Category Archives: cryptozoology

Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman

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Show transcript:

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

Monster month is upon us, and to kick us off I’ve got a fun episode about a supposed Bigfoot discovery called the Minnesota Iceman.

It happened in 1968, although the iceman had been around for a while as part of a traveling exhibition. But in 1968 a zoologist named Terry Cullen saw it at a livestock fair in Chicago. Curious and excited, Cullen talked to the owner of the exhibition, named Frank Hansen. Hansen said he wasn’t actually the iceman’s owner but that he was taking care of it for the owner.

Cullen contacted two cryptozoologists and urged them to look at the iceman, author Ivan Sanderson and zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Both wrote several influential books and basically founded modern cryptozoology, which of course is the study of animals that might or might not actually exist. Ivan Sanderson comes up in the podcast occasionally because he was everywhere back in the day, managing to have all sorts of sightings of mystery animals with absolutely no proof except for his own say-so.

But the iceman was clearly a real thing, because there it was. This is a good time to describe it, huh? It wasn’t a living animal but a dead one preserved in a block of ice. It was apelike but much larger than most apes with human-like proportions, and would have stood about six feet tall when alive, or 1.8 meters. The iceman’s face was somewhat flat in shape with pronounced brow ridges and a short snub nose. It had dark fur and enormous hands and feet, and while the ice obscured a lot of the details, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson got a good close look at it in Hansen’s home that December. The exhibition was on its winter break and Hansen kept it at his house in a refrigerated case. The body itself showed signs of injury, including a possibly broken arm and an eyeball dislodged from its socket.

Both Sanderson and Heuvelmans took photos and made careful drawings of the iceman. Heuvelmans, who was a zoologist, published a description of it in a Belgian scientific journal in 1969. He first suggested it was a new species of human that he named Homo pongoides, but later he changed his mind and decided it was probably more closely related to Neandertals.

Sanderson, meanwhile, was active in drumming up media interest. He also was sure it was a new species, but instead of Homo pongoides, he chose to call it Bozo. Yeah, Bozo. Sanderson published an article about the iceman in a 1969 issue of Argosy science fiction magazine, where he was an editor. In that article he suggests the iceman was the missing link between humans and apes. Remember what I’ve said about people claiming they’ve found the missing link? They either don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s a hoax. Sometimes both.

Sanderson also contacted John Napier, a primatologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution and had a longstanding interest in the Yeti and other Bigfoot-type creatures, and suggested he investigate. Napier and the Smithsonian’s director, S. Dillon Ripley, also a Yeti enthusiast, were both interested. But when they asked to see the iceman, suddenly Hansen said nope, the iceman’s actual owner didn’t want anyone else looking at their…sideshow exhibit.

Later Hansen said Napier and Ripley could see it after all. But when they did, it was clear to them that it wasn’t a real animal. Napier said it looked like a latex model. Hansen promptly said that he’d hidden the original, worried that he would get in trouble if it turned out to be a type of human, and that Napier had actually viewed the model he’d replaced the actual iceman with. Sanderson and Heuvelmans did say that the photos Napier took looked different from their own photos and what they remembered. But Hansen wouldn’t let anyone see the original iceman, so the scientists’ interest waned and that was pretty much it.

So where did the iceman come from and where is it now? Surely by now some museum or university has bought the actual specimen and thawed it out to examine, right? Where’s the genetic profile? Why isn’t this thing in textbooks?

Soooo, well. Let’s start with where it came from. Hansen said the body had been discovered in Siberia by seal hunters, floating in a block of sea ice just off the coast. But he also said it had been found not by Russian seal hunters but by Japanese whalers. Okay, well, maybe he couldn’t remember exactly who found it. But wait. He also said it had been shot by a hunter in Minnesota. And he also said it was killed in Vietnam and smuggled into the United States during the war in a body bag. And he also said someone discovered it in Hong Kong in a deep freeze after it was confiscated by authorities from the seal hunters or possibly whalers.

In other words, Hansen was clearly just making all this up. But maybe he didn’t know where it came from. After all, he always said he wasn’t the iceman’s owner, although he wouldn’t say who the owner was, just that they were an “eccentric California millionaire.” He also claimed the specimen’s hairs and blood had been tested and came back with lots of anomalies, but he refused to let anyone have current samples and he conveniently didn’t have copies of the test reports.

In 2013 someone listed the iceman in an eBay auction. It was bought by the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas, where apparently it’s still on display. It looks like the photos and illustrations made by Heuvelmans and Sanderson, but it’s not a real animal. It’s a latex model, just like Napier suspected.

Back in the early 1970s, Napier had done some digging and discovered that in 1967, Hansen had commissioned a latex model of an ape-man from a company that made movie props.

It’s quite possible that there was more than one model of the iceman made, since obviously that would increase its earning power in sideshow exhibits. That would explain why the iceman Heuvelmans and Sanderson saw looked different from the iceman Napier and Ripley saw. Or the differences could have come about when the model was thawed for easier storage, then frozen again in ice when it was time to go back on tour.

Of course, some people refuse to believe that the iceman was a hoax. They believe Hansen really did switch out the actual real iceman with a model. They base this on the report by Heuvelmans and Sanderson that when they examined the iceman, there was a place where the ice had melted, exposing the skin, and they said they smelled putrefaction.

There are several possible explanations for this, however. Just as people see what they expect to see, people smell what they expect to smell. I’m sure that model didn’t smell great, either, especially after being exhibited all over the country all summer. My freezer smells kind of funny even though there’s literally nothing in it but ice. Any questionable whiffiness might have been interpreted as that of putrefaction. Or, of course Hansen might have thrown a piece of rotten meat in its case to make it smell more realistic.

Whatever the reason for the smell they reported, that’s a really slim reason to ignore all the evidence that points to the Minnesota iceman being a latex model. I mean, we actually have the model to look at, and we know Hansen commissioned a model right before the Minnesota iceman conveniently went on exhibition, and that was well before Napier even knew about it.

Everything points to a hoax, but really, you can’t exactly blame Hansen. He didn’t approach Sanderson and Heuvelmans, they approached him. Hansen was a showman, so he probably hoped that if he convinced the pair the iceman was real, it would lead to a lot more publicity and therefore more money for him. That was his job, after all, and it sounds like he was good at his job.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 506: The Beast of Buderim

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Photos of a mangy fox that make it look like it has stripes:

Show transcript:

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

Buderim is a small city in Queensland, Australia, right on the coast but extending up the side of a small mountain. It looks like an especially beautiful place in a beautiful part of the world, but in the 1990s it was in the news due to sightings of a strange animal.

The animal was dubbed the Beast of Buderim by reporters. It all seems to have started in 1993 when a local artist was driving with her husband and saw a striped animal run across the road. She thought for certain it was a Tasmanian tiger, more properly called a thylacine. When she got home, she drew what she’d seen. It looks like a foxlike animal with black stripes, a long whiskery muzzle, and a long thick tail.

In March of 1995 a local dentist and his ten-year-old daughter saw the animal while driving along the edge of the local rainforest one evening. It was dark but his headlights lit it up and he was able to give a good description of it. He said it was medium-sized, presumably meaning about the size of an average dog, and had stripes that were sort of like a tabby cat’s markings but somewhat like a brindled dog’s markings. He described its coat as goldy in color. He also said it had a pronounced bump above its eyes, although I’m not sure if he meant it had a bumped-up forehead or if he was referring to a brow ridge of some kind. The animal was standing on the road, but when the car approached, it arched its back and then ran into the trees.

Another sighting occurred in August of 1995, but not near Buderim. A man in Bundaberg, a city over 130 miles away from Buderim, or 210 km, was driving at night and had to brake hard to avoid hitting a gray kangaroo as it bounded across the road. A moment later a large animal leaped onto the road after the kangaroo. In the glare of the headlights, the man reported that the animal was sandy in color with stripes that started about halfway down its back, and that its eyes glowed green-yellow. It was big too, four or five feet long, or 1.2 to 1.5 meters, not even counting its long, thick tail. It also had long jaws that the man said reminded him of a crocodile’s when it snarled at him. It made another huge leap and disappeared into the brush.

Plenty of other sightings have been reported from around Buderim and other parts of Queensland, with the most recent in 2014 turning out to be a mangy fox. This is the same area where a different striped animal, usually called the Queensland tiger, was first reported in 1871 and occasionally spotted afterwards. Sometimes people confuse the Beast of Buderim and the Queensland tiger. We talked about the Queensland tiger in an episode a long time ago—I don’t remember which one, but I do remember there not being much evidence that it was a real animal.

Some people think the Queensland tiger is a descendant of an extinct animal called Thylacoleo [thyla-CO-leo], while the Beast of Buderim is supposed to be a thylacine.

Thylacoleo is sometimes called the marsupial lion, although it looked much different than a lion. It had a strong kangaroo-like tail that it could use as a balance to help it stand on its hind legs. Its front legs were extremely strong and it actually had a semi-opposable thumb that helped it grab onto prey. Its front claws were retractable like a cat’s claws too, an excellent example of convergent evolution. All these traits also meant that Thylacoleo could climb extremely well. It might not have been a very fast runner, though, and some researchers think it was an ambush predator, possibly dropping down from trees onto its prey. The largest species, Thylacoleo carnifex, stood over two feet tall at the shoulder, or 71 cm, and was heavy for its size.

Not only that, Thylacoleo had massive jaws with huge weird teeth. Its cheek teeth were enormous, basically just one giant tooth on each side. Its other teeth were much smaller in comparison and not very strong, but those giant cheek teeth and its strong jaws meant that Thylacoleo could bite right through meat and bones with no problem.

We don’t know for sure what Thylacoleo looked like, but we do have two separate pieces of rock art that probably depict it. They show it with pointed ears instead of rounded ones and stripes on its back.

Thylacoleo was an apex predator in the food web of Australian megafauna during the Pleistocene, and like many of the megafauna predators in other parts of the world, Thylacoleo required giant prey. When its prey started to go extinct due to climate change toward the end of the ice age, along with the arrival of humans who hunted megafauna efficiently, eventually Thylacoleo didn’t have anything to eat. It was too well adapted for killing large prey to switch over to smaller prey, and more nimble small predators out-competed it. We’re not sure when it went extinct, but the best guess right now is about 30,000 years ago and possibly 40,000 years ago. It’s definitely not alive today, no matter how awesome that would be.

But that’s all beside the point, because most people who have reported sightings of the Beast of Buderim say it looks like a thylacine. We talked about the thylacine in episode one and then I’ve hardly mentioned it, so let’s learn a bit about it now.

Unlike Thylacoleo, the thylacine went extinct less than a century ago, and we know exactly what it looked like, where it lived, and why it went extinct. We have photographs and even video of living thylacines kept in captivity. The last thylacine reported in the wild was shot and killed in 1930, while the last captive specimen died in 1936. People have reported sightings since, but no definitive proof of a living thylacine has been found despite lots of people searching for it. It was officially declared extinct in 1982.

The thylacine looked superficially like a canid and was about the size of a big dog, with a long body and long, somewhat cat-like tail although the tail was stiff, not flexible like a cat’s. The thylacine was tan or brown in color with darker stripes that started just behind the shoulders and continued down the hindquarters and down the tail. It had large, somewhat rounded ears, a long muzzle, and jaws that could open extremely wide.

The thylacine looks like it should be a scary animal, and European settlers certainly acted like it was a monster that killed sheep and other large livestock. In reality, though, it was a timid animal with weak jaws that mostly ate small animals like a flightless bird called the Tasmanian native hen. It would definitely kill domestic chickens but it certainly wasn’t killing sheep. It also couldn’t run very fast, although it could stand on its hind legs for short periods of time.

That didn’t stop the Tasmanian government from offering a bounty for dead thylacines. Bounties started as early as 1830 and a century later the thylacine was extinct. Hunting was only part of the problem, though. Habitat loss was an increasing issue as more and more wild land was converted to farmland, and introduced predators like foxes and dogs competed for food and sometimes killed the thylacine. The thylacine’s preferred prey was also declining in numbers for the same reasons. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a disease similar to distemper decimated wild and captive thylacines, possibly because the remaining population was weakened by a lack of genetic diversity.

One interesting thing about the thylacine is that both males and females had a pouch. Like other marsupials, the female’s pouch was where her babies finished developing after they were born. Her pouch was under her tail and opened toward the rear of the body, as in wombats, which is somewhat rare. It contained four teats. The male’s pouch was in the same place and is called a scrotal pouch. The male could withdraw his scrotum into the pouch to protect it when he was traveling through tall brush.

The thylacine only survived in Tasmania until its recent extinction. It had once been common in mainland Australia too but probably went extinct there at least 2,000 years ago and probably closer to 3,000 years ago. There’s no conclusive proof that it survived in Australia until modern times and no conclusive proof that it lives there now. But Queensland is in Australia and that’s where the beast of Buderim has been sighted. Could the beast be a relict population of thylacines?

The August 1995 sighting at first seems plausible, since it’s so detailed and the description matches the thylacine. But remember, the thylacine wasn’t a very fast animal, mostly ate quite small prey like birds the size of chickens, and didn’t seem to be very aggressive. It certainly wouldn’t be chasing a full-grown male gray kangaroo, as the witness reported. The eastern gray kangaroo is a large, muscular animal that can bound extremely quickly, up to 40 mph, or 64 km/hour, and has sharp claws on its hind feet. A male can stand 6 ½ feet tall, or almost 2 meters.

Aside from humans, the gray kangaroo’s only living predator is the dingo, a canid introduced to Australia by humans over 8,000 years ago. We talked about it in episode 232. The dingo is usually tan or reddish in color and it carries its tail low, not curved upward. It also has pointed ears.

It doesn’t have stripes, though, and the stripes are a common detail in all the beast of Buderim sightings. But there are a number of possible solutions that don’t involve thylacines. The dentist’s sighting from 1995 might easily have been a big domestic cat. The dentist even reported that it had tabby-cat markings and that it arched its back when it saw the car. Size can be hard to estimate in darkness, especially when you’ve seen something unexpected.

The artist’s sighting in 1993 is less detailed. We have her drawing of the animal but we don’t know whether she saw it in daytime or at night. She saw it run across the road, which means that even if it was broad daylight she probably didn’t get a great look at it. I suspect a lot of the details she included in her drawing were things she expected to see, not things she actually necessarily saw. That doesn’t mean she was lying, just that her brain was filling in details without her even being aware of it. I think she saw a fox.

As for the August 1995 sighting, where the animal was chasing a kangaroo, I think that witness saw a dingo.

But wait, you may be thinking, neither foxes nor dingos have stripes! We’ve established their lack of stripes already.

To solve the mystery of the stripes, we have to look at another reported sighting. This is the most recent one, from 2014. The animal in question turned out to be a mangy fox, but it also definitely looked like it had stripes. We know because the witness got photographs, and the photographs show a scruffy fox with a thin tail and what look like thin dark stripes along its sides. All the beast of Buderum witnesses described their animals as looking brindled, and the marking known as brindled in dogs and a few other animals consist of thin dark stripes that are fairly close together.

Many things can make an animal look like it has brindled stripes, including poor coat quality, a coat that’s damp from rain or fog, or a coat that’s so thick it’s almost quilted and is therefore likely to appear unusual in bright headlights. The August 1995 sighting happened in wintertime in Australia, when a dingo might be expected to have a thick undercoat.

Whatever the animals were that witnesses reported, I don’t think they saw thylacines. That doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t see something mysterious, though. There might be some rare striped animal in Queensland that gets seen occasionally and mistaken for a thylacine. It’s just much more likely that foxes, dingoes, and other known animals are the actual Beast of Buderim. But I would love to be proven wrong!

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 505: Three Animal Mysteries

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Further reading:

Scientists solve a shark murder mystery

Stone Age Animal Urine Could Solve a Mystery about Technological Development

South African rock art possibly inspired by long-extinct species

The porbeagle shark [photo by Andy Murch, taken from this site]:

Dicynodont fossils and their possible art interpretation by the San people:

Show transcript:

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

It’s finally monster month, and I’m looking forward to sharing lots of fun mystery animals and animal mysteries over the next four weeks.

Our first mystery is from an article titled “Scientists solve a shark murder mystery.” The word solve is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this case, but let’s find out what happened to the shark.

The shark in question was a porbeagle shark, a type of mackerel shark that can grow as much as 12 feet long, or over 3.5 meters, and is gray and white in color. It lives in cold water in the North Atlantic and around Antarctica, and it eats fish and cephalopods like squid. It hardly ever bothers people although people like to eat it, and in some regions it’s been so overfished that the species is listed as endangered.

The porbeagle is especially unusual because it’s able to thermoregulate to some degree, like the basking shark and some other sharks that we talked about in episode 353, about warm-blooded fish. The porbeagle is actually really good at keeping its brain, eyes, and internal organs warm, which is why it’s so successful in cold water. It can live to be at least 65 years old.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the porbeagle, including where exactly it lives and how far it migrates throughout the year. A team of scientists has been tagging porbeagle sharks with little transmitters, like shark Air Tags, to find out where the sharks travel and other information, like how deeply they dive and what the water temperature is. The transmitter is attached to a shark’s fin and is designed to stay in place for a year, then detach and transmit all the information it’s gathered as soon as it floats to the water’s surface.

In October 2020, the scientists captured an 8-foot, or 2.5 meter, female porbeagle and fitted her with a transmitter before releasing her again. They were especially happy to see that she was pregnant, partly because the porbeagle is endangered and reproduces slowly, partly because they were interested to find out where a pregnant shark traveled.

About six months later, in April 2021, the tag began to transmit its information. It was too early for it to have detached on its own, but sometimes something happens to a tag and it ends up removed from the shark before it’s scheduled to.

The team’s lead scientist, Brooke Anderson, examined the transmitter’s information and knew something weird had happened to the shark. Everything seemed normal until about a week before the tag began to transmit, when the tag indicated a slight but steady increase in the temperature of its surroundings, even though it was still deep underwater. Anderson suspected that the shark had been killed and eaten at that point, and the tag ended up inside the body of another animal that was able to thermoregulate. When the transmitter was expelled from the predator’s body, it floated to the surface and did what it was designed to do, transmit its saved information.

But while the porbeagle isn’t a huge shark, it’s still big and dangerous. It’s also a fast swimmer. Something really big had to have attacked the shark.

The first thing Anderson suspected was an orca, but she and her team immediately rejected that theory. Orcas are mammals, which means an orca’s internal temperature is much higher than the tag had recorded. That narrowed the suspects down to another shark that’s able to thermoregulate, but it also had to be a really big shark. They decided in the end that the porbeagle was probably eaten by a great white.

Next, we need to learn a little about the rock hyrax, because a deposit of ancient rock hyrax urine is helping scientists learn more about our own prehistoric ancestors.

The rock hyrax looks like a weird rodent but it’s actually more closely related to dugongs, manatees, and elephants. I’m literally not even kidding. Hyraxes are native to Africa although the rock hyrax also lives in parts of the Middle East. It’s also called the dassie. It’s a chonky animal with a short tail and thick fur, small rounded ears, and nails instead of claws. Even a big male rock hyrax grows less than two feet long, or 50 cm, about the size of a small marmot or groundhog, which it resembles superficially. It eats plants.

The rock hyrax lives in family groups of one male and several females, along with their young offspring. It doesn’t dig a burrow but lives in holes and shelters it finds already dug, including caves, and that brings us to the sort-of mystery.

Like many animals, the rock hyrax tends to pee in the same place every time it needs to go, and a group of hyraxes living in the same shelter tend to all pee in the same place. A good shelter, like a cave, will get used by generation after generation of hyraxes. The rock hyrax is well adapted to dry areas and its kidneys are efficient. It doesn’t need a lot of water. As a result, its urine tends to be fairly thick and it also hardens quickly when exposed to the air.

In other words: rock hyraxes have been peeing in one part of Boomplaas Cave in South Africa for at least 50,000 years, and that urine is preserved in thin layers that contain pollen and other clues about the climate over the last 50 millennia. The urine can be carbon dated, too. That means scientists can cut samples from that huge deposit of ancient urine, determine how old each layer is, and examine the pollen trapped inside to learn what kind of plants were growing in the area at the time. That helps them determine what the climate was like, which in turn helps them learn more about the ancient humans who lived in the area too.

Until the samples were tested in 2022, the changes in South Africa’s climate over the last 50,000 years wasn’t well known. Now we have an unbroken record of the climate. The main problem is that the urine smells really, really bad. Like, really really bad. But it’s worth it, for science.

Let’s finish with another mystery from South Africa. Around 200 years ago, between 1821 and 1835, some artists among the San people painted an interesting animal on a rock wall. It’s not the only part of the painting, which contains art of other animals and various cultural elements, but it’s the only animal that can’t be identified as something real.

Of course, you can’t study art the same way you’d study a fossil. If you draw a dragon from your imagination, that’s art. If a scientist comes along 200 years later and tries to claim that dragon was based on a real animal that had four legs and two wings and could breathe fire, they’re misunderstanding what art is. But if that same scientist looked at your drawing along with the journal you kept at the same time telling about how you visited the zoo, they might suggest that your drawing was inspired by the crocodiles and monitor lizards you saw.

That’s what Julien Benoit thinks about the painting of an animal referred to as the horned serpent. The San have lived in that particular part of South Africa for longer than hyraxes have been peeing in Boomplaas Cave, and their culture is rich and in many ways unchanged from that of their ancient ancestors. They know everything about their land, including all the animals that live there now and a lot that used to live there.

The horned serpent painting is a long-bodied animal that doesn’t actually look like a serpent or an animal with horns. It very clearly has legs even though they’re short, and its body is thick but with a long thin tail and a small head with downward pointing tusks. If the animal was painted near somewhere that you’d expect to find walruses, everyone would assume it’s a walrus. But it’s not a walrus, or probably not, and the painting doesn’t resemble anything that actually lives in South Africa.

However, Benoit suggests that it does resemble an animal that used to live in what is now South Africa, the dicynodont. It had downward-pointing tusks, a thick body, and fairly short, strong legs. It ate plants and was very common in the area when it was alive—but it went extinct over 200 million years ago.

Clearly, as ancient as the San culture is, they weren’t around in the Triassic, so how could they possibly have known about dicynodonts? The answer is pretty simple. Dicynodonts were so common that their fossils are regularly found in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, including well-preserved skulls eroding out of the ground.

The San would have undoubtedly come across these fossils. They even have myths about huge animals that once roamed the area but that died out long ago, and archaeologists have found collections of fossils made by the San centuries ago. Benoit thinks the so-called horned serpent is an artistic depiction of a dicynodont, with elements taken from the fossils and from myth.

In other words, basically, the San people understood paleontology and extinction long before Europeans figured it out.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 504: The Mystery Roar

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Further reading:

Wolves on rise in France as bears wreak mountain havoc

Can Brown Bears Survive in the Pyrenees?

Show transcript:

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

On the evening of August 4, 2019, two hikers set up camp in the Pyrenees Mountains. Laurent and Frédéric were familiar with the area and had plenty of experience hiking and camping. Once their camp was ready for the night, they took off their boots and socks and sat down to eat dinner and relax at a small campfire. If you’ve ever camped after a long hike, you’ll know that this is the best time of the day, when you can rest and air out your boots.

After only a few minutes, though, the two heard grunts and growls in the darkness not far from their camp. They were concerned, but they had a fire and most animals won’t approach a fire. But the sounds got closer and closer.

Then the animal roared—and it sounded like it was much closer than before. Laurent and Frédéric remembered that bears have become more common in the Pyrenees in the last few decades, and rather than take their chances with a hungry bear, they decided it was time to go. They shoved their bare feet into their boots, left everything behind, and raced back down the trail.

It was late when they made it to the village of Germ so the hikers took refuge in a church where they spent the night. In the morning they hiked back up to their campsite to retrieve their belongings, expecting it to be trashed by a bear hunting for food. But everything was where they’d left it.

Some people assumed the hikers had panicked over nothing, but the men were adamant that they’d heard something roaring as it came closer. In a news interview they said the final roar, the one that made them grab their boots and run, lasted several seconds and was so loud they could actually feel it in their chests.

Brown bears were once fairly common in the Pyrenees but by 1991 they had all been killed, mostly by hunters. Habitat loss was also a factor as people built more roads and houses in the mountains. In 1995 a conservation program brought three bears from Slovenia to start a reintroduction program, and the way people acted, you’d think someone had released a thousand rabid weasels into their homes.

Sheep and cattle farmers, and people who think the wilderness belongs to humans and humans only, protested the reintroduction of the bears, and one of the bears was shot and killed. This is despite the fact that farmers whose livestock are killed by bears get paid a lot of money by the French government. Approximately 1,000 sheep a year are killed in the Pyrenees—not by bears, but by pet dogs running loose.

Conservation efforts continued despite protests and finally, by 2020, there were 64 bears living in the Pyrenees Mountains. The number may be a little larger—some estimates are as high as 100—but conservationists have difficulty counting the bears properly because protesters threaten them and in one case actually set a conservationist’s car on fire.

The Pyrenees mountain range more or less divides France from Spain. It’s older than the Alps and especially known for its spectacular waterfalls. Many plants and animals that live in the Pyrenees are found nowhere else in the world, but unfortunately hunting and habitat loss have driven many of them to extinction. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of wild goat, went extinct in the year 2000.

Conservationists have introduced a related animal, the western Spanish ibex, to help keep the mountain ecosystems healthy. The bears now living in the mountains are similarly important to the ecosystems. Conservationists are frustrated by protesters who don’t want bears in the mountains at all, especially considering that the Great Pyrenees dog was developed in the area to protect livestock from bears and other predators. Some shepherds in British Columbia, Canada, where both black bears and grizzlies live, successfully use Great Pyrenees dogs to guard their flocks from bears. Grizzlies are a subspecies of brown bear.

But let’s go back to Laurent and Frédéric’s scary camping trip. Did they really encounter a bear or could it be something else?

Bears are generally quite shy animals who avoid people when they can. Unlike black bears, which don’t growl, brown bears do make growling and grunting sounds occasionally. Males will growl or even roar at other males during mating season in spring and early summer, signaling aggression and the willingness to fight. A brown bear will sometimes growl or roar at a person to warn them away too. So it’s possible the hikers heard a bear who wasn’t interested in their food but just wanted them out of its territory.

There’s another possibility, though, and it’s an animal that’s much more common in the Pyrenees Mountains than bears are. The wild boar lives throughout the Pyrenees, especially in forested areas and meadows. It’s mostly nocturnal and is usually shy of humans, and its numbers have increased considerably since its main predator, the wolf, was driven to extinction in the mountains and elsewhere in the 1930s.

An estimated two million wild boars live in France, including the Pyrenees. The most common time for people to encounter wild boars is at dusk, which is exactly when the hikers heard the growling. But wild boars are just pigs, right? Pigs oink, right?

This is what an aggressive wild boar sounds like:

[boar growl]

A boar will growl to warn other boars that there’s danger nearby and to signal aggression. That would explain why the hikers heard grunts and growls, which finished in a loud, angry roar. It would also explain why the campsite was undisturbed. Wild boars mostly eat plants, including roots, nuts, and fruit, although they’ll also eat carrion and the occasional small animal if they can catch it. Unlike a bear, which almost always wants to eat people food when it can, a wild boar is a lot less interested in people food. If the hikers did hear a boar instead of a bear, once they ran away the boar was probably satisfied and just went around finding its natural food in the area as usual.

Wild boars have been introduced to parts of North and South America, Australia, and other places where they’ve become an invasive species. The wild boar is native to Europe and Asia, though, so the ones in the Pyrenees are right where they belong. The only real issue is the lack of natural predators to keep the boar population at a healthy level.

The good news is that wild boars aren’t usually as aggressive as they can sound, as long as they’re not cornered. The two hikers were probably not in any danger after all. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry when you get roared at by a large creature in the dark.

Thanks for your support and thanks for listening!

Episode 501: The Wee Waa Monster and Tupandactylus

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Further reading:

Pterosaur melanosomes support signalling functions for early feathers

Show transcript:

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

This month we have a small mystery from Australia, which as far as I can find is still unsolved.

In 1950, a man named George Gray started hearing bellowing from the gum swamp near his house. His adult son, Ted, heard it too and reported it was loud enough to hear half a mile away, or about 800 meters.

The bellowing sounded like a crocodile. The problem is, the Grays lived just outside of the small town of Wee Waa in New South Wales, Australia. Very, very rarely a saltwater crocodile wanders down the coast as far as New South Wales, but Wee Waa is a five or six hour drive inland. It’s not crocodile country. It gets cold in winter and it’s surrounded by farmland.

Ted Gray found tracks in the swamp where a large animal had flattened tall grass, although the footprints didn’t have claw marks. He estimated that if the animal was a crocodile, it was only about 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, although he did note that none of the trails seemed to lead to the water. The bellowing mostly occurred in early morning and around sundown and continued for several months.

Attempts to search the wetlands were unsuccessful, mostly because of heavy rain that spring and summer. The water was ordinarily no more than 3 feet deep, or about a meter [actually about 92 cm, got this wrong], but was much deeper that year. Hundreds of people came to listen to the bellowing, though, and one constable perched in a tree for most of a day hoping to shoot the animal. He never saw it.

Seven years earlier, during World War II, an armored division of troops stayed in the area. The troops had been based in northwest Australia for a time and were supposed to have brought some baby crocodiles with them as mascots. The soldiers were told to kill the crocodiles, but newspapers in 1950 suggested they’d been released instead and that one had found its way to George Gray’s swamp. That doesn’t explain how it survived seven winters or why no one had seen or heard it until then.

Then again, one man named Ross Tuckey claimed he’d seen a crocodile several years before about 20 miles away, or 32 kilometers. He’d first thought it was a goanna, which is a type of monitor lizard that lives in Australia. Some species of goanna can grow more than 8 feet long, or about 2.5 meters. When Tuckey’s dog rushed at the animal, it bowled the dog away with its tail and slid into a dammed stream. Tuckey watched it float in the water with only its nostrils visible.

The Wee Waa monster was never identified.

That’s all there is! I tried to find out more but if anyone ever found what animal was bellowing in George Gray’s swamp, the newspapers didn’t report about it. I actually only learned about this animal mystery when I was searching for something else, which is always a lot of fun.

***

115 million years ago a colony of strange flying animals lived in what is now northeastern Brazil in South America. It was a reptile that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but it wasn’t a dinosaur. It wasn’t a bird either. Its wingspan might have been as much as 13 feet across, or 4 meters, which was big for a pterosaur, which of course is what it was. Specifically, it’s Tupandactylus imperator [too-pan-DAK-tillus imper-AH-ter], and it is a complete weirdo.

Tupandactylus was only described in 1997, but we have several really well preserved specimens, including nearly complete skulls. And it’s the skull that makes it so bizarre. Many pterosaurs had large crests that were probably brightly colored and probably used to attract mates, but Tupandactylus had what may be the largest crest ever found. It was just ridiculously large, nearly as big as its whole body, not counting its wings, of course.

Tupandactylus’s skull is hard to describe. I’m going to do my best, but you might want to click through to the show notes and look at the picture.

First, imagine a pelican’s bill. It’s long and has a pouch underneath. But in your mental picture, push that pouch forward so that it’s at the base of the lower jaw like a chin, and made of bone instead of soft tissue. Tupandactylus had a sort of keel on the underside of the end of its lower jaw that was probably for display.

Next, the upper jaw is tall but narrow. Maybe it will help to picture a toucan’s bill, but unlike a toucan, Tupandactylus’s upper jaw had a projection at the top that formed the base of the crest. This projection is a big triangular piece of bone that tops the upper jaw, and at the upper point of the triangle there’s a long, thin spur of bone that points upward and bends back. It’s ridiculously long.

Finally, the rear of the skull has another projection that points straight back to form the back of the crest. The tall rod of bone on top of the upper jaw forms the front of the crest. The crest itself was mostly made of soft tissue and keratin stretched between the two bony rods.

To finish our description of the skull, Tupandactylus had no teeth and probably also had a keratin beak at the very tips of its jaws, especially its lower jaw. We don’t know what it ate, but some paleontologists hypothesize it might have mostly eaten fruit and other plant material. It probably spent a lot of time on the ground looking for food and hanging out in its flock, sort of like geese do today.

We have a pretty good idea of what the crest looked like because a few specimens have soft tissue impressions left by the crest when the animal died and fell into mud. The complete crest was like a big sail, although there’s no evidence that it helped the animal fly.

What we don’t know is what color the crest was, but researchers have long assumed it was brightly colored and probably patterned to attract a mate.

In an article published in Nature in April of 2022, a team of paleontologists from Brazil and Belgium announced that they’ve found some amazing details in a newly discovered Tupandactylus skull. Tupandactylus had feathers.

They discovered the feathers at the bottom of the crest, some of them fluffy and some of them longer and more like modern bird feathers. And that’s not all. The feathers are so well preserved that under electron microscopes, the team found preserved melanosomes, which are pigment granules. We still don’t know what colors the feathers were, but they were definitely different colors because the melanosomes are different shapes, and in bird feathers different melanosome shapes correspond to different colors. Simple feather fibers have also been found on the jaws, which suggests that Tupandactylus might have had feathers over much of its body. That means other pterosaurs probably did too.

There are actually two species of Tupandactylus known, T. imperator and T. navigans. T. navigans is smaller and has a smaller, less extravagant crest. Some researchers suggest the two species might actually be the same species, with sexually dimorphic males and females (meaning they look different). Maybe one day we’ll find out for sure.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 498: Octopolis

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Further reading:

https://sharonahill.substack.com/

https://metazoan.net/54-octlantis/

https://metazoan.net/109-octopolis-and-octlantis/

Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses

The gloomy octopus [photo by Niki Hubbard – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/118664956, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123044473]:

Show transcript:

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

As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like April Fools Day, which is April first. I especially don’t like it when someone makes an April fools day post online and just leaves it there afterwards. It’s too easy for other people to stumble across it and think it’s real. This goes double for strange animal and cryptid reports.

I subscribe to geologist Sharon Hill’s Pop Goes the Cryptid articles, and on March 31 she talked about a hoax called the North American Pine Squid. It got popular around Halloween of 2024. It’s said to be a black squid or octopus that lives in pine trees in remote, heavily forested places like the Pacific northwest and the Appalachian mountains. Most of the time it eats small animals like birds and squirrels, along with pine cones, but if someone walks underneath its tree, the pine squid grabs the person, pulls them up into the tree, and they’re never seen again.

But you don’t have to worry, because the pine squid isn’t a real animal. It’s also not even a new story. It’s based on another hoax called the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, which dates back to 1998. In the case of the tree octopus, it wasn’t created as a hoax or an April fool’s joke but as a study about whether children can tell if a website is reliable or not. The researchers made a page with information about a type of octopus that lived in the ocean but that also climbed trees. Then they asked several classrooms of children around age 11, from different schools in different countries, to read the page, look at the pictures provided, and answer some questions.

The study found that most of the children thought the page contained reliable information. Only a few figured out that the tree octopus wasn’t real. The study has been used repeatedly to argue that children need more lessons in how to evaluate a website to know if it contains reliable information, and of course that’s always a good thing. But it makes me a little angry too, because how were the kids supposed to know that octopuses can’t climb trees? There are so many amazing and strange animals out there, a tree octopus sounds perfectly normal if you don’t know very much about octopuses. So I argue that kids should be taught about everything, and taught in as interesting a way as possible so that they remember it better. The same goes for adults.

But this episode isn’t actually about April fools day, tree octopuses, or pine squids. It is about a type of octopus, and what I’m going to tell you is so weird that I have to reassure you that it’s actually true. It’s not a hoax or an April fools joke or anything like that. It’s about the gloomy octopus and the underwater cities some populations have created, referred to as Octopolis and Octlantis. I swear I’m not making this up!

The gloomy octopus lives off the eastern coast of Australia and the northern coast of New Zealand. It’s mainly brown and gray, but it has orange on the undersides of its arms, and it’s covered in little bumps that help camouflage it. Its eyes are white. On average, it has an armspan of about 6 ½ feet, or 2 meters, with females generally larger than males. Like many other octopuses, when the female lays her eggs, she stops eating completely and protects the eggs until they hatch. After they hatch, she dies.

The gloomy octopus lives in shallow warm water and especially likes places with lots of rocks, seagrass, reefs, and other places where it can hide. It spends a lot of time in a den it digs into the sea floor, only coming out at night to hunt. It especially likes scallops, but it will eat pretty much anything it can catch, including sea snails, crabs, seahorses, and even other gloomy octopuses. It usually brings its food back to its den to eat.

The gloomy octopus was thought to be a solitary animal until 2009. That’s when a biologist named Matt Lawrence was exploring Jervis Bay in New South Wales. In this particular part of the bay, the sand is silty and there are a lot of predators, so it’s not great for the gloomy octopus. But not only did Lawrence find a gloomy octopus there, he found 16 of them living in close proximity.

The octopuses’ dens were very close to each other, surrounding a human-made object that’s so encrusted with sea life that it can’t be identified. Scientists think it was a piece that fell off a boat at some point. Even more interesting, there are so many shells around, especially scallop shells, that instead of making dens in the sand, the octopuses are basically making dens in huge piles of scallop shells. The octopuses spend time moving the shells to improve their dens.

In other words, Lawrence had found an octopus city. Admittedly, it’s a very small city by human standards, with only 16 residents identified at any given time, but for a supposedly solitary animal, that’s pretty amazing.

The site was nicknamed Octopolis, and scientists think the presence of the piece of boat actually started the site. When it fell into the sand, it provided a great place for a gloomy octopus to hide. Since gloomy octopuses bring mollusks back to the den to eat, naturally they discard the shells near their dens. Once enough discarded shells had piled up, it provided better building material for another den. Another octopus moved in as the first one’s neighbor, which meant twice as many shells being discarded. Pretty soon another octopus joined the first ones, and eventually there were 16 separate dens in a little community.

Then, in 2017, another octopus city was discovered not far from Octopolis. Instead of a human-made object at its center, it has a few rocks sticking up in the middle of the city, which has been nicknamed Octlantis.

Observations of the octopuses living in these communities are surprising. The octopuses come out during the day even though ordinarily the gloomy octopus is most active at night, especially around dawn and dusk. They interact with each other in various ways, sometimes fighting, sometimes pairing off to mate, sometimes sneaking into another octopus’s den and trying to take it over. It might not be full of underwater skyscrapers and underwater scallop vendors on busy corners, but there’s a lot of hustle and bustle in these cities.

When biologists revisited Octopolis in 2023, they only found three octopuses. Octlantis had a little more activity and a few more octopuses, but nothing like its busy 2017 numbers. But this doesn’t mean that the cities are deserted. Low Octopolis populations were also discovered in 2010 and 2013, but a high population in between. The biologists also noted that the presence of sharks caused the octopuses to move, and in 2023 a shark was hanging around Octopolis.

Another reason for the changing population sizes at the sites is that gloomy octopuses don’t live very long. A three-year-old gloomy octopus is really old, since most die before they reach their first birthday. The octopuses spotted in Octopolis and Octlantis in 2023 might be as much as 14 generations removed from the ones seen in 2009. Young octopuses have to continually repopulate the cities as the older ones die off, and that might take longer some years than others.

Just because we know about Octopolis and Octlantis doesn’t mean those are the only two octopus cities in existence. There are probably a lot more. Scientists just haven’t noticed them yet. In years where sharks are spending too much time in Octopolis, the octopuses might just move to a city we don’t know about. Octopolis and Octlantis might even be really small in comparison to some cities. If you’re a diver around Australia or New Zealand, keep a sharp eye out for an octopus city. You might be the first human to visit New Octleans.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 495 The Koao

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Further reading:

Gauguin’s Magical Mystery Koao

Show transcript:

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

The French painter Paul Gauguin moved to the island of Hiva Oa in 1901, less than two years before he died. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a volcanic archipelago in Polynesia in the South Pacific. It’s extremely remote, only slightly closer to Mexico than it is to New Zealand, although Hawaii is even closer.

During his short time on Hiva Oa, Gauguin produced quite a few paintings, including a famous one whose title translates to “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.” It depicts a dancer and magician named Haapuani and represents the fast-vanishing local culture. One of the details of the painting is a bird on the ground next to a small dog. But no one can identify the bird in the painting.

The bird is mostly blue but with green face and wings, and the small dog appears to be biting its wing or back. It’s about the size of a chicken, although details aren’t especially clear due to Gauguin’s painting style. The bill is a brownish-red and is thick and pointed. The eye is the same brown-red.

No one paid much attention to the bird in the painting until a man named Thor Heyerdahl published a book about the Marquesas in 1974. He was most well known for his adventures sailing a balsawood boat, the Kon-Tiki, from South America to the Polynesian islands in 1947. In 1937, though, the most notable thing Heyerdahl did was see an unusual bird that he mentioned in his book.

He wrote that the bird had no wings and ran extremely fast when he startled it. It vanished into a thick bank of ferns and although he tried to catch another glimpse of it, it was gone. He later said it was about the size of a long-legged gull.

A French explorer also wrote about this bird in 1957, although he didn’t see it himself. He said the people who lived on the island called the bird koao, which meant “burrow bird” since it was supposed to hide in burrows. It was about the size of a rooster, purplish in color with a yellow bill, and while it only had little wings, its legs were long and it was a fast runner.

By 1979, researchers investigating the koao were told that it had gone extinct from overhunting, specifically by the French colonizers of Hiva Oa. Other researchers learned that the bird was supposed to have red eyes and was the size of a duck.

The ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy thought the bird sounded like a type of rail. Rails are relatively small birds that mostly stay on the ground. Even rail species that can fly are weak flyers, while many species are flightless. The family is a large one and includes birds like the American coot, the takahē of New Zealand, the common moorhen that lives throughout much of western Europe, South Asia, and parts of Africa, and the spotless crake that’s common throughout much of the South Pacific. Barloy suggested in 1979 that the koao might be a spotless crake.

The spotless crake is bluish-gray with reddish-brown back and wings, a black bill, red eyes, and pale orangey legs that are long for its size. It’s shy and mostly crepuscular, but when it’s out in daylight it never goes far from vegetation where it can hide. It prefers freshwater wetlands but will also live in forests as long as it has plenty of groundcover for shelter. It eats insects, worms, crustaceans, and even carrion, as well as plant material like seeds and fruit. It can fly but it would much rather run away from danger.

This doesn’t really fit with what we know of the koao. For one thing, the spotless crake is much smaller than a duck or rooster, smaller even than a crow. It doesn’t match the size or coloration of Gauguin’s mystery bird or the reports of the koao.

Even Barloy later decided he was wrong and suggested the koao might be a different type of rail, maybe even an unknown species of takahē. The takahē is dark blue with a greenish back, and its heavy beak and strong legs are red. This is much more similar to the bird Gauguin painted. The takahē was considered extinct until a small population was rediscovered in 1948, and while it’s flightless, its ancestors weren’t. Like New Zealand, many remote islands–including Hiva Oa–have no native mammals except bats. As a result, many island birds don’t need to fly because their predators are other birds like eagles. It’s easy to hide from an eagle if you’re foraging under cover of thick plants.

Without the bird itself or its remains, identifying it was impossible. Gauguin was a post-Impressionist painter who influenced later artists of the avant-garde movement, so his paintings aren’t photo-realistic. He was just making art, not illustrating a scientific treatise. The details of his painted bird might not be totally accurate and aren’t specific enough to help with an identification. All we know is that the koao looks like a type of rail and doesn’t match any known species of bird. So we’re back where we started.

But new species of rail keep being discovered in Polynesian islands, most from subfossil remains found during archaeological excavations. In 2007 three new species of extinct rail were described from remains a few hundred years old, while a fourth specimen consisted of only two bones, not enough to identify as a new species. Those two mystery bones were found on Hiva Oa. These findings show that many more species of rail and other birds once lived on the islands, probably driven to extinction by introduced rats and other non-native animals.

A rail described in 1988 from 600-year-old remains, Porpyrio paepae, sometimes called the Marquesas swamphen, may be the koao. It lived on Hiva Oa and another nearby island and was closely related to the takahē.

French biochemist Michel Raynal has researched the koao extensively since 1980 and suggests that Gauguin witnessed a dog catch a koao in 1902. That would explain why the dog in his painting is biting the bird’s back or wing. If the bird Heyerdahl saw in 1937 was also a koao, we can determine that it was still alive at that time.

The koao may be extinct now, but at least we have a painting of it. That’s more than we have for most extinct animals.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 488: The Java Tiger Mystery

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Further reading:

Is the Javan tiger Panthera tigris sondaica extant? DNA analysis of a recent hair sample

The Sunda tiger [photo by Alfonsopazphoto – Own workAnimaisFotos, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16029853]:

Show transcript:

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

We’re going to learn about a mystery tiger this month, but first we have to learn about the place where it’s supposed to live. Java is a large island that was formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago, and it’s been home to humans and our ancestors for over a million years. Its soil is rich and the climate is tropical, but the island’s ecosystems include tall mountains, savannas, rainforests, and mangrove forests. Naturally, lots and lots of animals live on Java that are found nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people live on Java too, which means that many animals and their habitats are threatened by habitat loss and pollution. Many animals have gone extinct in the last few hundred years. That includes the Java tiger.

The Java tiger was small compared to tigers in other areas, although even a small tiger is a big animal. A big male tiger can grow about ten feet long, or 3 meters, and the Java tiger could grow about 8 feet long, or almost two and a half meters. The Java tiger was lightly built, though, and rarely weighed much more than 300 pounds, or about 140 kilograms. Despite its relatively small size, it was extremely strong and had paws as big as the much larger Bengal tiger. It also had lots of thin stripes.

Originally scientists thought the Java tiger was a separate subspecies of tiger, but in 2017 it was reclassified as a population of Sunda tigers that have only been isolated from other populations for around 12,000 years. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important, though. It showed differences from other Sunda tigers that weren’t yet significant enough to warrant it being a separate subspecies, but which definitely indicated it was on its way to evolving into a separate subspecies.

Unfortunately, the Java tiger’s habitat was largely destroyed to make way for farming and logging, and as a result its usual prey animals became rare or went extinct. People would also poison or shoot any tiger they could. It only survived in a few small nature preserves, but the last tiger footprints were spotted in 1989 and since then, no tigers have been officially seen on Java. A 1999 expedition that set up camera traps in hopes of spotting a few tigers mostly got photos of poachers hunting in what was supposed to be a protected area. The Java tiger was declared extinct.

Rumors persisted that tigers still lived on Java, though. Sometimes I think people claim to see recently extinct animals as a way to feel less guilty about humans having driven an animal to extinction. But in 2019 someone saw a tiger outside a village in western Java and reported the sighting to some local foresters. The foresters investigated and discovered footprints, claw marks, and a single hair on a fence.

The foresters collected the hair carefully and gave it to a team of geologists who were working in the area. The geologists sent it to the West Java Nature Conservation Authority, which sent it for genetic analysis. They also sent some tiger hairs from other types of tigers to compare it to, including hairs from a museum specimen of a tiger killed on Java in 1930.

The hair discovered in 2019 was definitely from a tiger, and its genetic signature most closely matched the genetic signature of the 1930 Java tiger specimen.

This doesn’t 100% mean the Java tiger isn’t extinct, but it does mean that there’s hope that it’s still around.

Java is part of Indonesia these days, and a few days ago as this episode goes live, the Indonesian government announced a plan to search for signs of the tiger, with an expedition getting underway soon to place camera traps. Conservationists are hoping that the tiger is discovered, which will allow it to be protected.

The Sunda tiger is critically endangered, only surviving in the wild on the island of Sumatra, with possibly fewer than 400 of them left alive. Another population of Sunda tigers, the Bali tiger, was declared extinct in the 1940s. A few hundred captive tigers living in zoos around the world show congenital health issues as a result of inbreeding. If the Java tiger is still alive, it could mean the difference between extinction and survival of the entire Sunda tiger subspecies. Fingers crossed that the camera traps reveal a healthy, safe population of tigers on Java!

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 482: Smoky Mountain Mystery Animals

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I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18).

Show transcript:

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

The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the world’s continents crunched together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The southern Appalachians formed separately and later than the northern Appalachians, around 270 million years ago.

The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies or Himalayas, but by the time the dinosaurs went extinct, they had eroded down to the mountain cores. Sediment weathered from the peaks and filled in valleys. But during the Pleistocene, when massive glaciers covered the northern parts of North America, the weight of the ice pushed the North American plate down, causing the southern part of the plate to rise. Eventually the ancient mountains’ roots were a thousand feet (300 m) above sea level again. Rivers that once flowed east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the remains of the shallow Western Interior Seaway shifted their courses to flow northward. Streams that once meandered across the land now plunged down steep slopes and dug gorges into the rock. And over thousands of years, animals and plants retreating from the ice migrated southward along the mountain range.

When the climate warmed some 11,000 years ago and the ice age glaciers melted, many cold-adapted species were trapped in the peaks of the southern Appalachians. One of the highest peaks is Mount LeConte, with its highest point, High Top, measured at 6,593 ft, or 2,010 meters. I hiked Mount LeConte on 7 May, 2016 when the weather in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee was a warm 82 Fahrenheit, or 27.8 Celcius, but there was snow on the mountain that morning. I wrote my name in it. A spruce-fir forest grows on the upper slopes, a remnant of forest that grew throughout the mountains during the last ice age. The climate at the peak of Mount LeConte is more like that of southern Canada than the warm, humid southeastern United States.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934 to protect the mountains along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. No one lives in the park’s 800 square miles (2,072 square km), which receives up to 90 inches [2.29 m] of rain a year, some of it from hurricanes that sweep up from the southern Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. Large tracts of old-growth forest still remain in the park too.

So as you can see, the Smokies are a biodiversity hotspot. In 2018, the park announced its 1,000th species discovered that is new to science, which by July 2020 had grown to 1,025. Overall, 20,000 known species live in the park as of 2019 and scientists estimate that up to 100,000 more are yet to be discovered.

The Smokies are heavily forested, of course, but some mountain summits and crests have no trees. Instead, native grasses and shrubs grow. They’re called grassy balds and no one is sure why they exist. The prevailing theory is that Pleistocene megaherbivores opened the forests for grazing, and after their extinction, the balds remained open due to bison, elk (wapiti), and deer. When white settlers moved into the area, they used the balds to graze cattle and other livestock. Remains of mammoth and mastodon, musk ox, ground sloth, and other megaherbivores have been excavated from various balds throughout the park.

Amphibian enthusiasts call the Smokies the Salamander Capital of the World, with 30 known species. Largest of these is the hellbender, which we talked about in episode 14, a giant salamander that can grow nearly 2 ½ feet long, or 74 cm, and which lives in swift-moving mountain streams. It’s most closely related to the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders, which can grow over twice as long as the hellbender. Twenty-seven of the salamanders found in the Smokies are lungless, in the family Plethodontidae. Instead of breathing with lungs or gills, the lungless salamanders absorb oxygen through their skin. Of these, the red-cheeked salamander is endemic to the Smokies—that is, it’s found nowhere else in the world.

The red-cheeked salamander lives in forests in high elevations. It can grow up to seven inches long, or 18 cm, and is gray or black with bright red patches on its face. It spends the day in a burrow, then comes out at night to find insects in the leaf litter. But it’s hard to tell apart from the imitator salamander, although the imitator only grows a little over four inches long, or 11 cm. The imitator has red cheeks but its body is patterned black and brown instead of solid gray or black. Sometimes its cheeks are yellow, too, while the red-cheeked salamander only ever has red cheeks.

Another animal found only in the Smoky Mountains, although it may also be present in mountains outside of the park, is a species of jeweled spider fly called Mary-Alice’s emerald (Eulonchus marialiciae). Mary-Alice’s emerald has a metallic-green body and yellow legs, and the adults eat nectar. But the larvae eat spiders. Specifically, they parasitize spiders. After hatching, the larva goes in search of a spider, especially trapdoor spiders that live in burrows. When it finds one, it works its way into the spider’s body and eats it from the inside out, eventually killing it. Then it pupates in the burrow and emerges as an adult spider fly. It prefers high elevations that are cool and moist.

A less horrific animal found in the Smokies is the Carolina northern flying squirrel. It was one of the species whose ancestors migrated south along the Appalachians during the Pleistocene. Then, after temperatures started to warm, the cold-adapted flying squirrel migrated north again. Some populations remained on mountaintops in the Smoky Mountains and have been isolated for thousands of years, evolving into a subspecies of flying squirrel found only in high elevations of the Smokies. It’s much rarer than the southern flying squirrel that lives throughout the southeastern United States, and prefers spruce forests instead of the hardwood forests that southern flying squirrels like. But the spruce forests are threatened by climate change, the introduced woolly adelgid insect that kills fir trees, and pollution in the form of acid rain and pesticides that travel to the mountains from other states and even other countries.

The Carolina northern flying squirrel has a patagium of furry skin that connects its front and back legs. When it jumps from a branch, it stretches its legs out and uses the patagia to glide to a new perch. It’s clumsy on the ground, though, and spends most of its time in trees. It mostly eats fungi, mushrooms, and lichens, but will also eat nuts, insects, bird eggs and even baby birds, and other plant material like tree sap and buds.

Bobcats still live in the Smokies, but the cougar, or mountain lion, was supposedly killed off in the area by the end of the 19th century. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern cougar subspecies from the endangered species list in 2018, since it is supposed to be extinct. The last cougar in what is now the park was supposedly killed in 1920. But sightings continue in the Smokies, close to a dozen a year, and some sightings are compelling, like the 2002 report of a cougar crossing a road in the park, spotted by a veterinarian who treated captive cougars in his practice. Considering how seldom seen the bobcat is despite it being relatively abundant, it’s possible that a small number of cougars still live in the park—either animals that have moved back into the mountains from elsewhere, or a relict population.

The red wolf is native to the eastern United States and was once common in the Smoky Mountains, but was killed off by white settlers throughout most of its range. Where it remained in the wild, it interbred with closely related coyotes, until it was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. Fortunately, by then a captive breeding program was in place. Starting in 1991, 37 red wolves were released in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, following the release of 63 red wolves into the Alligator River Natural Area in North Carolina a few years earlier. But the release didn’t go well in the Smokies. Wolves are shy and need enormous territories with lots of game. Before long some wolves were leaving the park and attacking livestock. Others died of parvo virus, especially wolf pups.

Worse, this was about the same time that coyotes moved into the area from the west. The wolves started interbreeding with the coyotes, and the coyotes also competed with the wolves for food. In 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service ended the program and recaptured all but one of the wolves originally released into the park.

The North Carolina release went better, with a population peak in 2006 estimated at nearly 130 wolves. But that program was suspended in 2015, and without management of the wild population, the number has dwindled. As of 2019, only 14 wolves remain in North Carolina—and that’s the entire population of red wolves in the wild.

But sightings of red wolves continue in the Smokies. The trouble is that the red wolf looks very similar to the coyote. It’s taller and larger, with a more pronounced reddish shade to its coat, but even experts can have trouble telling the two species apart if they can’t get a good look at the animal. Most likely people are seeing coyotes, possibly ones descended from red wolf/coyote hybrids born during the reintroduction program.

The biggest mystery in the park is the occasional sighting of a Bigfoot-type creature. Most sightings are probably bears, though. An estimated 1,500 American black bears live in the Smokies, and while some bears get used to hikers and tourists, most are shy and seldom seen. A black bear keeping an eye on hikers or cars will sometimes stand on its hind legs for a better view, and would naturally look like a hulking humanoid if glimpsed. But other sightings aren’t so easy to explain.

In February of 2009, a photographer named Deb Campbell was hiking the Middle Prong Trail in the snow. The Middle Prong Trail passes three major waterfalls and many smaller ones as it follows along a tributary of the Little River. She had the trail almost completely to herself—she says she only saw one person the whole time. Later she reported, “[A]t some point I am photographing along the stream and I start to smell a gawd awful stench. Not really like anything I had ever smelled before. I look around, see nothing, listen intently…nothing. So I finish up at that spot and go further up the trail.” The smell receded behind her but the snow increased, so finally she turned around to hike out. Around the area where she smelled the stink earlier, she started feeling watched. She stopped long enough to secure her camera gear for much faster hiking in slick conditions, when she heard a deep growl that she described as “very low, not like a cat, almost guttural.” Needless to say, she got off the mountain as quickly as possible.

The black bear doesn’t truly hibernate since its body temperature remains normal instead of dropping, but it does find a den in cold weather and will sleep for long stretches. It may emerge from its den occasionally during the winter during warm spells, but for the most part it’s asleep in its den from around November through March in the Smoky Mountains. But Campbell was hiking in February during a snowfall, with snow already on the ground. A bear would most likely not be out of its den in that weather unless it had been disturbed.

And bears don’t actually smell bad. During the winter hibernation most bears don’t defecate at all. Any feces left in a bear’s digestive tract harden to form a fecal plug. If it does feel the need to defecate near the end of the winter, it will do so just outside its den, but the fecal plug has very little odor. Even under ordinary conditions, unless a bear has been eating carrion, it will smell no worse than a dog that needs a bath.

Not only that, black bears don’t actually growl. They make grunty, huffing noises when warning people away or when males fight in the summer, and a frightened bear will moan, but they don’t growl like a dog.

It’s possible that Campbell hiked past a bear that had emerged from its den early and had found and eaten carrion, possibly roadkill, and that she was so close to the bear without seeing it that she smelled its breath. That’s almost more frightening than the thought of passing near a Bigfoot. The growl might have come from a different animal, a coyote or who knows, maybe even a red wolf. Or Campbell might have encountered a creature sometimes called a skunk ape due to its foul odor.

The skunk ape is most commonly reported in Florida swamps, but sightings—or smellings—have come from many other states. The smell is sometimes described as that of rotting food and roadkill on a hot day. A bear or other animal that has been rooting around in garbage bins can pick up this odor, especially in hot weather, but it’s hard to believe that a bear would be actively foraging so much in winter that it would smell like trash. January and February are the depths of winter in East Tennessee. The bears are hibernating, not foraging.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening! This is what a couple of fighting bears sound like:

[bear sounds]

Episode 481: The Pictish Beast

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This week we’ll learn about a long-forgotten animal of folklore!

Further reading:

https://www.anomalist.com/

The Pictish Beast:

A dragonesque brooch:

Show transcript:

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

The Picts were a population of Celtic people who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland between around the third and tenth centuries. They had their own language, which is lost to time except for a handful of place-names, and made beautiful rock carvings and metal art, but we know very little about them even though their descendants still live in Scotland today. Vikings conquered the area, which led to upheavals among the many small kingdoms, so that by the 11th century, all the Picts had been absorbed into the greater Scottish population and had completely forgotten their heritage.

The carvings are what we’re interested in today. The Picts carved lots of different animals along with more abstract designs, and although the carvings are often stylized, we generally know what animals they represent. There are roe deer, red deer, dogs, boars, horses, cattle, salmon and other fish, otters, eagles, and more. But there’s one animal no one can identify, referred to as the Pictish Beast.

The Pictish Beast isn’t rare, either. One estimate is that 40% of all the animal carvings depict the Pictish beast, so it was obviously important. That makes it even more baffling that we don’t know what it is.

There are variations, but generally the Pictish Beast has a long snout or beak with a line showing that the mouth was long too. There’s a horn-like design that emerges from the top or rear of the head and bends backwards, with a little curl at the end. The body looks superficially doglike, with a little curled dog tail, but the legs don’t resemble any real animal’s legs. They appear stiff, not jointed, and often bend backwards slightly. The feet are simplified designs that curl backwards in a little spiral. The head is usually bent as though it’s staring downward. It has no ears or nostrils.

Naturally there are lots of theories as to what the Pictish Beast represents. One theory is that it’s not a real animal at all but a type of dragon. Specifically, some experts consider it to be a version of a design called dragonesque brooches. These were pieces of jewelry made throughout southern Scotland and northern England during the first and second century. They were roughly S-shaped, made to look like a double-headed animal with a curly nose and distinctive round ears. Instead of dragons, though, the dragonesque brooch animals were probably actually stylized rabbits or hares. They were also popular at least 200 years before the Pictish Beast started being carved so often, so while there is a superficial resemblance, it’s not a perfect match by any means.

Then again, there is one stone, called the Mortlach 2 stone, that depicts both a Pictish Beast and what seems to be a simplified version of the dragonesque brooch design. Some researchers think the artist was depicting what was at the time the modern Pictish Beast and the old-timey dragonesque brooch that inspired it.

One suggestion is that the beast was inspired by the dragonesque brooch, but isn’t otherwise related. Remember that the brooches would have been considered super old at the time and were probably rare even then as a result. Think about how many pieces of jewelry you own that are several hundred years old. If an artist saw one of the brooches and thought it looked neat, but had no idea what it was supposed to represent, they might have recreated it with details that made sense to them, trying to imitate what they saw. But that doesn’t explain why the design became so incredibly popular.

There are other suggestions, of course. Sometimes the beast is depicted vertically, which makes it look superficially like a weird seahorse. Seahorses do live off the coast of Scotland, but that doesn’t explain why the Pictish Beast has large legs and such a little tail. Most of the time the beast is shown horizontally, legs down.

Sometimes the beast is referred to as an elephant, but knowledge of elephants in the British Isles over a thousand years ago was unlikely at best. And the beast has zero resemblance to an elephant so I don’t know who came up with that idea but let’s just set it aside and move on.

Because of the horn-like appendage on its head, some people suggest the beast might depict a stylized deer. That’s more likely than an elephant but Pictish carvings of deer exist and are obviously deer. That doesn’t mean the beast couldn’t have started out as a deer that took on more and more stylized and exaggerated components until no one remembered it was actually a deer, but that could be said about any animal, not just a deer.

Another suggestion is that it’s supposed to be a water animal of folklore, possibly a kelpie, or water horse, or a water bull. Both creatures were supposed to lure people into the water by posing as a lost pony or bull, but as soon as the person touched the animal, it would drag them under the water and drown them.

Other people suggest the Pictish Beast represents a dolphin or beaked whale, and that the horn-like appendage isn’t a horn at all but a representation of the dolphin spouting. When a dolphin or whale comes to the surface to take a breath, it first has to let out the last breath it took. It does so really fast, expelling the warm, moist air from its lungs so that it looks like a spray of mist or water. The beast’s long beak does look like a dolphin’s rostrum, and crucially, its mouth even curves upward slightly like a dolphin’s mouth.

The front legs could possibly be explained as stylized fins. But what about the hind legs? Dolphins don’t have rear fins. Even if you accept that the hind legs are supposed to represent the dolphin’s tail, it already has a little doglike tail.

That’s where some people have gotten frustrated and said, “Okay, fine. It’s the Loch Ness Monster.” But the Pictish Beast doesn’t fit the general description of Nessie either. Nessie is supposed to have a long neck and a very long body, often with humps or bumps that appear above the surface of the water, and a long tail. The beast doesn’t have a long neck or a long tail.

Personally, I like the idea that the Pictish Beast represents a mythical water creature like a kelpie, but that it was given dolphin characteristics to make it more frightening and exotic. Since we know so little about the Picts, it’s possible the beast stood for some important quality in their society, the same way we use a lion to represent courage or a dog to represent loyalty.

It’s one of those mysteries that we’ll probably never solve, unless someone invents a time machine and we can go back and ask some Picts. But frankly, if I had access to a time machine, I’d use it to go back and look at dinosaurs. So I guess we may never know what the Pictish Beast really is.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!