. It can grow over four feet long, or 125 cm, and looks like an eel at first glance. Its fins are thread-like and not very long, and while it has small gills, they’re nonfunctional in adults. It mostly eats snails and shrimp, and like the African lungfishes, its teeth are fused into tooth plates that crush the shells of its prey easily.

Baby South American and African lungfish have external gills like newts but look more like tadpoles. After a couple of months they develop the ability to breathe air.

The African and South American lungfishes live in swamps and shallow river basins, and during the dry season, the water of their homes may dry up completely. At the onset of the dry season, the lungfish burrows a foot or two deep into the mud, or 30 to 60 centimeters, and lines the burrow with mucus to keep its body from drying out. Then it curls up in the bottom of the hole and lowers its metabolism, and stays there for months until the rains return and soak its dried mud home. This is called aestivation, and it’s related to hibernation except that it usually happens in warm weather instead of cold.

The Australian lungfish, also called the Queensland lungfish, lives in Australia and retains many features that are considered primitive compared to other lungfish species. It’s so different from the other lungfish species it’s even in a different order. Let’s learn about just how different it is and why that’s important.

In 1869 a farmer visiting the Sydney Museum asked why there were no specimens displayed of a big olive-green fish from some nearby rivers. The curator, Gerard Krefft, had no idea what the guy was talking about. No problem, the guy said, or probably no worries, he’d just get his cousin to send the museum a few. Not long after, a barrel full of salted greenish fish that looked like big fat eels arrived and Krefft set about examining them.

When he saw the teeth, he practically fainted. He’d seen those teeth before—in fossils several hundred million years old. No one even knew what fish those teeth came from. And here they were again in fish that had been pulled from a local river only days before.

The Australian lungfish doesn’t have ordinary teeth, it has four tooth plates or combs that resemble regular teeth that have fused together. Its skull is also very different from all other fish, possibly because of its feeding style. It crushes its prey with its tooth combs, so its skull has to be able to withstand a lot of pressure from the force of its own bite. Other lungfish species share this trait to some degree, but with modifications that appear more recent.

The Australian lungfish lives in slow-moving rivers and deep ponds and hunts using electroreception. Larger ones mostly eat snails and crustaceans, while smaller ones also eat insect larvae and occasionally small fish. It can grow up to about five feet long, or 150 cm. Its body is covered with large overlapping scales, and its four fins look more like flippers or paddles. Its tail comes to a single rounded point. In short, it looks superficially like a coelacanth, which is not a big surprise because it’s related to the coelacanth. While the Australian lungfish doesn’t actually get out of the water and walk on its fins, it does stand on them and sometimes walks around on them underwater.

Unlike the other lungfishes, the Australian lungfish has only a single lung instead of a pair. Most of the time it breathes through its gills, but at night when it’s active, or during spawning season or other times when it needs more oxygen, it surfaces periodically to breathe. When it does so, it makes a distinctive gasping sound. During droughts when its pond or river grows shallow, an Australian lungfish can survive when other fish can’t. As long as its gills remain moist, it can survive by breathing air through its lung. But unlike other lungfish, it doesn’t aestivate in mud.

The Australian lungfish hasn’t changed appreciably for the last 100 million years. The only real change it exhibits from its ancestors 300 million years ago is that it’s not as big, since they grew some 13 feet long, or 4 meters. Lungfish used to be widespread fish that lived in freshwater back when the world’s continents were smushed together in one supercontinent called Pangaea, some 335 million years ago. When Pangaea began to break up into smaller continents about 175 million years ago, various species of lungfish remained in different parts of the world. Now we’ve only got six species left…maybe.

A lot of mysterious eel-like fish or fish-like lizard stories might refer to lungfish. Some of the mystery animals are probably extinct, whatever they were, but some might still be around. All known lungfish were only discovered by science within the last 150 years or so, and it’s quite possible more are lurking quietly in remote swamps and rivers.

That brings me to a mystery that may or may not have anything to do with the lungfish. Occasionally when I’m researching a topic for an episode, I come across something interesting that doesn’t really belong in that episode but which isn’t enough on its own for a full episode. I sometimes spin those into bonus episodes for our Patreon subscribers. That happened recently with our Brantevik eel episode, where some blue river eels took me down a research rabbit hole that had nothing to do with eels. But a mystery animal I only covered in passing in that bonus episode suddenly has new meaning for this one.

The mystery animal is the indus worm, sometimes called the scolex. We don’t know what it was, if anything. It might have been a fable that got repeated and exaggerated over the centuries. It might have been something more akin to disinformation. It might have been both.

We have the story from multiple ancient sources, back to Ctesius’s original account in the fourth century BCE. The story goes that the river Indus, which flows through modern-day China, India, and Pakistan, contained a white worm of enormous size. It was supposed to be around 7 cubits long, or 10 ½ feet, or just over three meters, but it was so big around that a ten-year-old could barely encircle it with their arms, and that’s a straight-up quote from Ctesius only not in ancient Greek. In other words, it was a big fat eel-like creature over ten feet long, white in color. Moreover, it had weird teeth. Ctesias didn’t mention the teeth, but a few hundred years later Aelian said that it had two teeth, square and about eighteen inches long, or 45 cm, which it used to catch and crush animals that it caught at night.

This is an interesting detail that points to an animal with teeth something like a lungfish. But the indus worm was also supposed to drag animals into the water when they came to the edge to drink, which sounds like a crocodile—but the ancient Greeks were familiar with crocodiles and this clearly wasn’t one. The word crocodile comes directly from Greek, in fact. But there’s one more important detail about the indus worm that changes everything.

The indus worm was supposed to be useless except for the oil it produced. Now, all animal fat produces flammable oil, but it has to be rendered first. The indus worm was full of just plain oil. According to the ancient accounts, after an indus worm was killed—not an easy thing to do, apparently, as it required dozens of men with spears and clubs to subdue—it was hung up over a vessel, and the oil allowed to drip into the vessel from the body for a full month. One indus worm would produce about 2 ½ quarts, or almost five liters of oil. The oil was so flammable that only the king of India was allowed to own it, and he used it to level cities. Not only that, but the flame it produced couldn’t be put out unless it was smothered with mud.

This sounds like a petroleum-based flame. It might even refer to Greek fire, a deadly weapon of the ancient world. We don’t know what Greek fire was made of, but it wasn’t an animal-based oil. It could be that rulers who knew the secret of producing unquenchable flame obfuscated the knowledge by telling people the oil came from a vicious animal only found in one distant river. If so, it’s possible that the indus worm wasn’t based on a real animal at all.

I can just hear the conversation that started it all. “Hey, where do you get that oil that sticks to people and burns them up even after they jump in the water?” “Oh, um, it’s really hard to get. Yeah, totally hard. You know those little white worms that sometimes get in figs? Picture one of those that’s like, ten feet long, and it only lives in one river in India…”

Anyway, we have no way of knowing whether the indus worm was a real animal. It actually sounds kind of plausible, though, especially if you assume some of the stories are either exaggerated or confused with other animals. The Indus is a really long river with a lot of unique animal species. It’s possible there was once a lungfish that grew ten feet long and had flattened tooth plates like those of South American and African lungfishes.

Then again, there is another possibility. The rare Indus river dolphin grows to about eight and a half feet long, or 2 ½ meters. I’m probably going to do an entire episode on freshwater dolphins eventually so I won’t go into too much detail about it today, but while young dolphins have pointed teeth, when the dolphin matures its teeth develop into square, flat disks. But the dolphin isn’t white, it’s brown, and no one could look at a dolphin and call it a worm.

But there are other reports of mystery fish in Asia that may be lungfish. This is where I had to stop research for this episode until I ordered, received, and read a book called The Hunt for the Buru by Ralph Izzard. If in doubt, go back to the primary sources whenever possible. Izzard was a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Mail, and in 1948 he and a photographer accompanied explorer Charles Stonor on an expedition to find what they thought might be a living dinosaur or some other reptile. But while many cryptozoologists today think the buru might be a type of monitor lizard, zoologist Karl Shuker suggests the details given in the book sound more like a type of lungfish.

Accounts of the buru were collected in an anthropological study of the Apa Tani tribe in 1945 and ’46. The Apa Tani live in a large valley in northeastern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and were an insular people who at the time rarely traveled away from their valley. They’re characterized in The Hunt for the Buru as intelligent and practical, but not especially creative. They have no system of reading or writing, produce no art, and are efficient and knowledgeable rice farmers. The relevant parts of the study are reproduced in The Hunt for the Buru, and I’m happy to report that this was a genuine scholarly study, not a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs asking leading questions. The buru information was only collected incidentally as part of the tribe’s history and traditions, but I suspect mostly because the anthropologists found it interesting. A quick look online for more modern information about the Apa Tani point to them being really nice people. They have a festival celebrating friendship every spring that lasts an entire month. These days they’re much more mainstream but still continue their traditional practices of farming.

According to the Apa Tani, their ancestors migrated to the valley along two rivers, and accounts of their migration match up with actual places with a high degree of accuracy even though the migration took place many centuries ago. In other words, these are people with a detailed oral history, and that’s important when we come to their accounts of the buru.

When they reached the valley, it was largely flooded with a swamp and lake. In the lake was an animal they called the buru. It wasn’t an aggressive animal. It lived in deep water but occasionally came to the surface, stuck its head above water, and made a noise translated as a hoarse bellow. Occasionally a buru would nose through the mud in shallower water, and frequently waved its head from side to side. It didn’t eat fish and was described as living on mud. It was about 4 meters long, or a bit over 13 feet, and was dark blue blotched with white, with a white belly. I’ll go into more details of its appearance in a few minutes.

The Apa Tani drained much of the swamp and lake to create more farmland for rice paddies, and on four occasions, a buru was trapped in a pool of deeper water. The Apa Tani killed the burus trapped this way and buried their bodies, and the location of the buried burus are still known. The Apa Tani reported that there were no more burus in the valley.

In 1947, Charles Stonor was traveling near the Apa Tani’s valley and asked a member of a different tribe if he’d ever heard of the buru. Stonor apparently was both a trained zoologist and had at least some background in anthropology, according to Izzard. To Stonor’s surprise, the man said he not only knew about the buru, but said it lived in a swamp not too far away, called Rilo. Naturally Stonor decided to visit, and when he spoke to the nearby villagers, they said the buru did indeed live in the swamp.

Stonor recorded their accounts of the animal. It lives underwater and only comes to the surface briefly—“every now and again they come up above the surface. When one of them comes up there is a great disturbance and splashing, and the beast comes straight up out of the water, stays for a few moments only, and then disappears down again.” The buru were described as black and white, with a head as large as a bison’s but with a longer snout, and with a pair of small backwards-pointing horns. The buru was only seen in summer, when the swamp floods and becomes a lake. But no one in the Rilo village had ever seen a buru up close.

In early 1948 Izzard heard about the buru from a friend, and approached Stonor to ask if he wanted to undertake a small expedition to look for it. Stonor agreed, and in April 1948 the expedition headed out on the search.

They… didn’t find any burus. Spoiler alert: after months of careful daily watches of the swamp, they decided the buru had possibly once lived in the valley, but was now extinct, and since it had never been an animal the villagers paid much attention to, no one had realized it was gone. This sounds absurd until you realize that the village had only been settled about a decade before. Many trees had been felled, which increased erosion so that the swamp had silted up considerably and was no longer very deep even at full flood. It’s possible that the burus had died due to these changing conditions, especially if they hadn’t been very numerous to start with.

The expedition returned to civilization only to find that rumors of the buru hunt had leaked, and the papers were full of reports of a 90-foot “dinotherium” sighted in the jungle.

I find it interesting that Izzard rejected the idea that the buru was a lungfish, because, he writes, “no known fish would expose itself above water, for no practical purpose, for such a length of time.” Presumably Izzard didn’t realize that lungfish actually use their lungs to breathe air, and that they must surface briefly to do so.

So was the buru reported in the Rilo swamp the same buru that had once lived in the Apa Tani valley? Probably not. Izzard notes that while the two valleys are relatively close to each other, he does point out that they were completely separated by a ridge of mountains. Even if both burus were the same kind of animal, they were probably different subspecies at the very least considering how long the two populations must have been separated.

Let’s return to the Apa Tani buru, since the reports gathered from the mid-1940s anthropological study are clear and detailed compared to the Rilo buru reports.

The Apa Tani buru had limbs, but while some reports called them short legs that somewhat resembled mole forelegs with claws used for digging, one old man stubbornly refused to describe them as legs. The anthropologists found this confusing because they assumed he was talking about a reptile. I’ll quote from the relevant sections of the report. The old man was named Tamar.

“ ‘The buru was long: it had a long tail with flanges on the sides: they lay along it when resting, but were pushed out sideways when the beast was moving: it could twist its tail round and catch anything with it.’ The flanges were demonstrated by holding a piece of paper against a stick. We use the word ‘flange’ for want of a better expression. Tamar described them as pieces fastened on the sides of the tail. …

Q What sort of legs did it have?

A ‘It had no legs: the body was like a snake.’ Tamar then described and demonstrated that the tail flanges were grouped in two pairs, were about 50 cm long, and were as thick as a man’s arm: he added they were used in burrowing. We got the impression that he was trying to convey the meaning that they were appendages, but not limbs in the true sense of the word.”

I wonder if he was trying to explain, through an interpreter, something he himself probably didn’t fully understand, lobed fins. The Australian lungfish’s lobed fins do look like stubby legs with a frill around them that could be taken to be claws.

Tamar also described the buru as a snake-like creature. He said its head was like a snake’s with a long snout and that it had three hard plates on its head that helped it burrow into the mud. And like the other reports, he said it ate mud, not fish or animals.

This sounds a lot like a lungfish, which eats crustaceans and snails it digs out of the mud. Admittedly Tamar also said it had a forked tongue, which is not a lungfish trait. Many cryptozoologists think this forked tongue points to a type of monitor lizard, but while some monitor lizard species do spend a lot of time in the water, notably the widespread Asian monitor lizard, the buru is described as being exclusively aquatic. Monitor lizards also are very lizardy, with large, strong legs. And monitor lizards don’t stay in the mud when a swamp dries up.

To me, all this paints a picture of a large lungfish, blue and white in color, with lobed fins like an Australian lungfish and probably working gills as well as a lung or pair of lungs. It may have aestivated in the mud like African and South American lungfish during the dry season, and during the rainy season when it was spawning, it might have needed to breathe at the surface like the Australian lungfish to give it more oxygen than its gills could manage on their own.

Hopefully someone’s out there looking for burus in other remote swamps of Asia. I can’t do it myself. I’m busy.

There are brief anecdotal reports of possible new species of lungfish in Asia, Africa, and South America, although with very little to go on. But I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if someone discovered another lungfish species in a hard-to-reach swamp one of these days. Those 400-million-year-old fish are survivors.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 053: Dragons

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It’s our one-year anniversary! To celebrate, I’ve opened up a Patreon bonus episode for anyone to listen to. Just click the link below and you can listen in your browser:

bonus episode – Salty Animals

This week’s episode is about dragons, specifically dragons of western/English-speaking tradition. Even narrowing it down like that leaves us with a lot of ground to cover! Thanks to Emily whose suggestion of the Komodo dragon as a topic started this whole ball rolling.

A dragon from the game Flight Rising, specifically one of MY dragons. Her name is Lily. She’s so pretty.

The Lambton worm:

A spitting cobra:

A Nile crocodile:

Deinosuchus skeleton and two humans for scale. I stole this off the internet as usual so I don’t know who the people are. They look pretty happy to be in the picture:

St. George and the Dragon (REENACTMENT):

Klagenfurt dragon statue:

A wooly rhino skull:

The star of the show today, the Komodo dragon!

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s celebrate the podcast’s one-year anniversary with a big episode about dragons. Emily suggested komodo dragons as a topic, and then it all just spiraled out of control from there.

But first, a bit of housekeeping. Since it’s our one-year anniversary I’ve unlocked a Patreon episode so that anyone can listen. This one’s about salty animals. There’s a link in the show notes. Just click it and it’ll take you to the page where you can listen on your browser. You don’t need a Patreon login or anything.

Second, I got a polite correction recently from a listener about subspecies. Podbean is being a butt so I can’t actually see the comment, just read it in the email they sent, so I’m not sure who to thank. But they pointed out that “when the subspecies name is the same as the species name, it means it’s the first subspecies formally described, or the nominate subspecies.” In other words, Panthera tigris tigris didn’t get that second tigris because it’s extra tigery, it got it because it was the first tiger subspecies described. Although it is extra tigery.

So now, let’s learn about dragons.

Until the early 13th century or so, the word dragon wasn’t part of the English language. We swiped it from French, which in turn got it from Latin, which took it from Greek. Before the word dragon became a common word, dragon-like creatures were frequently called worms. A worm used to mean any animal that was snakey in shape. Old stories of dragons in English folklore are frequently snakier than modern dragons. For instance, the Lambton worm.

The story goes that a man called John Lambton went fishing one Easter Sunday instead of going to church, and as punishment he caught not fish but a black leech-like creature with nine holes on each side of its head. He flung it into a well in disgust, and joined the crusades to atone for fishing on the Sabbath. But while he was gone, the worm grew enormous. It killed people and livestock, uprooted trees, and even blighted crops with its poisonous breath. It couldn’t be killed, either, because if it was chopped in two, its pieces rejoined.

When John Lambton returned from the crusades seven years later and found out what had happened, he sought the advice of a local wise woman about what to do. Then he covered a suit of armor with sharp spines, and wearing it, lured the worm into the river Wear, where it tried to squeeze him to death. But the spines cut it up into pieces that were swept away by the river so they couldn’t rejoin. The end.

I don’t want to derail the dragon talk too much here, but I’m just going to point out that the sea lamprey has seven little holes behind each eye called branchial openings. It’s also eel-like and can be partially black, and it’s gross. If you want to learn more about it, and about my irrational dislike of this interesting animal, you can go back and listen to episode three.

Anyway, even after English adopted the word dragon, it didn’t mean dragon exactly. It was just a word for a big snake, especially one with mythical attributes or enormous size. But artists the world over are fond of adding wings and legs to reptiles, especially to snakes. Snakes just look so…undecorated. Gradually dragon took on its current meaning, that of a reptile with four legs, possibly a pair of wings, decorative horns and spikes and spines, and the ability to breathe fire. Actual. Fire.

That kind of dragon simply can’t exist except in folklore and fiction. But human creativity aside, many aspects of the dragon, at least the dragons of western tradition, are based on those of real-life animals.

If you’ve listened to episode 12, about the wyvern, the basilisk, and the cockatrice, you may remember the confusion among those terms and what they stand for. Technically all three are types of dragons, since the definition of dragon is actually pretty loose. In that episode, we discussed the king cobra as the possible source of many stories of the basilisk.

The king cobra doesn’t spit venom, but many species of cobra do. While cobra venom won’t hurt you very much if it just touches undamaged skin, it will hurt your eyes if it gets into them. And spitting cobras aim for the eyes. The venom is actually sprayed directly from the cobra’s fangs, which have tiny holes in the front that work sort of like a spray bottle. Some species of cobra can spit venom over six feet, or two meters, and they can also inject venom by biting. Cobra venom can cause blindness if enough gets in the eyes, and it certainly causes eye pain and swelling. Not only that, but a few other species of venomous snake, such as the Mangshan pit viper, sometimes also spit venom.

As far as I’m concerned, a big snake that sprays venom at your eyes is a good basis for the story of a dragon that breathes fire. I’d almost rather deal with a firebreather, to be honest, because I know to stop, drop, and roll if I catch on fire. Be safe, kids. This has been a public service announcement.

Crocodiles have undoubtedly influenced dragon mythology. In fact, so many common dragon traits are present in crocodiles that if you discount the wings and firebreathing, crocodiles basically are dragons. The biggest crocodile living today is the saltwater crocodile, which can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and which lives in southeast Asia, eastern India, and northern Australia. The second biggest crocodile is the Nile crocodile, which can grow nearly as long, and which lives throughout much of Africa around rivers, lakes, and swamps. Male saltwater crocodiles are typically larger than females, while female Nile crocodiles are typically larger than males.

While crocodiles look like big lizards, they’re actually more closely related to birds and dinosaurs. They can also live a long time, occasionally over a hundred years. All crocodiles are good swimmers with webbed feet that help them change directions quickly. They can also run pretty fast out of water. A crocodile’s back is heavily armored with thick scales and osteoderms, or scutes, which are bony deposits in the skin. Crocodiles have long jaws studded with 80 teeth, and if a croc loses a tooth, another grows in its place. It can just keep replacing its teeth up to 50 times. It has good night vision, a good sense of smell, good hearing, and special sensory pits on its jaws that allow a croc to hunt and escape danger even in complete darkness. A croc’s stomach contains acid that would make even the bearded vulture envious, so it has no problem digesting bones, hooves, and horns efficiently, a good thing since Crocodiles usually swallow their prey whole. And crocodiles have the strongest bite of any living animal, stronger even than a great white shark.

Of course, there used to be bigger crocodiles. Do you want to learn about gigantic extinct crocodiles? OF COURSE YOU DO, that is basically why we’re all here.

Okay, so, there used to be a 35-foot, or almost 11-meter-long crocodile called Deinosuchus that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now North America. It basically looked like a modern crocodile, but its rear teeth were shorter and blunter than its front teeth. They were adapted to crush its prey rather than bite through it, probably because with a bite force that was probably stronger than a T. rex’s, it didn’t want to accidentally bite a big chunk out of the dinosaurs it ate. Yeah. It ate dinosaurs.

So crocodiles probably did a lot to inspire dragon folklore. There’s still a lot of mythology wrapped around the crocodile today, for that matter. You know those little birds that are supposed to clean crocodile teeth? Not actually a thing. I’ve lived my whole life thinking that was pretty neat, only to find it’s a myth.

Sometimes in spring a croc will lie in the water with sticks on its snout. When a bird flies down to pick up a stick for nesting, the crocodile will grab the bird and eat it. This is a real thing that happens, not a myth. Crocodiles are actually pretty smart. And sometimes they hunt in packs.

One of the most famous traditional dragon stories in the English language is that of St. George and the Dragon, which probably originated from stories brought back to Britain during the Crusades. The story became especially popular in the 13th century and there are many versions.

According to the story, a venomous dragon lived in a pond near a city, and had poisoned not only its pond, but the entire countryside. To keep the dragon from approaching the city, the people had to feed it their own children. Each day the people held a terrible lottery to see who had to send one of their children to the pond for the dragon to eat. One day the princess was chosen, and despite all the king’s gold and silver he had to send his daughter to be eaten by the dragon.

Fortunately for her, St. George just happened to be riding by. The dragon emerged from its pond and St. George thought, oh no, we’re not having any of that, and charged it. He wounded it with his lance, then had the princess give him her girdle to use as a collar. A girdle in this case was something between a decorative belt and a ribbon tied around the waist. As soon as St. George tied the girdle around the dragon’s neck, it became meek as a puppy and followed him back to the city.

Naturally, everyone was terrified, but St. George said he would kill the dragon if the king and his people would convert to Christianity. They did, he did, and that was the end of the dragon.

While crocodiles and big snakes undoubtedly strongly influenced dragon lore, something else did too. There’s a reason dragons are so often supposed to live in caves, for instance. Caves are good places to find fossils of huge extinct animals.

In Klagenfurt in Austria there’s a monument of a dragon, called the lindorm or lindwurm, that was erected in 1593. It still stands today, together with a statue of Hercules that was added almost 40 years later. The dragon statue is based on a story of the region. 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 wooly rhinoceros.

Other dragon stories probably started when someone saw huge fossils they couldn’t identify. Dragons, after all, can look like just about anything. Stories of benevolent dragons living on Mount Pilatus in Switzerland may have started by pterodactyl fossils that are frequently found in the area. In 1421 a farmer saw a dragon flying to the mountain, and it was so close to him that the farmer fainted. When he woke, he found a stone left for him by the dragon, which had healing properties. The dragonstone is in a local museum these days and has been identified as a meteorite.

It occurs to me that if one were rich, and by one I mean me, one could take a dragon tour through Europe and visit all these awesome monuments and museums. That would be part of my expedition to search for the tatzelwurm in the Alps.

We’ll finish up at the animal I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the Komodo dragon. While in many respects the Komodo dragon is a real-life dragon, it probably didn’t influence traditional dragon stories in the western world because no one in Europe knew anything about it until 1910. It only lives on five small islands, notably Komodo, but it’s also found on the island of Flores where the Homo floresiensis remains were found.

There were rumors for years of a type of land crocodile found on Komodo. Dutch sailors said it actually breathed fire and could even fly. In 1910, a Dutch Colonial Administration official from Flores took some soldiers to Komodo and searched for the dragon. They shot one, and Peter Ouwens, director of the Zoological Museum in Bogor, Java, hired hunters who killed two more. Ouwens studied the lizards and published a formal description in 1912. In direct contrast to many governments of the time, who were apparently trying to drive as many species to extinction as possible, in 1915 the Dutch government listed the Komodo dragon as protected.

Keep in mind that at this time, people were completely bonkers about dinosaurs and other megafauna. The Komodo dragon got incredibly famous in a very short amount of time. A 1926 scientific expedition that brought back two live dragons and twelve preserved ones actually inspired the 1933 movie King Kong. Since Komodo dragons displayed in zoos proved to be huge draws, but didn’t survive long in captivity back then, if the dragon hadn’t already been protected it probably would have been driven to extinction by collectors capturing them for zoos and killing them to sell to museums as taxidermied specimens.

Researchers used to think that the Komodo dragon, which is a type of monitor lizard, demonstrated island gigantism, where some species that are typically not so big grow larger when a population is restricted to an island. Island dwarfism is its opposite, where big animals like elephants evolve to become smaller in an island habitat. But many species of monitor lizard are large even though they don’t live on islands, and it turns out that a close relative of the Komodo dragon lived in Australia until around 50,000 years ago. In fact, the first aboriginal settlers of Australia might have encountered it.

It was called Megalania and it was the largest straight-up lizard, as opposed to dinosaur, that’s ever been found. While we don’t have any complete skeletons, some researchers estimate it grew to around 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, although older estimates had it up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Either way, it was much bigger than the Komodo dragon, which can grow just over ten feet long, or more than 3 meters.

Like the crocodile, the Komodo dragon’s skin contains osteoderms. It almost looks like it’s covered with tiny spines up close. Also like the crocodile, it grows new teeth when it loses old ones, which frankly is something I wish mammals could do because how useful would that be? It can run faster than a crocodile, can swim and dive well when it needs to although it prefers to stay on land, and when it’s young it can climb trees. Older dragons are too heavy to climb trees, but an adult can stand on its hind legs using its tail as a prop. It likes to dig burrows to sleep in, and females may dig nesting burrows 30 feet long, or 9 meters.

The Komodo dragon eats anything, from carrion to baby Komodo dragons to humans, but it especially likes deer and wild pigs. Its sense of smell is so acute, it can smell a dying animal almost six miles away, or 9 ½ km. It will swallow smaller prey whole but will tear chunks off of bigger carcasses.

We’re still learning about the Komodo dragon. For a long time researchers thought it had a nasty dirty mouth full of rotten meat, which infected its prey with bacteria when bitten. But it turns out that the Komodo dragon is actually venomous. This is still somewhat controversial, since the Komodo dragon’s saliva does contain 57 strains of bacteria and some researchers think that’s more toxic than its venom. Whatever the case, you do not want to be bitten by a Komodo dragon.

It’s primarily an ambush predator, and when it attacks an animal, it gives it a bite with its huge serrated teeth. If the animal gets away, no problem. The dragon’s venom contains anticoagulants so it will probably die of blood loss. As for the dragon itself, its blood actually contains antimicrobial proteins. Researchers hope to develop new antibiotics from the proteins.

Komodo dragon eggs are big, about the size of grapefruits. The mother dragon guards her nest until the babies hatch, and some researchers have observed mothers defending their babies for short periods after they hatch. Baby dragons mostly live in trees and eat insects, lizards, birds’ eggs, and other small prey. If they want to approach a grown-up dragon’s kill to eat some of it, a baby will roll around in poop first or in the stinky parts of the dead animal’s guts so the adult dragons won’t eat the baby. Captive female dragons occasionally lay fertile eggs even though they’ve never mated, a process known as parthenogesis.

Komodo dragons look dumb. They’re probably not exactly geniuses even compared to crocodiles. But dragons kept in captivity sometimes play with items in their enclosures, which is pretty neat. If even a Komodo dragon can take time out of its busy schedule to play, you can too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 052: British Big Cats

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Here’s another in the 2018 series of out-of-place animals, this time ABCs–alien big cats: big cats where there shouldn’t be any big cats. Like the British Isles, where no one should find a lynx or puma wandering around these days. But not only do people see big cats in Britain, they sometimes catch or kill them too.

The Eurasian lynx:

The European wildcat:

The puma:

A photo of the Beast of Bodmin Moor:

Mr. Tinkler’s unexpected serval:

The Kellas cat:

Show transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about some more out of place animals, but a specific type. There are so many reports of big cats in places where big cats should not be, especially black panthers, that cryptozoologists have a term for them: ABCs, or Alien Big Cats. Thanks again to Maureen for the topic suggestion!

There are whole books written about ABCs, so I won’t be able to do more than touch on the highlights in this episode. Big cat reports from Great Britain are especially common, so that’s what I’ll focus on this time.

Many reports of black panthers turn out to be large domestic cats seen at a distance, where tricks of perspective and poor light contribute to the cat looking much bigger than it really is. Some big cat reports turn out to be real animals that escaped from captivity, but other reports are not so easy to explain away.

The British Isles only fully separated from mainland Europe about 8,000 years ago as the land rose due to isostatic rebound after the weight of glaciers was gone and due to rising sea levels from melted glaciers. Before that, it was connected to what is now Denmark and the Netherlands via a large area of marshland for several thousand years. We know one European big cat crossed into Britain during that time: the Eurasian lynx, which only went extinct in Britain about 1,500 years ago. Other ice age big cats went extinct long before, around 25 to 30,000 years ago, or 12,000 years ago in the case of the cave lion.

Of all the big cats that once lived in Britain, only the Eurasian lynx is still around. It now lives in parts of Asia and Europe on up to Siberia. It’s larger than the related North American bobcat and the Canadian lynx, but still nowhere near as big as tigers and lions. The Eurasian lynx stands about 28 inches tall at the shoulder, or 70 cm, and is heavily built with thick spotted fur and a short bobtail. The tip of its tail is black although the rest of the animal is mostly buff to orangey-brown with darker brown spots, and it has long black tufts of fur on the tips of its ears. It’s a distinctive animal.

There is one other wild cat that we know still lives in Britain, the European wildcat. It used to live throughout the British Isles but now only remains in Scotland, although it also lives in parts of Europe. At first glance the wildcat looks like a domestic cat with tabby markings, but it’s a little larger and more heavily built than most domestic breeds. But since it can and does interbreed with the closely related domestic cat, it can be hard to tell the wildcat apart from a feral domestic tabby. It’s also very rare. Only a few hundred remain in the Scottish highlands at most, possibly only a few dozen. In the last few years, Scotland has worked hard to protect the remaining wildcats. An active program to neuter all feral domestic and hybrid cats in the West Highlands has helped reduce the number of crossbreedings, and more land has been designated as a wildcat haven.

There are very old stories of a vicious big cat in Britain, with the first mention in a Welsh manuscript dating to some time before 1250, called the Black Book of Carmarthen. It’s a collection of histories and legends told in verse. A fragment of a poem frequently referred to as Pa gur after the first two words of the first line, or more descriptively, Arthur and the Porter, is about King Arthur and probably dates to around 1100. The Cath Palug is mentioned in the stanza right at the end before the rest of the poem is lost due to damage. I’ll quote an English translation of the last few lines, because I was an English major and will use any excuse to read poetry out loud.

“Cei the fair went to Mona

To devastate Lleown.

His shield was ready

Against Cath Palug

When the people welcomed him.

Who pierced the Cath Palug?

Nine score before dawn

Would fall for its food.”

Kay was Arthur’s foster-brother, but in this poem he’s described as Arthur’s nephew. Lleown possibly means lions, and Mona is Ynys Môn, or Anglesey. The cat was a monster that had already killed 180 men when Kay finally defeated it. But the Cath Palug appears in other Arthur legends, and from them we can learn a bit more about it. In some stories it was the offspring of Henwen, the great white sow, who was chased into the sea and gave birth to a black kitten. The kitten swam to the island of Ynys Mon where the sons of Palug raised it, only for it to turn into a monster. In other versions of the story, a man fishing in a lake swore to dedicate his first catch to God, but broke his oath. On his third cast he caught a black kitten, which he kept and raised. But it grew enormous and killed him, his family, and anyone else who came near the lake. Sir Kay, or Arthur in other versions of the story, polished his shield so the cat would attack its reflection and not the man.

The Cath Palug was probably not a real cat but an animal of folklore. There’s always a possibility, of course, that the stories were based on the European lynx. But the lynx is not black even as a cub, and it’s not a dangerous animal to humans the way tigers sometimes are.

The first modern report of an Alien Big Cat in Britain comes from about 1770. The writer William Cobbett described seeing a gray cat the size of a Spaniel dog when he was a boy. It climbed into a hollow elm tree near Waverley Abbey, a ruin in Surrey. Later in his life, while traveling in Canada, he saw a wild gray cat, possibly a lynx, and thought it looked like the cat he saw in England.

Lynxes are occasionally killed or captured in Britain. In 1903 a lynx was shot and killed in Devon after it killed two dogs. The animal was taxidermied and given to a local museum, which labeled it as a Eurasian lynx—but a study of the animal published in 2013 proved that it was a Canadian lynx that had been kept in captivity for at least part of its life. In 1927 newspapers reported a lynx caught in Scotland. I found a copy of the article from the Sunday Post dated the 16th of January 1927, which I’ll quote part of:

“Shepherds reported having seen an animal like a leopard, but without spots on its coat, stalking the sheep in the heather. A farmer who set a steel trap on a mountainside was astonished to find the following morning that he had captured a large, fierce, yellow animal of unknown species. He obtained a gun and, cautiously approaching it, shot it. The body was sent to the London Zoo, where it was identified as that of a lynx… Two other specimens have been killed in Scotland recently. How they reached there is unknown, but it is believed that they must have escaped from some traveling menagerie.”

Unfortunately the article doesn’t give much information about the animal. It’s only called large, fierce, and yellow, and the shepherds who’d seen it before it was trapped said it looked like a leopard without spots. That’s strange if this really was a lynx, because while some individual lynxes may have spots that don’t show up well against the background coat, all lynxes have spots. They also have bobtails and the distinctive black ear tufts, but those details aren’t reported.

It’s possible the poor cat wasn’t a lynx at all but a puma. The puma, also called a cougar or mountain lion, is native to the Americas. It’s bigger than a lynx, standing almost three feet tall at the shoulder, or 90 cm, and is usually tawny in color with lighter belly, and has a long tail that may show some faint ringing. You’d think that the London Zoo expert who examined the animal would know the difference between a long-tailed puma and a short-tailed lynx, though, so who knows what it really was? But in 1980 an honest-to-goodness puma was captured in Scotland. The puma spent the remainder of her life at the Highland Wildlife Park zoo, where they named her Felicity, and after she died was taxidermied and is now in the Inverness Museum. Felicity was probably an escaped or released pet, since the zoo director reported that she liked being tickled. Wild animals don’t typically like to be tickled.

Many other large cats of various species have been killed or captured in Britain. In most, if not all, cases the animals were probably exotic pets that were either released when they became too difficult to manage, or escaped and weren’t reported because the owners didn’t have a license to own the animal in the first place. But there are many other sightings of more mysterious large cats.

The Surrey Puma is one of the earliest cases. The first sightings were made in the 1930s around the Surrey/Hampshire border, but since this is the same area where William Cobbett saw his Spaniel-sized gray cat, many people think that 1770 account is the earliest known. In 1955 a woman walking her dog saw a puma-like cat slinking away from a dead calf, which it had evidently been feeding on. Many reports followed through the 1960s. Naturalists who examined paw prints discovered in the area identified the prints as made by dogs. Occasionally someone would snap a photo, but they were always too blurry to be conclusive—until 2014. One quiet Friday morning a man named Allan Tinkler, from Molesey in north Surrey, was eating breakfast with his children when he saw a strange cat in his garden. It stayed in the yard for over half an hour and was definitely not a domestic cat. I’ve got one of the pictures he took in the show notes, and it clearly shows a small wildcat called a serval.

The serval is a long-legged, large-eared African cat with spots over most of its body and some stripes along the neck and shoulders. It turned out that this particular serval was an escaped pet, and its owner retrieved it safely and took it home. They also had a license to keep it. Servals are frequently kept as pets and will sometimes cross-breed with domestic cats, producing tame kittens with serval-like markings. This hybridization is the basis of the domestic cat breed called the Savannah cat.

Obviously that serval wasn’t the cause of sightings going back decades or even centuries, but with no clear photos or captured animals, we can’t guess what the Surrey Puma might really be.

The Beast of Bodmin Moor is another case that received a lot of attention starting in the late 1970s. Bodmin Moor is in Cornwall, England, and over the years people have reported seeing big cats in the area, brown or black in color and about the size of a German shepherd, with long tails. One persistent rumor is that in 1978, when a circus owner named Mary Chipperfield had to close her zoo in Plymouth, she released three pumas onto the moor rather than give them to Dartmoor Zoo. Supposedly the Beast of Bodmin Moor is a descendant of these pumas.

In 1994, after something killed a number of sheep on the moor, the local MP called for an official investigation into the beast. A biologist and a zoologist headed the investigation. They looked at the sheep supposedly killed by a big cat, at tracks, photographs, and video footage, and conducted a search of the moor. Their conclusion, after six months, was that there was no evidence for any big cats of any type living on the moor. The tracks were made by dogs, the sheep carcasses did not show signs of being killed or eaten by cats, and the photos and videos showed domestic cats seen in places where scale was hard to judge.

Locals weren’t at all appeased. Many people were convinced big cats lived on the moor. A few days after the official report, a boy found the skull of a big cat near the River Fowey. But the Natural History Museum in London, which examined the skull, determined that it was from a leopard that had been prepared for taxidermy after death, and was probably taken from a leopard-skin rug.

Mysterious big cats have been spotted all over Britain, and considering how many exotic cats have been caught and killed over the years, it’s clear something is going on. It’s unlikely that any exotic species have successfully established breeding populations in Britain, but it’s not completely out of the question. But there is one other possibility.

For a long time the Kellas cat, or cait sìth, which means ‘fairy cat,’ was thought to be a Scottish folktale. It was a big black cat flecked with white, and with a white spot on its chest, that was supposed to be an omen of doom or even a type of evil spirit. Then a gamekeeper caught one in a fox snare in 1984, and in the following years a few more were shot or captured. It turns out that the Kellas cat is a landrace population of hybrids between European wildcats and domestic cats. A landrace is a locally adapted animal—not a subspecies, although in some cases it could eventually develop into one, but not really a separate breed of animal, although traits of a landrace population can be standardized into a breed through selective breeding. In the case of the Kellas cat, it’s black with a white spot on the chest, and has long white guardhairs that give it a flecked appearance.

While the Kellas cat is not much bigger or heavier than a domestic cat, it’s possible that at least some sightings of mysterious big cats are actually Kellas cat sightings. And honestly, if I had the choice between seeing an escaped exotic pet and seeing a fairy cat, I’ll take the fairy cat every time.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!