Category Archives: cryptozoology

Episode 142: Gigantic and Otherwise Octopuses

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Happy birthday to me! For my birthday, we’re all going to learn about octopuses, including a mysterious gigantic octopus (maybe)! Thanks to Wyatt for his question about skeletons and movement that is a SURPRISE SPOOKY SKELETON SEGMENT of the episode, or maybe not that much of a surprise if you read this first.

Further reading:

How octopus arms make decisions

Octopus shows unique hunting, social and sexual behavior

Kraken Rises: New Fossil Evidence Revives Sea Monster Debate

The larger Pacific striped octopus is not especially large, but it is interesting and pretty:

The giant Pacific octopus is the largest species known. It even eats sharks, like this one:

Show transcript:

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

Today happens to be my birthday, and not just any birthday. It’s a significant birthday that ends with a zero. That’s right, I’m TWENTY! Or maybe a little bit older than that. So for my birthday celebration, and one week closer to Halloween, let’s learn about the octopus. The episode was going to be about possible giant octopuses, but as I researched, octopuses in general turned out to be so interesting and weird that that’s what the episode is about. But we will talk about some mystery gigantic octopuses at the very end.

The first thing to know about the octopus is what the correct plural is. Sometimes people say octopi but that’s actually technically incorrect, although it’s not like you’ll be arrested if you say octopi. The correct plural of octopus is octopuses, although octopodes is also correct. No one says octopodes because that sounds weird.

But who cares about that, because we’re talking about awesome creepy weird cephalopods! The octopus lives in the ocean but it can come out of the water and walk around on land if it wants to, although it usually only does so for a matter of minutes. The octopus breathes through gills but it can also absorb a certain amount of oxygen through its skin, as long as its skin stays moist. Generally people don’t see octopuses come out of the water because most octopuses are nocturnal.

Most octopuses spend their time on the ocean floor, crawling around looking for food. When it’s threatened or frightened, though, it swims by sucking water into its body cavity and shooting it back out through a tube called a siphon, which allows it to jet propel itself quickly through the water headfirst with its arms trailing, so that it looks like a squid. But most of the time the octopus doesn’t swim like this, because when it does, the heart that pumps blood through most of the body stops. The octopus has three hearts, but two of them are only auxiliary hearts that move blood to the gills to make sure the blood stays oxygenated.

Octopus blood is blue because it’s copper-based instead of iron-based like the blood of mammals and other vertebrates. This allows it to absorb more oxygen than iron-based blood can. Since many octopuses live in cold water that doesn’t contain very much oxygen, they need all the help they can get.

The octopus also uses its siphon to release ink into the water when it’s threatened. Of course it’s not ink, but it is black and resembles ink. Also, people have used octopus ink to write with so, you know, I guess maybe it is sort of ink. Anyway, when the octopus releases ink, it can choose to mix it with mucus. Without the mucus, the ink makes a cloud of dark water that hides the octopus while it jets away, and it may also interfere with the predator’s sense of smell. With the mucus, the ink forms a blob that looks solid and in fact looks a lot like a dark-colored octopus. This is called a pseudomorph or false body, and the octopus uses it to confuse predators into thinking it’s still right there, when in fact the octopus is jetting away while the predator attacks the false body. Researchers have found that young sea turtles who attack the false body thinking it’s the real octopus later ignore real octopuses instead of trying to eat them.

In addition to their ninja-like ability to disappear behind a smoke screen, or ink screen, the octopus can also change its color and even its texture to blend in with its background. Its skin contains cells with different-colored pigments, and tiny muscles can change both the color and the texture of the cells. Think of it like being able to shiver to give yourself goosebumps whenever you want, but at the same time you can change the color and shape of the goosebumps. An octopus species that lives in shallow water and is active during the day generally can camouflage itself better than a species that lives in deeper water and is nocturnal, and small species are typically better at camouflage than large ones. Some species mimic rocks or algae with six arms and use the other two arms to creep along the ocean floor, inching away from a potential predator without it noticing.

But the octopus doesn’t just use its ability to change colors to hide from predators. It also communicates with other octopuses by changing colors. And some species have a special threat display of bright colors that warns predators away. This is especially true of the blue-ringed octopus that lives in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which will display bright blue spots if it feels threatened. Since the blue-ringed octopus has the strongest venom of any octopus, if you see this particular threat display, swim away quickly. I don’t know why I’m assuming my listeners include sharks and whales. Actually, the place you’re most likely to encounter a blue-ringed octopus is in a shallow tide pool on the beach, so watch where you step.

You probably already know what an octopus looks like, but I haven’t actually mentioned it yet. The octopus has a bulbous body with two large eyes, eight arms lined on the bottom with suckers, and in the middle of the arms, a mouth with a beak. The beak looks sort of like a parrot’s beak and is made of chitin, a tough material that’s similar to keratin. Inside the mouth, the octopus has a radula, a tongue-like structure studded with tiny tooth-like bumps.

Until about ten years ago, researchers thought that only the blue-ringed octopus was venomous. The blue-ringed octopus is tiny but super venomous. Its venom can kill humans, although that’s extremely rare. But now we’ve learned that all octopuses appear to have venomous saliva, most of it relatively weak, but enough to kill mollusks and other small animals. The octopus eats anything it can catch, for the most part, including crabs, shrimp, small fish, mollusks, and so forth. Its suckers can attach so firmly to a bivalve’s shells that it can pull the shells apart. If it can’t manage this, though, it will cover the shells with its toxic saliva. The toxin dissolves tiny holes in the shell and kills the mollusk, allowing the octopus to open the shells easily and eat the animal inside. It can also inject the toxins into crabs to paralyze them, then uses its beak to bite the shells open without the crab being able to fight back.

The octopus can regrow an arm if it’s bitten off or otherwise lost. Some species will even drop an arm like some lizards can drop their tails in order to distract a predator. In the case of the lizard, its tail thrashes around after it’s detached, while in the case of an octopus arm, the arm continues to crawl away and tries to escape from being hurt. This is creepy to the extreme, especially when you realize the arm acts this way because it contains a sort of brain of its own.

An octopus’s brain doesn’t fully control its arms. In fact, the arms contain about twice the number of neurons that the brain contains, which means they can act autonomously in a lot of ways. Basically, each octopus arm processes information the same way that a brain does, without involving the actual brain. The arms have an excellent sense of touch, naturally, and the suckers have chemical receptors that act as a sense of taste as well. When an arm touches something, the arm decides whether it’s food, or if it’s dangerous, or if it’s in the way, or so forth. Then it decides what it should do about it. The arms use the peripheral nervous system, again not the brain, to make decisions that require arms to work together. The result is that the arms can all work at different tasks, together or separately, while the central brain is processing other information, primarily from its eyes. But also as a result, the octopus doesn’t have a good sense of where its body is in space at all times. You don’t have to see your arms to figure out where they are in relation to your body, but the octopus does.

This is all very different from the way our brains work. Researchers study the octopus to determine how its brain works with the arms to help the octopus navigate its environment. Some researchers point out that the octopus’s intelligence is so different from the intelligence of other animals we’ve studied that it’s as close as we can come to studying intelligent life from another planet.

The main reason why the octopus has such a different nervous system is that it’s an invertebrate. Humans and other mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish are all vertebrates, meaning they have a backbone of some kind. The backbone contains a spinal cord that is the main pathway for the nervous system, connecting the brain with the rest of the body. The brain processes everything that the body does. But invertebrates and vertebrates started evolving separately over half a billion years ago, and while most invertebrates don’t demonstrate a lot of what we would consider intelligence, the octopus does. Instead of a central spinal cord of nerves, the octopus, like other invertebrates, has concentrations of neurons throughout its body, called ganglia. The ganglia form a sort of neural net. This actually means the octopus can process information much more quickly than a human or other vertebrate can.

And the octopus is intelligent, probably as intelligent as parrots, crows, and primates. An octopus can learn to recognize individual humans and solve complex puzzles, can learn from watching another octopus solve a problem, and many species use tools in the wild. Some species of octopus spend the day in dens that they make out of rocks, including a rock door that they close after they go inside. The veined octopus will collect pieces of coconut shells, stack them up, and carry them around. If it’s threatened, or if it just wants to take a nap or rest, it uses the coconut shells as a hiding place.

Octopuses in captivity can cause a lot of trouble because they’re so intelligent. They will dismantle their tanks out of curiosity or just escape. An octopus in an aquarium in Bermuda escaped repeatedly in order to eat the fish and other animals displayed in nearby tanks. A common New Zealand octopus named Inky, kept at the National Aquarium, was famous for causing mischief, and one day in 2016 he managed to move the lid to his enclosure just enough to squeeze out. Then he walked around until he found a small pipe. He squeezed into the pipe, and fortunately for him it was a pipe that led directly outside and into the ocean.

The reason that octopuses can squeeze through such tiny openings is that they have NO BONES. There is not a single bone in the octopus’s body. The only hard part of the body is its beak. As long as the octopus can get its beak through an opening, the rest of the body can squish through too.

And that brings us to a surprise spooky SKELETON SECTION, thanks to a suggestion by Wyatt!

[spooky scary skeletons song!]

Wyatt wants to know how bones work and move, which is a good question and will help us learn about octopuses too. Bones have many purposes, including making blood cells and protecting the brain—that would be the skull part of the skeleton, of course—but mainly bones help your body move. Muscles are attached to bones, and when you contract a muscle, it moves the bone and therefore the rest of that part of your body. Without muscles, your bones couldn’t move; but without bones, your muscles wouldn’t do much. Also, you’d look sort of like a blob because bones provide structure for your body.

But if you need bones to move, how does an octopus move? An octopus has no bones! Do I even know what I’m talking about?

The octopus’s muscles are structured differently than muscles in animals with bones. Our muscles are made up of fibers that contract in one direction. Let’s say you pick up something heavy. To do so, you contract the fibers in some muscles to shorten them, which makes the bone they’re attached to move. Then, when you push a heavy door closed, you contract other muscles and at the same time you relax the muscles you used to pick up something heavy. This pulls the arm bone in the other direction.

But in the octopus, the fibers in its muscles run in three directions. When one set of fibers contracts, the other two tighten against each other and form a hard surface for the contracted fibers to move. So they’re muscles that also sort of act like bones. It’s called a muscular hydrostat, and it actually can result in muscle movements much more precise than muscle movements where a bone is involved.

There are exceptions to the “bones and muscles work together” rule, of course. Your tongue is a muscle. So is an elephant’s trunk, or at least it’s made up of lots and lots of muscles that aren’t attached to bones. Tongues and elephant trunks and worms and things like that all use muscular hydrostatic functioning to move.

The octopus has a lifespan that seems abbreviated compared to other intelligent animals. It typically only lives a year or two and dies soon after it has babies. After the female lays her eggs, she stops eating and instead just takes care of the eggs, which she attaches to a rock or other hard surface. It usually takes several months for the eggs to hatch, and all that time the female protects them and makes sure they have plenty of well-oxygenated water circulating around them. She dies about the time the babies hatch. As for the male, he doesn’t take care of the eggs but after he mates with a female he starts showing signs of old age and usually dies within a few weeks. That’s if the female doesn’t just decide to eat him after mating. Most male octopuses stay as far away as they can from a female while mating, and uses one of his arms to transfer a packet of sperm into her mantle, which she uses to fertilize her eggs.

At least one octopus species has been observed to brood its eggs for four and a half years, guarding them from predators and keeping them clean. Researchers studying life in an area of Monterey Bay called Monterey Canyon, off the coast of western North America, regularly survey animals in the area. In May of 2007 they saw a female octopus on a rocky ledge about 4,600 feet, or 1,400 meters, below the surface. She had distinctive scars so the researchers could identify her, and she didn’t leave her eggs once during the next four and a half years. She also didn’t appear to eat or even be interested in the small crabs and other delicious octopus food within easy reach of her. As the years went by she became thinner and paler. She and her eggs were still there in September of 2011 but when the researchers returned in October, she was gone and her eggs had hatched.

Babies are teensy when they’re first hatched, typically only a few millimeters long. The babies drift with the currents and eat tiny animals like zooplankton as they grow. One exception is the same deep-sea octopus species that spends so long protecting its eggs, Graneledone boreopacifica. Because they develop in the egg for so long, babies of this species are much larger than most baby octopuses and can even hunt for small prey immediately.

Another exception to the usual octopus habit of only reproducing once before dying is the larger Pacific striped octopus, which lives in the eastern Pacific Ocean in warm, shallow water. Not only is it gregarious, instead of mostly solitary like other octopus species, it can reproduce repeatedly without dying. Mated pairs sometimes live and hunt together and even share food. Despite the word “larger” in its name, the larger Pacific striped octopus only grows to about three inches across, or 7 cm. It is striped, though. It’s quite attractive, in fact. And its many differences from other octopus species show just how little we know about octopuses.

So how big can an octopus grow? We don’t actually know. The species that grows the largest is called the giant Pacific octopus, and the biggest one ever measured had an armspan of about 30 feet, or 9 meters.

But there are always rumors and sightings of octopuses of colossal sizes, often referred to as the gigantic octopus or the colossal octopus. In 2002 a fishing trawler brought up the incomplete carcass of a dead octopus near New Zealand, and estimates of its armspan when it was alive are around 32 feet, or 10 meters. In 1928 a man named Robert Todd Aiken reported seeing six octopuses off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii with armspans of nearly 40 feet, or 12.5 meters. In 1950, also off the coast of Oahu, a diver named Madison Rigdon reported seeing an octopus with each arm alone measuring almost 30 feet, or over 9 meters.

But because octopuses are soft-bodied animals that are eaten by so many predators, and because the biggest ones typically live in deeper water, we just don’t know that much about how big they can get. When we do find a big dead octopus, its size is difficult to estimate since cephalopods actually shrink quite quickly after they die.

We only have a few remains of ancient octopuses, mostly body impressions and fossilized beaks. In 2009, paleontologists working in Lebanon reported finding five specimens of fossilized octopus that date to 95 million years ago. The specimens are remarkably well preserved, too, which allows researchers to determine that the octopuses belong to three different species that appear to be unchanged from their modern counterparts. In 2014 the impressions of cephalopod beaks dated to around 80 million years ago were found in Hokkaido, Japan. The impressions were well preserved and paleontologists have determined that all but one belonged to an extinct species related to the vampire squid, that we talked about in episode 11. They estimate its body to have been about two feet across, or 60 cm, without the arms. The other beak impression was from a different species, one related to modern squid.

If you listened to episode 86 about ammonoids and nautiloids, which are related to octopuses, you may remember that some extinct species grew enormous, probably over 19 feet long, or 6 meters. Since those species have shells, we have a lot more fossilized remains.

But we have almost no remains of ancient octopuses, so we have no way of knowing how big some species once grew. The colossal squid was only determined to be a real animal a matter of years ago (and we talked about it and giant squid in episode 74). I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if the colossal octopus was one day found to be a real animal too.

Let’s finish with an ancient cephalopod mystery. The octopus is a messy eater, so sometimes researchers can identify an octopus’s territory by the way it leaves shells lying around. Some species of octopus arrange shells and other items in heaped-up patterns around its den. In 2011 a pair of paleontologists named Mark McMenamin and Dianna Schulte McMenamin examined an unusual pattern of ichthyosaur remains in Nevada and suggested that they might have been arranged by an octopus after eating them. But since the nine ichthyosaurs are 45 feet long, or 14 meters, the octopus would have had to be equally enormous. Dr. McMenamin and other Dr. McMenamin think the octopus might have killed the ichthyosaurs by either breaking their necks or drowning them, or both. In 2013 the team investigating the site found what may be part of a fossilized cephalopod beak, further backing up the theory. Then again, that species of ichthyosaur, Shonisaurus, ate squid and other cephalopods, so it’s possible the beak was actually inside an ichthyosaur stomach when it died and that a giant octopus or other cephalopod had nothing to do with the deaths. Still, it’s fun to think about, and it might be true!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 140: Rains of Fish and Frogs (and other things)

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We’re starting off October (you know, MONSTER MONTH) with accounts of animals that fall from the sky like rain, mostly fish and frogs! Is this a real thing that actually happens, and if so, what causes it?

Further reading:

Raining Frogs

Recent observations of “mystery star jelly” in Scotland appear to confirm one origin as spawn jelly from frogs or toads

Not a real photo of an octopus falling in a storm:

This photo is probably real, two shrimp/prawns on a windshield in the same storm as above (in 2018):

A photo of people picking up fish in the street but I have no idea where it was taken:

An arctic lamprey found in someone’s yard:

Some of the stuff called star jelly, star rot, or star snot:

A walking catfish:

Show transcript:

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

It’s finally October, and that means monsters and other spooky stuff! I have lots of fun episodes planned this month, but first, an important announcement!

A few weeks ago I got a message from someone on Podbean, and I feel terrible because I can’t reply or even see the whole message or who it’s from! Podbean does not like me. I get an email with the first couple of lines of the message but when I click through and log in to Podbean to see the whole message and respond, Podbean goes, “Message? What message? You don’t have any messages.” So please, person who messaged me with a suggestion I can’t see, I’d love it if you email me at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com! And if anyone else has ever messaged me somewhere but never received a reply, email is the best way to get hold of me. I always reply, so if you don’t get an answer it means I never saw your message and you should totally send it again. Thanks!

So, back to the October fun! Let’s start off the month right with a strange phenomenon that’s been reported for untold centuries all over the world. Do fish and frogs and other animals actually sometimes fall from the sky like rain?

It seems pretty certain that while this is a rare event, and not all reports are of animals that actually fell from the sky, it does sometimes happen. In fact, lots of weird stuff falls from the sky from time to time. For instance, after a heavy rain over Punta Gorda, Florida at the end of August 1969, the streets were full of golf balls, dozens of them if not hundreds. But there wasn’t a golf course near the town.

Sometimes colored rain falls instead of ordinary clear water. This happens because raindrops form around tiny specks of dust or pollen in the air. When the dust is colored, the rain will be too. Red rains come from dust blown into the atmosphere from the Sahara while yellow rain results from dust from the Gobi Desert. Volcanic eruptions, soot, and other pollutants in the air can cause black rain. And a red rain that fell in Kerala, India in July 2001 was analyzed and the color found to be due to fungal spores. Snow is occasionally colored too, just like rain.

But sometimes frogs, fish, or other small animals do apparently fall from the sky, with or without rain. Here’s a typical report of a rain of frogs. It comes from the book The Unexplained by zoologist Karl Shuker, whose honesty and scholarship I trust. Not only that, it’s something that happened to his own grandmother, Gertrude Timmins. In 1902, Gertrude was only eight years old. She and her mother were walking across a field in the West Midlands in England when it started to rain. They opened their umbrellas, but a moment later Gertrude noticed that amid the regular pattering of rain on an umbrella there were some heavier thumps. Then she noticed that the thumps were caused by small frogs falling onto her umbrella and bouncing off onto the ground. Gertrude was frightened at first, naturally, because that’s just a weird thing to happen to anyone. But her mother told her not to be scared, it was just a rain of frogs.

Remember, Gertrude and her mother were walking across a field. There weren’t any trees or buildings around that the frogs might have fallen from. So where did they come from?

The main hypothesis is that the animals are picked up by a water spout or small tornado and carried on the wind until they’re dropped elsewhere, miles away. When I was a kid I thought this was a dumb suggestion. If a dissipating water spout dropped everything it had picked up out of a pond, why do people just report one kind of frog falling from the sky or one kind of fish? Where’s the algae, water plants, turtles, mud, and other stuff presumably also picked up and carried out of a pond?

The answer may be pretty simple. When the wind velocity is high, the tornado or water spout can carry heavy objects, but as the wind slows and loses energy, it starts to drop the heaviest items. But the wind is still moving, so as it moves across the land and slowly loses more and more energy, it drops the heaviest items first, then the next heaviest items, then the next heaviest, and so on.

It might not even be a tornado or water spout. A powerful updraft, which is often associated with storms, can lift light items like sticks, leaves, and pool toys and drop them miles away. Small frogs often weigh no more than a penny does and during breeding season can be incredibly common in a small area, hopping everywhere. It’s reasonable to assume that sometimes these little frogs get lifted from one area by a strong updraft and dropped elsewhere, astonishing anyone who happens to see it. If you doubt the strength of an updraft, keep in mind that storms can also generate downdrafts and they can be so powerful they destroy or uproot trees.

No one has witnessed frogs or other animals get sucked up into the air and dropped elsewhere, so we don’t know if it actually happens this way. But the animals are obviously getting into the air somehow.

Frogs aren’t the only animals witnessed to fall from the sky. Fish are actually probably the most common animals that fall with rain. It doesn’t even have to be raining.

On October 23, 1947 fish fell over Marksville, Louisiana in the United States. A biologist was having breakfast with his wife in a local restaurant when the server said that fish were falling from the sky. Naturally he went to look. He identified the fish as several different freshwater species common in the area, including two species of sunfish, a type of bass, and a few others, all ranging from 2 to 9 inches long, or 5 to 23 cm. It was a foggy but calm morning with no reports of tornados or strong winds in the area.

It’s possible that a small waterspout formed over one of the many nearby lakes, sucked up whatever fish happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and deposited them a few miles away. Waterspouts form the same way tornados do except that it happens over water. The inside of a waterspout, like the inside of a tornado, is a low-pressure tunnel inside a high-pressure cone of air. It acts like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up water as it moves, and anything that’s in the water near the surface gets sucked up too.

There are two types of waterspouts. Tornadic waterspouts are tornados that happen to touch down over water instead of land. They can be dangerous and are usually reported in the local news and weather if they’re spotted. But fair-weather waterspouts aren’t associated with storms, although they do form ahead of developing storm systems. They’re typically smaller, much less dangerous, and much less likely to be reported to the news. So it’s possible that the 1947 fish fall was the result of a fair-weather waterspout.

This phenomenon isn’t something that used to happen in the olden days and doesn’t happen now. In June of 2009, there were tadpole rains in parts of Japan on two different days in slightly different areas. One man saw over a hundred dead tadpoles on car windshields in one parking lot after a rain shower.

On June 13, 2018, shrimp and possibly other sea creatures fell on the coastal city of Qingdao [zhing-daugh], China during a storm. The media reported it as a “seafood rain” since people posted photos of octopus, squid, starfish, mollusks, and shrimp that they claimed had fallen during the storm. Some of the photos are hoaxes, especially the ones of octopuses flying through the air, but at least some of them are real. Some people speculate that the source of the animals may have actually been a market stall, but since the city is on the coast of the Yellow Sea and the storm’s winds were measured at 77 mph, or 125 km per hour, it’s just as likely that the animals were lifted into the air from shallow water as from a market stall.

Sometimes we can figure out what the cause is of falling animals. In 2015 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game received four separate calls from people who’d found arctic lampreys on their property, including the parking lot of a store and someone’s front yard. If you remember from waaaaay back in episode 3, where we talked about the sea lamprey, lampreys are jawless fish with suckerlike mouths. They latch onto a fish and use their rasping teeth to parasitize it. The arctic lamprey grows to about a foot long on average, or 30 cm, but occasionally one will grow twice that long. It lives in cold freshwater lakes and rivers in the arctic, although it’s found as far south as Japan. An investigation revealed that all four lampreys found on land had cut marks and bruises in a specific pattern, which indicated that they’d been picked up in the beak of a seagull and then dropped, probably by accident when the lamprey wriggled too much. In 2015 there were an unusually high number of arctic lampreys in the Chera River, near where the four lampreys were reported on land.

A substance often referred to as star jelly or star rot has been seen in various parts of the world for centuries, usually connected in folklore with comets and shooting stars. In late 2008 through February 2009 the BBC’s Scotland Outdoors website collected photos and accounts of star jelly people had encountered in Scotland and other places. People reported finding lumps of the usually clear or white, jelly-like substance in their gardens, on walkways, on fence posts, stumps lawns, on the side of the road, in pastures, on rocks, and so on. One person found a lump of it on his tractor, another on a 3rd floor balcony.

Even hundreds of years ago some people suspected star jelly had something to do with frogs. At least some of it looks like the jelly-like matrix that surrounds the eggs of many frog and toad species. This is backed up by the presence of small black eggs in some star jelly that look like frog eggs. But it’s clearly not exactly frog spawn and is often found in places where a frog would never lay its eggs, even if it could for instance get up onto a third floor apartment balcony.

Many samples of star jelly have been examined by scientists and found to be the spawn jelly of frogs and toads, which is produced by the female to surround the eggs and keep them damp. As the female lays her eggs, each one is coated with a layer of spawn jelly, which absorbs water in the environment and increases in volume. Sometimes when a predator tears a frog or toad into pieces to eat it, the reproductive tract is torn open and its contents falls to the ground. When the spawn jelly is exposed to the air, it starts to absorb moisture from whatever it’s touching. This will make it swell up and become much more noticeable to people, especially if it’s rained and the spawn jelly has absorbed a lot of water.

Often an animal will eat a frog or toad, then later regurgitate the less digestible parts. This includes spawn jelly and some parts of the reproductive tract, specifically the oviducts since they contain the spawn jelly. Sometimes eggs are mixed in too. Star jelly has been examined and tested frequently, although most DNA testing has been inconclusive since samples are contaminated with bacteria. But a 2015 DNA test determined that the star jelly was from a frog. The test also found traces of magpie DNA, so we can probably guess what ate the frog.

Some star jelly doesn’t have anything to do with amphibians, though. Instead, some are slime molds or a type of freshwater algae-like bacteria known as nostoc. Neither slime molds nor nostoc fall from the sky but they can appear suddenly, so people may assume that’s what happened. Many birds that eat frogs and toads will eat them in midair, and may also regurgitate the indigestible portions while flying, so at least some star jelly does fall from the sky.

Sometimes people assume an animal has fallen from the sky when it actually hasn’t. For instance, the walking catfish will wriggle across dry land to find water when its pond dries up. It can grow up to 1 ½ feet long, or half a meter, and is usually grayish-brown with little white spots. Its skin is covered with mucus that helps keep it from drying out when it’s out of water. It’s native to parts of Southeast Asia, but it’s been introduced to other places, including southern Florida. In places where it’s not native, people may not be familiar with its ability to breathe air and move around out of the water, so when they see the walking catfish on land they may assume it fell from the sky.

The walking catfish is an invasive species in many areas. It’s an omnivore and can tolerate all kinds of habitats, including stagnant water where other fish can’t survive, since it can breathe air. Fish farmers in areas where the walking catfish lives have to put fences up around their ponds to keep walking catfish out. And if you see one, don’t pick it up. Its fins have spines that help stiffen them so it can use them to move more effectively on land, but that make them sharp.

We obviously don’t know everything about animals that fall from the sky, so let’s finish with a real mystery. It’s called the Kentucky Meat Shower and it happened on March 3, 1876 in a tiny community called Olympia Springs, Kentucky.

Olympia Springs is east of Lexington, Kentucky, in the southeastern United States. These days it’s in the Daniel Boone National Forest and just outside of the Olympia State Forest, so there’s not much in the area except wilderness. This was probably also the case in 1876 except that in 1876 there probably wasn’t a Dairy Queen restaurant a ten minute drive away. Wikipedia says it happened in a community named Rankin in the same county, but most other sources say Olympia Springs. Either way, it was an isolated, remote area at the time.

On this particular day, a woman only identified as Mrs. Crouch was in the yard, making soap. It was a perfectly clear day, not a cloud in the sky, when suddenly it started raining meat. She said it fell like big snowflakes all around her, but presumably not as pretty as snow, and lasted for several minutes. It was fresh meat, looked like beef or other red meat, and the pieces were irregularly shaped and gristly. Some were as big as 4 inches across, or 10 cm, but most about half that size. The meat landed all around, including on fences, in an area estimated to be about 100 yards across and 50 yards wide, or 91 by 46 meters.

Mrs. Crouch and her husband were understandably shaken by this event, and records don’t report whether the soap got finished that day but I suspect not. The next morning, the meat was still lying around, but it had dried out overnight and was starting to spoil. A couple of men stopped by and actually tasted it—ugh, I hope they at least cooked it first—and said they thought it might be venison or mutton. That’s meat from deer and sheep, respectively.

Samples of the meat were sent to various experts who examined it. Keep in mind that this was 1876 so they couldn’t do much more than look at it under an old-timey microscope. Two samples were identified as lung tissue, two as cartilage, and three as muscle.

As soon as the story hit the newspapers, people were quick to offer solutions that didn’t actually fit the reported facts. One person suggested that it was just nostoc that hadn’t actually fallen from the sky, it had been on the ground all along but that rain had made it swell up, which is something nostoc does. Never mind that nostoc is a slimy bacteria that looks nothing like meat—remember, it’s sometimes identified as star jelly—and that it wasn’t raining at the time and that Mrs. Crouch actually saw it fall and that pieces of it were found draped over fences. Plus, nostoc doesn’t taste like venison or mutton. Plus, samples were identified as actual meat.

The main suggestion is that some vultures were flying overhead and had disgorged some meat they had eaten, which had been caught by the wind and fell across a wide area. But while even nowadays people claim that is what must have happened, it has one big flaw. Vultures don’t disgorge meat while they’re flying. They disgorge it as a way to deter predators approaching their nest, and they may disgorge if a predator approaches while they’re feeding so they can get into the air quickly, but not while flying. Not only that, but any meat disgorged by a vulture would smell and taste horrible, since it would have already been rotting before the vulture ate it, and it would then be coated with caustic vulture digestive juices.

So what might have caused the Kentucky Meat Shower? If it wasn’t a newspaper hoax, which were really common in the late 19th century, it might have been the result of some poor animal that was swept up by a tornado, torn apart, and the smallest pieces dropped over the Crouch’s farm after the winds had dissipated. Presumably the heavier pieces, like bones, fell earlier and probably landed in the forest where no one saw them fall. I looked for a weather report for Kentucky for that day, but couldn’t find one. Eastern Kentucky is not too far north from where I live in East Tennessee, so I can verify that March can be a very warm month with unsettled weather. It wouldn’t be at all unusual to have a storm strong enough to generate a small but powerful tornado in March, although this usually happens at night after a hot day.

I don’t know if I believe the Kentucky Meat Shower really happened or if it was a hoax. But either way, we can stop blaming vultures.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 132: Paleontological Frauds

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Ever heard of the Piltdown Man? What about Missourium or Archaeoraptor? They’re all frauds! Let’s learn about them and more this week.

Further reading:

The Chimeric Missourium and Hydrarchos

Investigation of a claim of a late-surviving pterosaur and exposure of a taxidermic hoax: the case of Cornelius Meyer’s dragon

Missourium was literally an extra mastodon:

Hydrarchos (left) was a lot more, um, exciting than its fossil donors, six Basilosauruses (right):

Piltdown man’s suspicious skull:

A lot of people were excited about Archaeoraptor:

Not a pterosaur:

Show transcript:

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

Last week we learned about some mistakes paleontologists made while working out what an extinct animal looked like using only a few fossilized bones. Mistakes are a normal part of the scientific method, no matter how silly they seem once we know more about the animal. But this week we’re going to look at some frauds and hoaxes in the paleontology world.

We really need to start with a man named Albert Koch. He was from Germany but moved to the United States in 1835, and was something of a cut-rate PT Barnum. He called himself Dr. Koch although he hadn’t earned a doctorate. A lot of the so-called curiosities he displayed were fakes.

Back in the mid-19th century, fossils had only recently been recognized as being from animals that lived millions of years before. People were still getting their heads around that concept, and around the idea that animal species could even go extinct. Then the fossils of huge animals started to be discovered—and not just discovered, but displayed in museums where the public could go look at them. Naturally they were big hits.

Sometimes these fossil exhibits weren’t free. For example, the mounted fossil skeleton of a mastodon was exhibited by the naturalist Charles Peale starting in 1802—one of the first fossil exhibits open to the public. Peale and his workers had mounted the skeleton to seem even larger than it really was by putting wooden discs between some of the bones. But the exhibit was primarily meant to educate, not just bring in money. It cost 50 cents to see the mastodon and lots of people wanted to. These days Peale’s mastodon is on display in Germany, without the wooden discs.

Albert Koch knew about Peale’s mastodon, and more to the point he knew how much money Peale had made off his mastodon. Koch wanted one for himself.

In 1840 he heard about a farmer in Missouri who had dug up some huge bones. Koch bought the bones and assembled them into a mastodon. But Koch wasn’t a paleontologist, he didn’t care about educating the public, and when he looked at those fossils, he just saw dollar signs. And he had ended up with bones from more than one mastodon, so, you know, he used them all. And he added wooden discs between the bones to make the animal bigger. A lot bigger. Between the wooden discs and the extra bones, Koch’s skeleton was twice the size of a real mastodon. Plus, he turned the tusks around so that they pointed upward, either because he didn’t know any better or because he thought that looked more exciting.

He called his mastodon Missourium and displayed it at his exhibit hall in St. Louis, Missouri later in 1840. It was a hit, and in 1841 he decided he’d make more money if he took Missourium on the road. He packed the massive skeleton up, sold his exhibit hall, and went on tour with just the mastodon.

Paleontologists spoke out against Koch’s Missourium as being unscientific, but that only gave him free publicity. People thronged to his exhibit for the next two years, until 1843 when he sold it to the British Museum. Needless to say, the experts at the British Museum promptly disassembled Missourium so they could study the fossils properly before remounting them into a mastodon that didn’t contain any extra ribs and vertebrae. Also, they put the tusks on the right way up.

But Koch wasn’t done riding roughshod over paleontology. To learn about what he did next, we have to learn about an animal called Basilosaurus.

Despite its name, Basilosaurus isn’t a dinosaur or even a reptile. It’s a mammal—specifically a whale, although it didn’t look like any whale alive today. It probably grew up to 70 feet long, or over 21 meters, with long jaws full of massive teeth—more like a crocodile or mosasaur than a whale. It had short flipper-like front legs that still had an elbow joint. Modern whales don’t have elbows. It also had little nubby hind legs, but the legs were far too small to support its weight on land. It probably mostly lived at or near the surface of the ocean since its vertebrae were large, hollow, and filled with fluid, which would have made Basilosaurus buoyant. It wouldn’t have been able to dive much at all as a result. It ate sharks and fish as well as smaller whale relatives.

Basilosaurus went extinct around 34 million years ago. Modern whales aren’t related to it very closely, although modern whales did share an ancestor with Basilosaurus. But Basilosaurus was a common animal and its fossils are relatively common as a result. They were so common, in fact, that they were sometimes used as house supports in parts of the American South.

In 1835 a British naturalist named Richard Harlan examined some fossils found in Alabama and decided it was a marine reptile, which he named Basilosaurus, which means king lizard. The mistake was corrected soon after when another paleontologist determined that the animal was a whale-like mammal, but it was too late to change the name due to taxonomic rules in place to minimize confusion. That’s why Basilosaurus is sometimes called Zeuglodon, since that was the name everyone wanted as a replacement for Basilosaurus.

In 1845, Albert Koch got hold of a lot of Basilosaurus fossils and decided this was his next big thing. And again, he didn’t care what Basilosaurus was or what it was called, he just wanted that moolah.

He constructed a mounted skeleton with the Basilosaurus fossils. But just as he did with his mastodon fossils, he didn’t arrange them as they appeared in life. He constructed a sea serpent that was 114 feet long, or almost 35 meters, and contained bones from six Basilosauruses, as well as some ammonite shells to bulk it out even more. He named it Hydrarchos and exhibited it first in New York City, then went on tour throughout the United States and Europe. It was even more popular than Missourium. Heck, I would have paid to see it.

Koch sold Hydrarchos to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who exhibited it in the Royal Anatomical Museum in Berlin even though the paleontologists there really, really didn’t want it. Kock promptly bought more Basilosaurus bones and built a new fake, a mere 96 feet long this time, or 29 meters. He toured with it and sold it to another flim-flam artist in Chicago, who exhibited it until 1871, when the great Chicago fire destroyed it and most of the rest of Chicago.

Koch wasn’t the only person putting together real bones to make a fake animal back then, but at least he did it for the money. Other fakes were more insidious because we aren’t even sure why the hoaxer did it. That’s the case with the so-called Piltdown Man.

This is how the story goes. A man called Charles Dawson said that a worker at a gravel pit in Piltdown had given him a piece of skull in 1908. Dawson searched the pit and found more pieces, which he gave to a geologist at the British Museum, Arthur Woodward. Woodward and Dawson both returned to the gravel pit in 1912, where they found more pieces of the skull and part of a jawbone. Woodward reconstructed the skull from the pieces and reported that the ape in question must be a so-called missing link between humans and apes.

Just going to mention here that if anyone refers to a fossil as a missing link, you should be suspicious that maybe they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, or that the fossil is a fake.

Not everyone agreed with the reconstruction. In 1913, Woodward, Dawson, and a geologist and priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin returned to the gravel pit. Teilhard found an ape-like canine tooth that fit the jaw. But the tooth raised even more controversy, leading to the loss of friendships and colleagues splitting into camps for and against the Piltdown fossil. Teilhard de Chardin washed his hands of the whole thing and moved to France, and later helped discover Homo erectus, one of our direct ancestors.

Piltdown Man, of course, was a fake. Some people had already suspected it was a fake in 1912, and through the years afterwards people repeatedly examined the bones and kept pointing out that it was a fake. Now, of course, it’s easy for researchers to see that the jaw and teeth are from an orangutan while the skull is from a human. But for a long time, no one was sure who was behind the hoax. Was it Dawson, Woodward, Teilhard de Chardin, or all of them together? Or did someone else plant the fakes for those people to find?

In 2008, a team of experts decided to examine the fossil and the circumstances surrounding its so-called discovery. It took them eight years. They determined that the orangutan teeth were all from the same animal while the pieces of skull came from at least two different people and were possibly several hundred years old. The jaw and skull pieces had been treated with putty, paint, and stain to make them look fossilized, with some carving to make the bones match up better. The hoaxer had even crammed pebbles into the natural hollow places inside the bones, then puttied them over, presumably to make the bones weigh more and therefore feel more like fossils.

All these methods were the work of a single person, and experts have seen that person’s work before. Charles Dawson was an amateur geologist, historian, and archaeologist who “discovered” a lot of things, almost all of which have been proven to be hoaxes. But the Piltdown man hoax was the one that got him into the history books, even if only as a cheater.

So why did Dawson do it? It’s possible he wanted Britain to be home to a human ancestor more impressive than Homo heidelbergensis, which was discovered in Germany in 1907 and which was probably the common ancestor of humans and Neandertals. More likely, he just wanted to be part of the excitement of a big discovery, one which would bring him the respect of the professional scientists he envied. His other hoaxes had brought him a certain amount of fame and weren’t discovered during his lifetime, so he just kept making them.

You’d think the days of faked fossils were behind us now that paleontology is so much more sophisticated. But fake fossils are actually more of a problem now than ever, mostly because fossils can be worth so much money. Usually the fakes are obvious to experts, but sometimes they’re much more sophisticated and can fool paleontologists for at least a short time. And that brings us to Archaeoraptor.

In 1999, National Geographic announced the discovery of a feathered dinosaur fossil from China, which was a mixture of elements seen in both dinosaurs and birds. National Geographic called it a missing link between dinosaurs and birds.

Yep, another missing link.

Archaeoraptor looked like a small dinosaur but with feather impressions. This doesn’t sound weird to us now, but in 1999 it was shocking. Dinosaurs with feathers? Who ever heard of such a thing! Supposedly, the farmer who found the fossil had cemented the broken pieces together as best he could before selling it to a dealer. The fossil ended up in the United States where it was bought in early 1999 by The Dinosaur Museum in Utah for $80,000.

The National Geographic Society was interested in publishing an article about it in the magazine after the official description appeared in Nature. But Nature rejected the description. The paleontologists tried the journal Science next but again, Science rejected it. By then, other paleontologists who had examined the fossil reported that it wasn’t one fossilized animal but pieces from at least three different animals glued together to look like one. Albert Koche would be proud.

But National Geographic decided not to pull the article. It appeared in the November 1999 issue and the fossil itself was put on display at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, a paleontologist named Xu Xing who’d seen the Archaeoraptor fossil thought it looked really familiar. He asked around in the area of China where Archaeoraptor was supposedly found, and eventually discovered the fossil of a small dinosaur called dromaeosaur. The tail of Archaeoraptor matched the tail of the Dromaeosaur fossil exactly—like exactly, right down to a yellow ochre stain in the same place. This doesn’t mean it was a fake or a copy, but that the two pieces had once been joined. Quite often fossils leave impressions on both sides of a piece of rock, which are called the slab and counterslab. Once Xing’s information got out, people started calling the fossil the Piltdown bird.

Remember last week when an extinct peccary tooth was misidentified as an ape tooth? People who didn’t believe evolution was real claimed that that one mistake proved they were right and all of science was wrong wrong wrong. Well, the same argument is going on today with people who still don’t believe evolution is real. For some reason they think that because Archaeoraptor was a hoax, evolution is somehow also a hoax—even though we now have plenty of perfectly genuine feathered dinosaur fossils that show how a branch of dinosaurs evolved into modern birds.

There are a lot of hoaxed fossils coming from China, which has some of the world’s most amazing fossil beds and some of the most amazingly well preserved fossils in the world. But because the people finding them are often desperately poor farmers, it’s common for fossils to be sold to dealers for resale. The dealers prepare the fossils and sometimes, to improve the resale value, they add details that aren’t really there to make the fossils seem more valuable. Even worse, the preparation by non-experts and those added details often destroy parts of the fossil that are then lost to science forever. And because the fossils are dug up by non-experts, paleontologists usually don’t know exactly where the fossils were found, which means they can’t properly estimate the fossil’s age and other important information.

Let’s finish with a very old hoax that was started for the best of reasons but took some unusual twists and turns. Way back in the late 17th century, the countryside near Rome in Italy kept getting flooded by rivers. Rumor had it that a dragon-like monster was responsible, that when it moved around too much in the river where it lived, the river overflowed its banks like water out of an overfull bathtub. In actuality the area is in a natural floodplain so of course it was going to flood periodically, but that didn’t make it any easier for the people who lived there.

A Dutch engineer, architect, and engraver named Cornelius Meyer had a solution, though, involving levees to make the River Tiber more navigable and less prone to flooding. He started the project around 1690 but had trouble with his local workers. They expected to come across the dragon at any moment, which made them reluctant to get too near the river.

So Meyer decided to show them that the local dragon was dead. In 1691 he “found” its remains and mounted them to put on display. The workers were satisfied and got to work building the levees that did exactly what Meyer promised, reducing flooding and saving many lives. No one knows what happened to Meyer’s dragon, but we have an engraving he made of it in 1696. You can see it in the show notes. It shows a partially skeletal monster with hind legs, bat-like wings, a long tail, and horns on its skeletal head.

Centuries later, in 1998 and again in 2006, two men saw the engraving reprinted in a book about dragons published in 1979 and decided it was a depiction of a recently killed pterosaur. Wait, what? Pterosaurs disappear from the fossil record at the same time as non-avian dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago. Why would anyone believe Meyer’s dragon was a pterosaur? It didn’t even look like one.

The two men were part of a group called the young-earth creationists, who believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. In order to shoehorn the entire 4 ½ billion years of earth’s actual history into only 6,000 years, they claim that rocks only take a few years to form and that dinosaurs and other extinct animals either still survive today in remote areas or survived until modern times. I shouldn’t have to point out that their ideas make no sense when you understand geologic processes and other fields like cosmology, the study of the entire universe and how planets form. Young-earth creationists are always on the lookout for anything that fits their theories, like so-called living fossils and cryptids that resemble dinosaurs, like the mokele mbembe we talked about way back in episode two. I’m not sure why they think that finding a living dinosaur would prove that the earth is only 6,000 years old. All it would prove is that that a non-avian dinosaur survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.

Anyway, these two men decided that Meyer’s dragon was a pterosaur, which brought the engraving to the attention of modern scientists, who hadn’t known about it before. Obviously the dragon wasn’t actually a pterosaur. What was it?

The original remains were long gone, but the engraving was of extremely high quality. In 2013 researchers were actually able to determine what animal bones Meyer had used to make his dragon. The skull is from a dog, the jaw is from another dog, the ribs are from a large fish, the hind limbs are actually the front leg bones of a young bear, and so on. The wings, horns, and a few other parts are carvings.

Gradually, historians pieced together the real story behind Meyer’s dragon. We don’t know who actually made the fake dragon, but they did a great job. But it wasn’t a real dragon, and it definitely wasn’t a pterosaur.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 129: The blurry line between animals and plants

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This week we’re looking at some really strange animals…or are they plants? Or both? We’ll start with the sea anemone, then learn about a sea slug that photosynthesizes like a plant (sort of), then learn a little about whether algae is a plant or an animal…and then we’re off and running through the wild world of carnivorous plants–including some carnivorous plants of mystery!

Thanks to Joshua Hobbs of A Degree in Nonsense for the suggestion, and to Simon for the article link I’ve already managed to lose!

A sea anemone and some actual anemones. Usually pretty easy to tell apart:

The sea onion looks so much like an onion I can’t even stand it. This is an ANIMAL, y’all!

Venus flytrap sea anemone and actual Venus flytrap. It’s usually pretty easy to tell these two apart too.

 

The eastern emerald elysia, a sea slug that looks and acts like a leaf:

Giant kelp. Not a plant. Actually gigantic algae. Algae is neither a plant nor an animal:

The corpse flower (left) and the corpse lily (right). Both smell like UGH and both are extremely BIG:

The pitcher plant can grow very big:

Maybe don’t go near trees with a lot of skulls around them:

Puya chilensis (the clumps in the foreground are its leaves; the spikes in the background are its flower spikes):

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to explore the sometimes blurry line between animals and plants. Joshua Hobbs of a great new podcast A Degree in Nonsense suggested a type of carrion flower that smells like rotting flesh to attract insects, and friend of the pod Simon sent me an article about carnivorous plants. Our very first Patreon bonus episode was actually about carnivorous plants, so I’ve expanded on that episode and added lots of interesting new content. Buckle up, folks, because we’re going to cover a whole lot of ground today!

Oh, and Joshua also says, quote, “I never had a pet growing up, but recently gained an interest in animals. Now after getting into your podcast and animal YouTube channels, I’ve got my first pet, a little corn snake named Arnold!” So welcome to podcasting, Joshua and Arnold!

Let’s start by looking at an animal that resembles a plant. The sea anemone looks so much like a plant that it was named after an actual flower, the anemone, but the sea anemone is related to jellyfish. Most sea anemones attach to a rock or other hard surface most of their lives and don’t move much, although they can creep along very slowly—so slowly that snails are racecar drivers in comparison. Many species have a body shaped like a plant stem and colorful tentacles that resemble flower petals. But those tentacles aren’t just to look pretty. The sea anemone uses them to catch prey. The tentacles are lined with stinging cells that contain venom, just like many jellyfish have. The venom contains neurotoxins that paralyzes a fish or other small animal so that the sea anemone can eat it.

So how does something that looks like a plant eat a fish?

The sea anemone has an interesting body plan. What looks like the stem of a plant is called the column, and in some species it’s thin and delicate while in other species it’s thick like a tree trunk. It sticks to its rock or whatever with an adhesive foot called a basal disc, and on the other end of the column is what’s called the oral disc. Oral means mouth. The actual mouth is in the middle of the oral disc, surrounded by tentacles. The mouth is usually shaped like a slit, which if you think about it is sort of how people’s mouths are too. The digestive system is inside the column. But there is no other opening into the body. The mouth is it. So like jellyfish, the mouth takes in food but it also expels waste, so, you know, not precisely a mouth like ours. When the sea anemone wants to eat, it uses its tentacles to push the food into its mouth.

You know the movie Finding Nemo? Nemo and his dad are clownfish, which aren’t affected by sea anemone venom. Clownfish hide among sea anemone tentacles so predators won’t bother them. In return, the sea anemone eats the clownfish’s poops. I wish I were making that up.

If a sea anemone feels threatened, many species can not only suck its tentacles into its mouth, it can retract the whole mouth inside its body. Basically, it can swallow its own mouth. A sea anemone called the sea onion retracts its tentacles and inflates its column so that it looks like an actual onion. The sea onion lives in a burrow it digs very slowly into the sediment at the bottom of the ocean, with just its tentacles sticking out.

Most sea anemones live in relatively shallow water, but there are some deep-sea species. The Venus flytrap sea anemone has been found at 5,000 feet deep, or over 1,500 meters. At first glance looks like a Venus flytrap plant, thus the name. Its body is a long, usually slender column that widens into a big oral disc on top that’s fringed with short tentacles. It mostly eats detritus that drifts down from above, which it filters from the water with its tentacles, although if a living creature strays into its tentacles it’ll eat it too.

That brings us to the actual Venus flytrap. It’s a plant that eats insects and spiders, especially crawling insects like ants and beetles. The ends of its leaves are modified into lobes that look a little like flowers because the insides of the lobes are a cheerful red while the edges and the hair-like cilia are yellow. When a bug touches the receptors inside the lobes it closes tightly. If the insect continues to move around inside, stimulating the receptors even more, the lobes seal and form a sort of stomach. Digestive enzymes are secreted and about ten days later the lobes reopen and there’s nothing left of the insect but its empty exoskeleton.

If bugs made movies, this would be the subject of every single bug horror film.

The Venus flyptrap is only found in one small part of the world, the boggy areas surrounding Wilmington, North Carolina in the United States. They’re so in demand that the plant is almost extinct in the wild due to idiots digging them up to sell. But Venus flytraps really aren’t that difficult to grow, you just have to make sure the soil you use is deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus. So you can buy Venus flytraps that were grown ethically instead of dug up from the wild. As of 2014 digging up a Venus flytrap is a felony in North Carolina.

Before we go on to talk about some other carnivorous plants, let’s discuss an animal that acts like a plant. It’s a sea slug called the eastern emerald elysia and it lives along the east coast of North America in shallow water. Even though it’s a sea slug, it will also live in fresh water. It grows to about an inch long, or 3 cm, and is green. It’s green because it photosynthesizes like a plant…sort of.

The sea slug eats algae, but it doesn’t fully digest the algae it eats. Its digestive system retains the algae’s chloroplasts, which are the parts of a plant cell that convert sunlight into energy, which is what photosynthesis is. The sea slug keeps the chloroplasts in its digestive system and keeps them alive for months, living off the energy the chloroplasts produce. Researchers aren’t sure how the sea slugs keep the chloroplasts alive.

This is pretty amazing, but it’s not the only sea slug that photosynthesizes in this way. The blue dragon sea slug, that lives along coasts around the Indo-Pacific Ocean, doesn’t just keep chloroplasts alive to produce chlorophyll energy. It gets even more complicated about it. The blue dragon eats tiny animals called hydrozoa, which are related to jellyfish and include the freshwater hydra, although since the blue dragon only lives in the ocean it doesn’t actually eat the hydra. The blue dragon eats hydrozoa that themselves contain a type of microscopic algae that live in a lot of animals, like giant clams, some jellyfish, even some sea anemones, and exchange energy from photosynthesis for protection from predators by living in or on its host. So when the blue dragon eats the hydrozoa containing these algae, it retains the algae and keep them alive. So basically it gets to eat its prey and steals its prey’s symbiotic algae.

Speaking of algae, most algae photosynthesize, and in fact many seaweeds, like kelp, aren’t plants but are giant plant-like algae. But algae, technically, aren’t plants. They’re not animals either. Researchers and taxonomists are still working out the ways various algae are related to each other and to other organisms, but most algae are considered more closely related to plants than to animals without actually being plants. They’re usually grouped with plants above the kingdom level of taxonomy, but since at that level animals like humans and fish and worms and mosquitoes are grouped with fungi, this is a really broad category.

And that brings us, in a roundabout way, to the rotten meat smelling plant suggested by Joshua. There are several plants that attract flies and other insects to pollinate their flowers by smelling of rotten meat. Some of these have freakishly large flowers, like the corpse flower. It lives in rainforests in parts of Sumatra and Java and is actually related to the calla lily. It’s a weird-shaped plant and hard to describe. You know how a calla lily has a pretty white petal that wraps around a yellow spike thing? The corpse flower is like that, only it can be ten feet high, or 3 meters. The thing that looks like a petal is actually a specialized leaf and the yellow spike is called the spadix. The yellow part is made up of tiny flowers, so a calla lily isn’t a single flower, it’s lots of flowers that look like one. Well, the corpse flower is like that, although its flowers are actually only at the bottom of the spadix. The petal-like leaf is dark red inside. The top of the spadix is where the rotten smell comes from, and it’s incredibly stinky—something like rotting meat and rotting fish with some extra smell like dung on top of it. It releases this stink mostly in the evenings and the top of the spadix actually grows hot to better disperse the smell.

The largest single flower in the world is sometimes called the corpse lily and it can grow over three feet across, or about a meter. It’s dark reddish-brown with white speckles and five fleshy petals, which look like meat. It smells like rotting meat too. Flies are attracted to the flower, which pollinate it. The flower can take an entire year to develop but only blooms for a few days. If it’s successfully pollinated, the flower produces a round fruit full of seeds that are eaten by tree shrews, which later poop the seeds out and spread them.

But the corpse lily isn’t any ordinary plant. It doesn’t even have roots or a stem or leaves. All it has is the flower, which grows directly from the roots of the corpse lily’s host plant. That’s right, the corpse lily is a parasitic plant, but it’s no ordinary parasite. It grows not on or around its host plant, but inside it. The host plant is a type of vine called Tetrastigma, related to the grape vine. When a tree shrew poops out a seed, the seed germinates and if it happens to germinate on a Tetrastigma vine, it develops tiny threadlike filaments that penetrate the vine and grow inside it.

The corpse lily lives only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, and it’s rare and getting rarer since so much of the rainforests in those areas are being destroyed. Fortunately, the corpse lily is actually a tourist attraction since it’s so rare, so spectacular, and so stinky. People who have corpse lilies growing in their yard sometimes protect the flower buds from harm and charge tourists to come look at them, which helps the people of the area and the plants.

There are literally hundreds of carnivorous plant species, with carnivorous habits evolving probably nine different times among plants that aren’t related. Different species use different methods to catch insects. For instance, the pitcher plant has modified leaf that forms a slippery-sided pitcher filled with nectar-like liquid. When an insect crawls down to drink the liquid, it falls in. The insect drowns and is dissolved and digested.

Some carnivorous plants have leaves lined with sticky mucilage, which traps small insects. The sundew has tentacles lined with hair-like structures beaded with mucilage. When an insect becomes trapped in the mucilage, the tentacles bend toward the insect and stick onto it, sometimes quite quickly—in seconds, or in at least one species, a fraction of a second. Generally you don’t think of plants as moving that fast.

Almost all known carnivorous plants are pretty small. The largest are pitcher plants. Two species of big pitcher plants grow in the mountains of the Philippines. Attenborough’s pitcher plant was discovered in 2007 and described in 2009, and is a shrub with pitchers that can hold nearly two liters of fluid. An even bigger pitcher plant was discovered in 2010. But the biggest pitcher plant known is from a couple of mountains in Malaysian Borneo called Nepenthes rajah. It’s been known to science since 1858 and its pitchers can hold over 2 ½ liters of digestive fluid. The biggest pitcher ever measured was over 16 inches tall, or about 41 cm, and the plant itself is a messy sort of vine that can grow nearly 20 feet long, or 6 meters. Mostly pitcher plants just attract insects, but these giant ones also trap frogs, lizards, rats and other small mammals, and even birds.

There’s always the chance that even bigger pitcher plants have yet to be discovered by science, although probably not much bigger than the ones we do know about. The larger an animal, the more likely it is to damage the pitcher while trying to escape. Insects and the occasional small animal are fine, anything bigger than that could just bust through the leaf.

But there have long been rumors about plants that eat much larger animals, even humans. In the 1870s, a German explorer named Karl Liche claimed he’d witnessed a tribe in Madagascar sacrifice a woman to a carnivorous tree. His account is not very believable. He describes the tree as about eight feet high with a thick trunk. A coat of leaves hang down from the top of the tree, leaves about twelve feet long with thorns. At their base is a flower-like receptacle with sweet liquid inside, with six ever-moving tendrils stretching up from it. When the sacrificial woman was made to drink the liquid, the tendrils wrapped around her and the tree’s long leaves folded up and over her. After ten days, the leaves relaxed, leaving nothing but a bleached skull at the base of the tree.

Later expeditions to Madagascar never found any plant that resembled Liche’s. In fact, everyone who’s researched Liche, the tribe he mentioned, and the tree in question haven’t found any evidence that any of them ever existed. It turns out that the account was a hoax from start to finish, written by a reporter named Edmund Spencer for a newspaper called the New York World in 1874.

A 1924 book called Madagascar: Land of the Man-Eating Tree describes a more realistic-sounding carnivorous plant that was supposed to be from India. Its blossoms have a pungent smell that attracts mice and sometimes large insects, which crawl into a hole in the blossom that turns out to be a bristly trap. This sounds a little like the corkscrew plant that lives in wet areas of Africa and Central and South America. It has ordinary leaves aboveground but modified leaves that grow underground. The modified leaves are traps with a stalk lined with hairs pointing in one direction. Tiny water animals, especially single-celled protozoans, stray into the leaves but can’t get out because of the hairs. They’re digested and absorbed by the leaves. But there are no known corkscrew plants or anything like them that trap larger animals or animals that live aboveground.

An 1892 article describes a friend of a friend of a friend’s encounter with a tangle of thin, willow-branch-like vines covered with an incredibly sticky gum. This was supposed to have happened in Nicaragua in Central America. A Mr. Dunstan’s dog was ensnared by the plant but was rescued by Dunstan, who managed to cut the vines with his knife. In the process, both man and dog suffered blistered injuries from the plant, as though it had been trying to suck their blood. The article also says that natives of the area say the plant will reduce a lump of meat to a dried husk in only five minutes.

From these sorts of factual-seeming accounts, it’s a short step to plants of folklore like the Japanese Jubokko tree that grows on battlefields and drinks human blood. It captures people who pass too close to it, sticks its branches into them, and sucks out their blood. If someone cuts into the tree’s bark, blood comes out instead of sap.

Another carnivorous plant was supposedly encountered by a French explorer in 1933 in the jungles of southern Mexico. He doesn’t describe the plant in his 1934 magazine article, just says it’s enormous, but he does say that when a bird alighted on one of its leaves, the leaf closed and pierced the bird with long thorns. The expedition’s guide called it a vampire plant.

A similar story supposedly of a plant found in South America and Central Africa is of a short tree with barbed leaves that grow along the ground, and if an animal or bird steps on the leaves they twine around it and stab it to death, then squeeze the blood out to absorb.

There may actually be a real plant that these stories are based on. It’s called the Puya chilensis and it lives in Chile in South America, on dry hillsides of the Andes Mountains near the ocean. It’s an evergreen plant that only flowers after it’s some 20 years old, with a flower spike that can grow over 6 ½ feet high, or up to 2 meters. The flowers are pollinated by birds. But its leaves are long, edged with hooked spines, and grow in clumps that can be up to six feet wide, or nearly two meters.

Those hooks along the leaves give the plant its other name, the sheep-killer. Sheep and other animals can become entangled in the leaves, which are so tough that locals use the leaf’s fibers to make rope. If the animal can’t escape, it dies and its body decomposes, adding nutrients to the soil around the plant. Yum.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. 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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 128: Weird Pigs

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If you think pigs are just cute little pink animals that go oink, you definitely need to listen to this week’s episode!

Further listening (two unlocked Patreon episodes):

Weird teeth featuring the babirusa

Peccaries

Further reading:

More about the swamp pig of Hungary

An adorable pygmy hog:

A Javan warty pig, looking magnificent:

An actual warthog, not a cartoon warthog, just sayin:

A giant forest hog, looking kind of similar to the warthog but bigger:

A wild boar looking surprisingly fluffy:

A wild boar piglet, awwww:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at an animal all of us know as the thing that goes oink-oink. Some people eat them, some people will absolutely not eat them, some people keep them as pets, but everybody knows what a pig is. But you might not know about these weird and sometimes mysterious pigs!

I’ve unlocked two Patreon bonus episodes about pigs so that anyone can listen to them. I recently posted a bonus episode about peccaries, and there’s an older bonus episode about some animals with weird teeth that features the babirusa. Check the show notes for links to those episodes. You don’t need a Patreon login, just click on the link and use your browser to listen.

There are two groups of piglike animals, known as the New World pigs found throughout the Americas, and the Old World pigs from Africa and Eurasia. Domestic pigs are Old World pigs, although escaped domestic pigs live as feral animals in many parts of the world. New World and Old World pigs are related, but not closely. They used to be classified together in the pig family, Suidae, but the New World pigs now have their own family, Tayassuidae.

All these pigs have one thing in common: a snout that ends in a disc with nostrils at the end. You know, a pig snout. The disc is made of cartilage and is usually extremely tough, with leathery skin, but it’s also full of nerve endings so the pig can tell exactly what it’s touching with its snout. Pigs use their snouts to root in the ground, digging up plant material and small animals like grubs and worms. You know why pigs sometimes have a ring in their nose, through the nostrils? This stops a pig from rooting, because the ring gets caught on rocks and things and pulls at the sensitive nostrils.

Male pigs of all kinds also have tusks, or teeth that grow long enough that they extend out of the mouth. Plus pigs have small, thin tails, bulky bodies with relatively slender legs, cloven hooves with two dew claws on each foot, and small eyes. The babies of wild pig species are usually furry with stripes the length of their body.

Pigs are surprisingly intelligent and can learn all kinds of tricks, just like dogs. And while a domestic pig that’s been handled often since it was a piglet will make a good pet, wild pigs and pigs that aren’t used to people can be dangerous. Pigs will eat people, which seems only fair since people eat so many pigs. Pigs will eat anything, in fact. They’re omnivores, just like humans are. Pigs also carry a lot of parasites and diseases that humans can catch too.

Let’s look at some of the more unusual wild pigs out there, starting with the pygmy hog. The pygmy hog isn’t actually very closely related to most pigs. It’s much smaller than most pig species, only about a foot high, or 30 cm. It’s brown in color with short hair and rounded ears, and it lives in India although it used to be much more widespread.

The pygmy hog lives in small family groups, usually females and their young. Males are more solitary. In cold weather the pygmy hog digs a nest to sleep in, rooting out a small trough in the dirt with its snout and lining it with grass. This is adorable.

The pygmy hog was first described in 1847 but by the 1960s it was supposedly extinct. But a population was rediscovered in 1971 living in a wildlife sanctuary. By the time a conservation program was set up in 1995, only a few hundred pygmy hogs were still alive in the wild due to habitat loss and hunting. The pygmy hog likes wet grasslands, which are often overgrazed by livestock. Fortunately it’s now a protected species in India, and over a hundred captive-bred pygmy hogs have been reintroduced into the wild and are repopulating areas where they were once common.

Another endangered pig is the Javan warty pig, which lives on several islands in Indonesia. It’s black with some reddish areas on its head and belly. Males can grow up to three feet tall, or about a meter, although females are smaller. It’s mostly active at night, with females and young living in small groups, while adult males are mostly solitary. When something scares it, it gives a shrill whistle to warn other pigs.

The male Javan warty pig has three pairs of so-called warts on its head, one pair under the eyes, one pair under the ears, and one pair on the jaw. These aren’t warts at all, of course, but thickened skin that protect the eyes, the ears, and the neck from the tusks of other male pigs, since males fight with their tusks during mating season.

The most famous wart-bearing pig, of course, is the warthog. The warthog lives in Africa and is well-adapted to the savanna and hot weather. It has very little hair except for a mane down the spine, and very little fat, which helps keep it cool, and it often sleeps in abandoned aardvark burrows or digs its own burrow for shade. It usually backs into its burrow so if anything tries to come in after it, it will meet its tusks.

Warthogs have two pairs of massive tusks that rub against each other, sharpening them. The upper tusks can grow up to two feet long, or 61 cm, with the lower tusks up to 6 inches long, or 15 cm. Males fight each other with the tusks, but both males and females have them since they make good weapons against predators like lions. But the warthog can run so fast that it doesn’t usually need to defend itself. It can run up to 34 mph, or 55 km/hour.

The warthog mostly eats grass and other plants, including roots that it digs up with its snout. It can go without water for months at a time, getting the moisture it requires from the plants it eats. But when water is available, it likes to sit in the water to cool down. It will also wallow in mud just like domestic pigs do. It often kneels while it eats but no one’s sure why. I guess it just finds that comfortable.

One of the biggest species of wild pig alive today is the giant forest hog, which lives in forests in a few parts of Africa. There are three subspecies, but only the one that lives in East Africa is really big. It can grow more than 3 ½ feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.1 meters, and a big male can weigh over 600 lbs, or 275 kg. It looks sort of like a hairier, bigger warthog with a broader head.

The giant forest hog is black, gray, and dark brown. It likes forests and mostly eats plants, especially grass, although like other pigs it will eat anything it can find when its favorite foods aren’t available. This includes insects, carrion, and elephant dung. It lives in small family groups, usually one male, a few females, and their piglets. Younger males without a mate will hang out together in bachelor herds, but adult males will fight if they encounter each other, mostly by ramming their heads together or pushing snout to snout in a test of strength.

The other biggest species of wild pig is the wild boar, native to Eurasia and north Africa, and the ancestor of the domestic pig. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a game animal, including Australia and the United States. There are 16 subspecies of wild boar, including the Ussuri wild boar, which grows the largest. It lives in parts of China and Russia. A big male Ussuri can weigh 660 pounds, or 300 kg.

According to Hungarian folklore, there used to be a type of large wild pig called the fisher pig or swamp pig that lived in marshy areas near certain rivers. Hungary is a country in central Europe, roughly between Austria and Romania. The swamp pig is supposed to be extinct now, dying out around the end of the 19th century, but it was once well known in parts of Hungary. It mostly ate crabs and fish and lived in herds. That’s pretty much all I could find out about it. It may have been a population of feral pigs or it might have been a subspecies of wild boar that’s gone extinct now.

So what’s the biggest domestic pig ever measured? Pigs are usually assessed by weight, naturally, and a pig named Big Bill holds the world record. He weighed 2,552 pounds, or 1,157 kg, in 1933. This is really unusual, though. Most pigs that weigh anywhere near that much end up dying of heart failure or other health issues brought on by their unusual size after being overfed by their owners.

Wild boars can and do crossbreed with domestic pigs. The offspring usually resembles the wild parent more than the domestic parent, often with a mane of bristly hair that gives it the name razorback. It can be hard to tell whether a particular animal is a wild boar or a hybrid or just a feral domestic pig.

Sometimes unusually large pigs are shot and killed. You may have heard of Hogzilla, Hog Kong, and the Monster Pig, among others. Where wild boars have been introduced as game animals, they’re incredibly destructive to the environment and can be dangerous. It’s common for people to hunt them and sometimes they kill humongous pigs. Or at least they claim they did.

In 2004 a man shot a pig on a hunting reserve in Georgia, in the United States, that he claimed weighed over a thousand pounds, or 450 kg. It actually turned out to be much smaller, only about 800 pounds, or 360 kg. That’s still a big pig, so I don’t know why the hunter had to lie about its size.

Similarly, in 2007, some hunters in Alabama in the United States reported that an 11yo boy with them, the son of one of the hunters, had shot and killed a pig that weighed over a thousand pounds, or more than 475 kg. They sent photos of the boy and the dead pig to local media, but pretty soon the story fell apart. It turned out that the photos used forced perspective to make the pig look bigger than it really was, and that the pig wasn’t even wild. It was a domestic pig named Fred who was quite friendly and had been raised as a pet. Fred’s owners had sold him to a hunting preserve and recognized their former pet in the pictures. The 11yo boy had “hunted” Fred in a relatively small enclosure. Whatever your views on hunting, this wasn’t a fair hunt and it turned out that the whole thing was a publicity stunt to drum up business at the preserve.

I don’t know, maybe don’t sell your pet pig to a canned hunt business in the first place.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. You can email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 123: Linnaeus’s mystery animals

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Carolus Linnaeus was a botanist who worked out modern taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, but there are two mystery animals associated with his work. Let’s find out about them!

Rembrandt sketched this elephant whose skeleton is now the type specimen of the Asian elephant:

Linnaeus’s original entry about Furia infernalis:

Further reading:

Ewen Callaway, “Linnaeus’s Asian elephant was wrong species”

Karl Shuker, “Linnaeus’s Hellish Fury Worm – The History (and Mystery) of a Non-Existent Micro-Assassin”

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s learn a little something about binomial nomenclature, which is the system for giving organisms scientific names. Then we’ll learn about a couple of mystery animals associated with the guy who invented binomial nomenclature.

That guy was Carlolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who lived in the 18th century. Botany is the study of plants. If you’ve ever tried to figure out what a particular plant is called, you can understand how frustrating it must have been for botanists back then. The same plant can have dozens of common names depending on who you ask.

When I was a kid, the local name for a common plant with edible leaves that tasted deliciously tart was rabbit grass. I’ve never heard anyone anywhere else call it rabbit grass. Maybe you know it as sourgrass or false shamrock or wood sorrel.

There are over a hundred species of that plant throughout the world in the genus Oxalis, so it’s also sometimes just called oxalis. The species that’s most common in East Tennessee where I grew up is Oxalis dellenii, but all species look pretty much the same unless you get down on your stomach and really study the leaves and the flower petals and the stems. So if you were a botanist wanting to talk to another botanist about Oxalis dellenii back in the early 18th century, you couldn’t call it Oxalis dellennii. Not yet. You’d have to say, hey, do you know what rabbit grass is? And the other botanist would say, why no, I have never heard of this no doubt rare and astounding plant; and you’d produce a pot full of this pretty little weed that will grow just about anywhere, and the other botanist would look at it and say, “Oh. You mean sourgrass.” But imagine if you weren’t right by the other botanist and didn’t have the plant to show them. You’d have to draw it and label the drawing and write a paragraph describing it, just so the other botanist would have a clue about which plant you were discussing. Nowadays, all you have to do is say, “Hey, are you familiar with Oxalis dellenii?” and the other botanist will say, “Ah yes, although I myself believe it is the same as Oxalis stricta and that the differences some botanists insist on are not significant.” And then you’d fight. But at least you’d know what plant you were both fighting about.

Before Linnaeus worked out his system, botanists and other scientists tried various different ways of describing plants and animals so that other scientists knew what was being discussed. They gave each plant or animal a name, usually in Latin, that described it as closely as possible. But because the descriptions sometimes had to be really elaborate to indicate differences between closely related species, the names got unwieldy—sometimes nine or ten words long.

Carl Linnaeus sorted this out first by sorting out taxonomy, or how living creatures are related to each other. It seems pretty obvious to us now that a cat and a lion are related in some way, but back in the olden days no one was certain if that was the case and if so, how closely related they were. It’s taken hundreds of years of intensive study by thousands upon thousands of scientists and dedicated amateurs to get where we are today, not to mention lots of technological advances. But Linnaeus was the first to really attempt to codify different types of animals and other organisms depending on how closely they appeared to be related, a practice called taxonomy.

Linnaeus’s system is beautifully simple. Each organism receives a generic name, which indicates what genus it’s in, and a specific name, which indicates the species. This conveys a whole lot of information in just two words. A zoologist who hears the name Stenella longirostris will know that it belongs to the genus Stenella, which means it’s a type of dolphin, which means it’s in the family delphinidae. If they’re familiar with dolphins they’ll also know they’re talking about the spinner dolphin, and in this case they can even get an idea of what it looks like, since the specific name longirostris means ‘long beak.’ To make things even clearer, a subspecies name can be tagged on the end, so Stenella longirostris centroamericana is a subspecies of spinner dolphin that—you guessed it—lives in the ocean around Central America.

Carl Linnaeus was a young man when he started working out his classification system. He was only 25 when he traveled to Lapland on a scientific expedition to find new plants and describe them for science. This was in 1732 so travel was quite difficult. Linnaeus traveled on horseback and on foot, which as you can imagine took a long time and gave him lots of time to think. Within three years he had worked out the system we still use today.

You know what else Linnaeus invented? The index card. He needed index cards to keep track of all the animals and plants he and other scientists named using his binomial nomenclature system.

Linnaeus named a whole lot of plants and animals himself—something like ten thousand of them during his lifetime. And naturally enough, some mistakes crept in that have since been corrected. But a couple of his mistakes have led to mysteries, and those are the ones we’re going to look at today.

In 1753 Linnaeus got to examine a fetal elephant preserved in a jar of alcohol. Back then hardly anyone outside of Asia and Africa had seen an elephant, so Linnaeus was enormously excited about it and wrote to a friend that the specimen was as rare as a diamond.

Linnaeus described the species and named it Elephas maximus, also known as the Asian elephant today. But from records that still survive, the specimen was marked as having come from Africa. A Dutch pharmacist and collector had acquired the specimen around 1736, and after he died it was sold to King Adolf Frederick of Sweden, who let Linnaeus examine it. The auction catalog where it was listed for sale indicates that it was from Africa, but in his official description of the elephant Linnaeus wrote that it was from Ceylon, which is now called Sri Lanka, which is in Asia.

So ever since there’s been a mystery as to whether the elephant specimen was actually an Asian elephant or an African elephant, and if Linnaeus even knew that there were elephants in Africa. Because the specimen is of a fetal elephant—that is, a baby that died before it was fully developed, probably when its mother was killed while she was pregnant—it’s hard to tell just by looking if the specimen is an African or Asian elephant. We do still have the specimen, fortunately, which is held in the Swedish Natural History Museum’s collection.

A mammal expert at the London Natural History Museum, named Anthea Gentry, got curious about the specimen in 1999, when she saw it on a trip to Sweden. Gentry’s husband was a paleontologist who specialized in mammals, and later she showed him a photograph of the specimen and asked what he thought. He said he was pretty sure it was an African elephant, not an Asian elephant. Gentry got permission to do DNA testing on the specimen, but since it had been in alcohol for so long, not even the most advanced technology and the world’s most experienced expert in ancient DNA could get a usable genetic sequence from the tissue.

The world’s most experienced expert in ancient DNA was Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He did his best and failed, but he couldn’t forget about the little mystery elephant. In 2009 he got an idea for extracting genetic material from the specimen in a new way that might yield results. It took years, but he and his team got it to work. In 2012 the mystery was finally solved. Linnaeus’s little elephant was actually an African elephant.

But that’s not the end of the story. When a scientist describes a new species and gives it its scientific name, the first specimen described is known as the type specimen. Linnaeus’s elephant was the type specimen of the Asian elephant—but since it was proven to be an African elephant, it couldn’t continue to be the type specimen of the Asian elephant. But that meant that there was no official type specimen of the Asian elephant. They needed a specimen that was still available and that had been described by someone who had examined it scientifically.

When an animal is described officially, it’s a formal process. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature decides whether a suggested name is acceptable and makes decisions on type specimens and taxonomy. So researchers connected with the Commission started digging around for a new type specimen, preferably one from Linnaeus’s time or earlier.

A type specimen isn’t always a whole animal. A lot of times it’s just a little piece of a skeleton or a partial fossil, although the more complete a specimen is, the better. Linnaeus had described a partial elephant tooth at some point which was still available in a Swedish museum, and taxonomists were considering using that as a type specimen when they got an email from a paleontologist who specialized in elephants. He sent a copy of a travel journal from an amateur naturalist named John Ray, who had visited Florence in 1664 and wrote his observations of an elephant skeleton and skin on display in the duke’s palace.

And, it turned out, the elephant skeleton John Ray had described was in the collection of a museum in Florence. And it was definitely the skeleton of an Asian elephant—in fact, we even have what amounts to a photograph of the elephant when it was alive, because none other than the artist Rembrandt sketched it. So that skeleton was designated as the type specimen of the Asian elephant and all is well.

That brings us to the other mystery associated with Linnaeus, and this one is a lot less cute than a misidentified baby elephant. But before I tell you what the mystery animal is, let me tell you something that happened to Linnaeus before he’d even come up with his system of nomenclature. This happened in 1728, when Linnaeus was a broke college student staying with a professor and spending all his free time collecting botanical specimens in the marshes.

One day Linnaeus was searching for plants he didn’t already have specimens of when something stung him on the neck. Since he was wading around in a marsh, this was not really that unusual. But this wasn’t the usual insect sting or midge bite. Before long Linnaeus’s neck was painfully swollen, and soon one of his arms had swollen up too.

These days we’d recognize this as an allergic reaction, but back in 1728 they didn’t know what allergies were. By the time Linnaeus got home, he was in such bad shape that the doctor they called worried he wouldn’t survive.

Fortunately for Linnaeus and for science and humanity in general, he survived and went on to invent his naming system only eight years later. Some thirty years after he almost died, he published the tenth edition of his book, Systema Naturae, and included a formal description of the animal that had almost killed him. He named it the fury worm, Furia infernalis.

But there was no type specimen of a fury worm. Linnaeus hadn’t seen the one he believed had bitten him, and the only one anyone had shown him was a tiny worm so dried up and old that he couldn’t see any details. But he knew the fury worm existed because it had bitten him, and anyway everyone knew it was a real animal.

The fury worm was supposed to be tiny and slender, so small that it could be picked up by the wind and blown to other places. If it landed on a person or an animal it would immediately bite them with its sharp mouthparts, breaking the skin, then burrow into the flesh through the wound. It would dig in so quickly and so deeply that it was impossible to find, and even if you did find it, it was impossible to get out because of the backward-pointing bristles on its tail that kept it anchored in place. A person or animal bitten by the worm was likely to die within a day, sometimes within half an hour, unless a poultice of cheese or curds was applied to the bite.

Fortunately for most of the world, this horrible worm only lived in swampy areas in northern Sweden and Finland, Russia, and a few other nearby areas. In one year, 1823, some 5,000 reindeer died from fury worm attacks, and the export of reindeer furs was banned so the worm wouldn’t spread.

But. Where. Are. The. Worms??? And why would a parasitic worm kill its host so quickly? A parasite depends on its host staying alive for enough time that the parasite can benefit from whatever it’s getting from the host, whether that’s nutrients or a protected place to develop into its next life stage. This isn’t going to happen in half an hour.

So we have all this anecdotal evidence of the fury worm’s existence, even from such noted a scientist as Linnaeus himself, but no worms. And the symptoms reported from fury worm attacks varied quite a lot from patient to patient.

Doubts about the fury worm’s existence were already common in the 19th century, and even back in the late 18th century Linnaeus started to have doubts. And as technology and scientific knowledge improved, the fury worm started to look less and less like a real animal and more and more like an explanation for things people had once not understood—like allergies, infection, and bacteria. The death of 5,000 reindeer in 1823 was finally traced to a disease called neurocysticercosis [neuro-cyst-iser-kosis], which is actually caused by a parasite, but not a fury worm. It’s caused by tapeworm larvae that only kill its host after the larvae have matured and are ready to infect a new animal, which happens when something eats the meat of the animal that has died.

So was the fury worm ever a real animal? Almost certainly not. I tried to find out if people are still reporting fury worm bites in northern Sweden and Finland, but I didn’t come up with anything. On the other hand, I did check and it doesn’t look like there’s a band named Furia infernalis, so if you were trying to think of a really cool name for your band, I got you.

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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

 

Episode 115: Giant Rabbits and King Hares

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This week let’s learn about some giant-sized rabbits and hares! Also some regular-sized ones.

Further listening:

Life, Death & Taxonomy podcast episode about the Collared Pika

Further reading:

Dr Karl Shuker’s post about giant rabbits and hares

The National Cryptid Society’s post about giant rabbits and hares

An eastern cottontail rabbit:

The Flemish giant looks Photoshopped. It’s a big bunny:

A European hare (also called the brown hare):

The Belgian hare is a domestic rabbit bred to look like a hare:

Show transcript:

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

A few weeks ago we had an episode about some animal hoaxes that were based on true animal facts, including the horned hare. While I was researching that topic, I kept running across interesting facts about rabbits and hares, specifically mysterious reports about giant rabbits. So this week, let’s have a whole episode about gigantic rabbits and hares.

We’ll start with some general information. Collectively rabbits and hares are called leporids after their family, Leporidae, or lagomorphs after their order, Lagomorpha. Lagomorphs include pikas, which are really cute and look sort of like oversized hamsters. The podcasts Species and Life, Death and Taxonomy both did really good episodes about the pika recently, so we’re just going to talk about rabbits and hares today.

Leporids are famous for hopping instead of walking, and they’re able to do so because their hind legs are longer than their front legs and have specialized ankle joints. Ancestors of leporids developed this ankle as much as 53 million years ago, but their legs were much shorter so they probably ran instead of hopped. Hares have longer legs than rabbits and can run faster as a result, but both rabbits and hares are known for their ability to bound at high speeds. When a rabbit or hare runs, it pushes off from the ground with the tips of its long hind toes, and its toes are connected with webbed skin so they can’t spread apart. If the toes did spread apart, they would be more likely to get injured. Rabbits and hares also don’t have paw pads like dogs and cats do. The bottom of a leporid’s foot is covered with dense, coarse fur that protects the toes from injury. Its long claws help it get a good purchase on the ground so its feet won’t slip.

Baby rabbits are called bunnies, kits, or kittens, and like baby dogs and cats, they’re born helpless, without fur and with their eyes still sealed closed. Baby hares are called leverets and are born fully developed, with fur and with their eyes open.

Leporids eat plants, including grass, weeds, twigs, and bark. Animals that eat grass and other tough plants have specialized digestive systems so they can extract as many nutrients from the plants as possible. Many animals swallow the plants, digest them for a while, then bring up cuds of plants and water to chew more thoroughly. Rabbits and hares don’t chew their cud in that way, but they do have a system that allows them to digest the plants they eat twice.

After a leporid eats some plants, the plants go into the stomach, naturally, and then travel into the first part of the large intestine, called the cecum. The cecum separates the softer parts of the plants from the harder, less digestible parts. The hard parts are compressed into hard pellets that the rabbit poops out. But the soft parts of the plants, which are most nutritious, develop into softer pellets. These are called cecotropes, and as soon as the rabbit poops out the cecotropes, it immediately eats them again. This allows the digestive system to get a second round to extract more nutrients from the plants.

Most rabbit species are native to North America, but there are also rabbits native to parts of South America, parts of Europe and Asia, parts of Africa, and a few Japanese islands. They’ve also been introduced to other areas of the world, especially Australia, where they’re a real pest since rabbits eat a lot and reproduce rapidly.

Most hare species are native to Eurasia, with some species also living in parts of Africa, North America, and some Japanese islands. Despite its name, the jackrabbit of North America is a hare.

Hares live above ground and are generally solitary. Almost all rabbits are sociable and sleep underground in warrens and burrows. The exceptions are the rare hispid hare of South Asia, which is actually a rabbit, and the cottontail rabbit of North America. These rabbits make nests in long grass like hares do to raise their babies. Eastern cottontails are the rabbits I’m familiar with, and the cottontail gets its name because its short tail is white all over instead of only white underneath. It looks like a powder puff.

Hares aren’t domesticated, but rabbits have been and there are a lot of breeds of domestic rabbit. I had a pet red satin when I was a kid. Her name was June and she was beautiful. Domestic rabbits can be trained to use a litter box just like a cat, but unlike most cats, rabbits will chew on everything. I say most cats because I had a cat once who liked to chew through phone cords, back when I had a landline phone. But a rabbit will chew on all cords, on furniture, on wallpaper, and things like that if the rabbit isn’t trained and isn’t given appropriate things to chew on. A pet rabbit can be spayed or neutered just like a pet dog or cat to make it healthier, less likely to spray urine to mark its territory, and less aggressive.

So now we have a good idea of what rabbits and hares are like. Now let’s find out about some gigantic and mysterious leporids.

I’ll start with an account by a witness named Evelyn who saw something unusual while waiting for the school bus one morning. This happened in New Jersey, which is in the northeastern United States. I’ll quote the account I found in the National Cryptid Society archives.

“In 1954, I had just turned 14. I was waiting for the school bus at 6:45 AM by our house in the country, which was across the road from a holly farm. At that time before they planted hollies it was mostly weeds along the road but sweet potatoes in the rest of the field.

“I glanced over at the 10+ acre field in front of me and there sat what appeared to be a huge ‘rabbit.’ It was brown and I was roughly ten to fifteen feet from it. I had seen hares before but this was not a hare; besides, hares hadn’t been seen in that part of New Jersey in forty years.

“This creature was sitting on its haunches and stood nearly four and a half feet tall. It just watched me for several minutes, and then it just disappeared! It did not hop away.

“I wasn’t frightened. I had a strange feeling of peace. I had such a calm, peaceful feeling. It was almost as if it was reassuring me it was not unreal; that is the only way I can explain it.

“No one else ever saw it and my family lived there for over 25 years. To this day I wonder what it really was and where it came from.”

Wow, wait, what?? How does an animal that big just disappear? Like, actually vanish into thin air?

Let’s take a closer look at the details here and see what we can figure out.

We’ll start with the detail about the sweet potatoes in hopes of figuring out what time of year it was. In New Jersey, sweet potatoes are planted around the end of spring and harvested in late summer into early autumn. In other words, if there were sweet potatoes in the field, the days would be long and it would have been fully light at 6:45 am. So Evelyn probably did get a good look at the animal for at least a minute.

She also states she was only ten to fifteen feet away from it, which would be about 3 to 4 and a half meters away. That’s really close. But from the way she describes the scene, it sounds like she was across the road from the field where she saw the animal. She says she was waiting by her house, which was across from the farm. I actually measured the road in front of my house when I was researching episode 17 about the Thunderbird. My road is a typical two-lane road in a small town and I believe it measured 18 ½ feet, or just over 5.6 meters. Of course, I don’t know how wide roads were back in 1953, but it’s likely Evelyn was a little farther away from the animal than she remembers.

It sounds like the animal was close to the road, probably in the weeds along the edge of the road rather than in the cultivated field full of sweet potatoes. Deer are considered sweet potato pests but rabbits aren’t, so if it was a giant rabbit of some kind, it was probably eating weeds instead of sweet potato leaves.

Next, what kind of rabbits and hares live in New Jersey? The eastern cottontail and the New England cottontail are both small rabbits that Evelyn would have recognized easily. The European hare, black-tailed jackrabbit, and white-tailed jackrabbit, which are all hares, have been introduced into parts of New Jersey for hunting at different times. But Evelyn states specifically that this was not a hare.

The snowshoe hare is sometimes seen in northern New Jersey and might occasionally stray farther south. I don’t know what part of New Jersey Evelyn was from, but sweet potato farming is more common in the southern parts of the state. The snowshoe hare is more rabbit-like in appearance than other hares, since its ears are smaller and its body more rounded. Its fur usually turns white in winter to camouflage it against the snow, but in summer it would be brown. And it’s also fairly large, certainly bigger than a cottontail rabbit. Not counting the tail, a snowshoe hare can grow up to a foot and a half long, or 48 cm. If it was sitting up on its hind legs, especially if it was sitting up high on its hind legs to watch Evelyn in case it needed to run, it might appear to be even bigger, say two feet or more, or over 61 cm. But even accounting for the animal’s size being exaggerated in Evelyn’s memory, that’s still a lot smaller than the almost four and a half foot tall animal she describes. Four and a half feet is 137 cm. That’s really tall.

If you’ve listened to episode 73, about phantom kangaroos, you know that wallabies and kangaroos are sometimes kept as pets in the United States and often escape. Wallabies and kangaroos have long ears, long hind legs, and sit up like rabbits and hares. If Evelyn saw a wallaby but didn’t see its long tail, she might have thought she was looking at an enormous rabbit.

But…it disappeared. Hares are considered masters of hiding and are said to be able to seem to disappear from view even in short grass, but how in the heck can an animal more than four feet tall just vanish?

I don’t have an answer, so all I can offer is that either Evelyn misjudged the animal’s size and thought it was much larger than it was, and it was able to drop down quickly and appear to vanish in tall weeds, or Evelyn actually saw a ghostly giant rabbit of some kind that actually vanished. Now this sounds like a Halloween episode. At least her ghost rabbit wasn’t scary. She even points out that she felt peaceful after seeing it.

Evelyn isn’t the only person who’s reported seeing a giant rabbit or hare. In 1976 in Dorset, England, a woman named Louise Hodgson and two men out walking their dogs in the evening saw a group of about a dozen hares in a field. This was in September so it was unusual to find that many hares together just to start with, since hares are usually solitary except during mating season in spring. But there was a bigger animal with the hares. The dog-walkers at first thought it was a roe deer due to its size, but then they realized it was another hare, but huge. A roe deer stands no more than two and a half feet at the shoulder, or 75 cm, which is the same measurement of the length of a large European hare’s body. So a European hare could appear as tall as a roe deer when sitting up, but then why did it appear so much larger than the other hares?

In April of 2006, not long after the awesome movie Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit was released, reports of a giant rabbit eating up gardens in Northumberland, England hit the news. People thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but the gardeners were furious and had proof: giant-sized rabbit footprints, and of course their destroyed produce. They reported that the rabbit was the size of a dog and was black and brown in color. The first witness saw it in February of that year. But before anyone could get a good photo of the rabbit or capture it, a local woman reported that she’d been driving one night in early April when a massive rabbit bounded in front of her car. She wasn’t able to stop and collided with the rabbit, which was so big that the front bumper of her car was damaged. The rabbit died, unfortunately, and the woman said she got out and looked at it. She estimated it was at least two feet long, or 61 cm, with long legs. Rabbit fur was found stuck in the damaged bumper of her car, but the dead rabbit was long gone, probably eaten by a fox. After that the giant rabbit wasn’t seen again and the gardeners were left in peace.

And in 2017 a man reported that when he was a kid in the late 1960s, in Placer County, California, he and his mother both saw some jackrabbits that were almost four feet tall when they sat up, or 1.2 meters. The best part of this story is that they saw more than one giant jackrabbit.

So what could these giant hares and rabbits be? Do leporids ever really get that big?

Actually, yes. There are two breeds of domestic rabbit that are enormous. One is called the Flemish giant and the other is a British breed called the Continental giant. Both were originally bred for fur and meat, but are good-natured rabbits that are often kept as pets these days. A typical domestic rabbit is roughly the size and weight of a small to medium-sized cat, but a Flemish or continental giant rabbit can be as large as a medium-sized dog. The biggest is a rabbit named Darius, who is officially four feet four inches long, or 134 cm. Pictures of him and other domestic breed giants look photoshopped, because how can a rabbit be so big? But they are.

It’s probable that the Northumberland giant rabbit was a Flemish or continental giant that had escaped its home. But what about the giant hares reported in other places? Hares look much more slender and angular than rabbits and usually have longer ears.

Some cryptozoologists suggest that an extinct leporid might be the culprit, if it isn’t really extinct. Nuralagus rex, also called the Minorcan giant lagomorph, and sometimes referred to as a giant jackrabbit, was only described in 2011 and went extinct 3 to 5 million years ago. But Nuralagus wasn’t a jackrabbit and it only lived on one island, Menorca in the Mediterranean Sea. While it was related to modern rabbits and hares, it was definitely very different and not really all that big. It probably stood about a foot and a half high at the highest part of the back, or around half a meter, and was big and heavy. But it had small eyes and ears, and it probably couldn’t hop or even run very fast. If it was alive today, no one would think it was even related to a rabbit or hare.

The king hares seen in parts of England might be unusually large hares whose size has been exaggerated, since it’s hard to estimate size of an animal seen in the distance or seen only briefly. The king hare seen by Louise Hodgson in Dorset amid a bunch of smaller hares might actually have been a large hare in a field of rabbits, which Hodgson and her companions might have interpreted as being one giant hare and a lot of normal-sized hares. Hares and rabbits don’t typically interact where their ranges overlap, but they also don’t apparently dislike each other. A solitary hare might feed in a field where rabbits are also feeding.

Of course it’s also possible that there are anomalously large hares born sometimes. But there is another possibility.

In the mid-1980s, a man named Andrew Munro was walking through his mother’s garden in County Cork, Ireland when he saw a huge hare. He stopped and stared at it, and it stopped and stared at him, standing on its hind legs with its ears perked up. Munro estimated it was over four feet tall, or 1.2 meters. Munro’s dog saw it and gave chase, but the hare bounded away and was gone in moments.

This is an interesting sighting, because Munro pointed out that the hare was only four feet tall because it was standing up tall on its hind legs with its long ears up. A large hare can have ears more than half a foot long, or 15 cm. If you add the ear length to the body and head length, a big hare sitting up can measure three feet, or over 91 cm, and if it’s also standing on its hind legs instead of sitting on its bottom, that adds more height. So maybe we’re talking about big hares, but not ENORMOUS hares.

Not only that, there’s a breed of domestic rabbit called the Belgian hare that was bred to look like a hare. It’s slender, strong, and energetic, with long ears and legs. It was first bred in the early 18th century and was considered a meat rabbit, and while it’s not as heavy or bulky as a Flemish giant or continental giant rabbit, it’s big, much bigger than a wild hare. In fact, the Flemish giant was developed from the Belgian hare breed.

The Belgian hare became incredibly popular at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th as a meat rabbit and as a show rabbit. Some prize Belgian hares sold for as much as a thousand dollars, which is expensive now and was ridiculously expensive back in the olden days. By 1917 its popularity had fallen, mostly because there were just so many Belgian hares that the price dropped to almost nothing, which made fewer people want to bother keeping them to sell.

According to zoologist Karl Shuker’s blog, during the 1940s, Belgian hares may have been released into the wild in Ireland with the expectation that people could shoot them for meat. But before long Ireland was overrun with rabbits to such an extent that they were eradicated. I can’t find anything else about this online so this might not be the case, or the rabbits might only have been released in one small area, but it is interesting to consider that the big hare Andrew Munro saw in the 1980s might actually have been a descendant of one of these hare-like rabbits.

We’ll finish with another interesting rabbit, but not a big one. It’s the marsh rabbit, and it’s a type of cottontail that lives in swamps and along the coast of the southeastern United States. It’s smaller than other cottontail species with small ears and shorter legs, and it always lives around water. There are three subspecies, including the endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbit that lives in the Florida Keys.

The marsh rabbit can hop just fine like other rabbits, but because its legs are so much shorter than other rabbit species, it can also walk. Its walking gait resembles a cat’s. This helps it navigate dense vegetation more easily. Not only that, its toes are much more widely spread than in other rabbit species.

But the really extraordinary thing about the marsh rabbit is that it likes to swim. It spends a lot of time in the water—and I mean, actually in the water. It mostly eats aquatic plants. It will submerge itself in muddy water to hide with just its nose and eyes above water and its ears laid flat to hide them. If a predator approaches, the rabbit will swim away. This is not behavior I think of when I think of rabbits but you have to admit, it’s adorable.

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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 113: Horned Hares and Winged Cats

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It’s April Fool’s Day, but while these two mystery animals may mostly be associated with hoaxes and tall tales, there’s a really interesting nugget of truth in both.

Unlocked Patreon episode about mammals with nose horns

Further reading: Dr Karl P N Shuker’s blog post about winged cats and his blog post about horned hares

Traditional drawings of horned hares:

You can take classes in taxidermy that specialize in making jackalopes!

A genuine horned hare (with an extreme case of SPV):

A winged cat:

Mitzi/Thomas the winged cat:

Show transcript:

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

This episode releases on April Fool’s Day, April 1. I’m not a fan of April fool jokes, so we’re going to discuss two interesting strange animals that turned out to be hoaxes—but hoaxes with a nugget of truth that’s actually more interesting than the hoax.

The first hoax is akin to the jackalope and it’s pretty obvious to us nowadays. The horned hare was a tradition in European folklore and drawings of it look like a jackalope. There are even stuffed horned hares, just as there are stuffed jackalopes.

Some of you may be wondering what the heck a jackalope is, so I’ll explain that first.

The jackalope legend may have started as a tall tale, but was probably just a taxidermy joke. When someone prepares a dead animal for taxidermy, it’s not a simple process. The taxidermist has to remove the skin from the body, clean it and add preservatives, make a careful armature or mannequin of the body out of wood or other materials, and put the skin on the armature and sew it up. The taxidermist then adds details like glass eyes and artificial tongues. It can take months of painstaking work to finish a specimen, and it requires a lot of artistry and training. Taxidermists who are learning the trade will often mount small, common animals like rabbits and rats as practice. And sometimes they’ll get creative with the process, just to make it more interesting. For instance, a taxidermist may add pronghorn antelope horns to a jackrabbit. Voila, there’s a jackalope!

You can see stuffed jackalopes today in a lot of places, since they’re fun conversation pieces. Some restaurants will have one stuck up on a wall somewhere, for instance. Horned hares are similar, but instead of a jackrabbit with pronghorn horns or white-tailed deer antlers, which are animals from North America, the European horned hare is usually a European hare with horns [I should have said antlers] from a roe deer.

The horned hare was such a common taxidermied animal that people actually believed it was real. Eventually, around the 19th century, as knowledge of the natural world grew more sophisticated, scientists realized rabbits and hares don’t have horns and those stuffed specimens were just hoaxes. The tip-off was probably when taxidermists started getting really fancy and adding bird wings and saber teeth to their mounted hares.

But…

The horned hare goes way back in history. It appeared in medieval bestiaries, sometimes called the unicorn hare. The unicorn hare was supposed to have a single black horn on its head. The hare would act normal, but when someone approached, it would spring at them and stab them with its horn. Then it would eat them. The legend of the horned hare is so widespread and long-lived, in fact, and was believed for so long, that it’s easy to think maybe it was based on something real. I mean, we just talked about rodents with nose horns a few weeks ago, so nothing’s impossible.

Wait, I think that’s a Patreon episode. If it is, I’ll unlock it. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

There is a strange truth behind all the jackalopes and horned hares. A disease called the Shope papilloma virus, or SPV, affects hares and rabbits. There are a lot of papilloma viruses in various animals, even humans, but in most animals, including humans, it only results in tumors in the body. In rabbits and hares, it causes keratinized tumors to grow from the skin, often on the head. Usually these are small and don’t show through the fur, but sometimes an animal has an extreme case of SPV and it genuinely looks like it has horns. The horns are hard and usually dark in color. As if that wasn’t bad enough, rabbits and hares in Europe can also get a disease called Leporipoxvirus that again causes facial horns to grow from the skin.

If you’re feeling totally creeped out right now, don’t worry, humans can’t catch these diseases from rabbits and hares.

Remember how I mentioned taxidermied hares with wings? What about cats with wings—but not taxidermied, real live domestic cats with fur-covered wings. That totally can’t be real, right? It’s not real?

It’s real…but only if you are really generous with what you mean by wings.

Winged cats are a real phenomenon, but the wings in question are furry, not feathered, and winged cats can’t fly. That doesn’t stop people from claiming they’ve seen these winged cats flying around causing mischief. For instance, in Ontario, Canada in 1966 a so-called vampire cat was supposedly flying around attacking other animals. It was a black tomcat with furry wings 7 inches long, or 18 cm. Eventually someone shot the cat, which was examined by veterinarians and found to be rabid. Its wings were nothing but thickly matted fur, so the stories of it flying around weren’t true, although sadly, it was definitely attacking other animals due to having rabies.

In 1959, a case went to court in West Virginia over a winged cat. A 15 year old boy named Douglas Shelton said he’d rescued the cat from a tree and adopted her. But a woman named Mrs. Hicks said that the cat was hers, named Mitzi, but that Mitzi had run away and she wanted her back. This makes sense. I mean, I would want my cat back too. At first the judge awarded the cat to Mrs. Hicks, but when Douglas brought her into the courtroom, she had no wings. Douglas said she’d shed them during the summer but he’d kept the wings, which he showed to the judge. At that point, Mrs. Hicks suddenly decided she didn’t want the cat after all. Frankly, I’m sure Mitzi was better off with Douglas, who didn’t care if she had wings or not, although he did change Mitzi’s name to Thomas.

Stories like these didn’t just happen back in the olden days. There are lots of winged cat reports today, including photos and videos. What’s going on? Why do some cats develop these furry appendages that people call wings?

Sometimes the cats in question just have long fur that has become unusually matted and appears to form winglike flaps along the sides. But in many cases, the wings are due to a rare skin condition called feline cutaneous asthenia, or FCA.

Cats with FCA have unusually elastic skin. All skin stretches at least a little bit but almost immediately snaps back into place. You can try this yourself by gently tugging up the skin on the back of your hand and releasing it. But in cats with FCA, the skin doesn’t snap back properly, especially the skin along the shoulders and back. Since in the ordinary course of living its life, a cat’s skin stretches quite a bit along the back, eventually an FCA cat ends up with long flaps of furry skin that stretched and didn’t snap back repeatedly. The wings aren’t really wings, of course, and can’t allow the cat to fly.

Cats with FCA do usually need special care, especially if the case is severe. The skin is elastic, but it’s also prone to damage because it’s actually very delicate. The so-called wings sometimes tear off naturally, leaving wounds that bleed very little but still need to be treated by a veterinarian. They then reform. The wings tend to be on the sides near the hind legs but are sometimes closer to the shoulders.

Mitzi, AKA Thomas, was definitely a cat with FCA. Her wings were six inches long, or 15 cm, and her tail was described as squirrel-like. She was a white cat described as a Persian, although she may have just had long hair like a Persian cat. A reporter who examined Thomas described her wings as fluffy at the ends but with a gristly feel at the base, as though they contained tendons or other structure. This was probably the extended skin due to FCA.

It sounds like Douglas was a really nice kid who rescued the cat from the tree and took her home, and when his friends made fun of the unusual-looking cat, he was really upset. Once word of the winged cat got around, people started showing up at the family’s house to look at it. At first Douglas charged 10cents to see the cat, and he was even invited to New York where he and Thomas appeared on the Today Show.

But after that, things started to go kind of nuts. Thousands of people kept trying to see the cat, so many that Douglas’s mom spread the story that the cat had died, just so people would leave the family alone. She also took the cat to a friend’s house for a while until the fuss died down, swearing the friend to secrecy that the cat was still alive. Then Mrs. Hicks sued.

I tried to find out what happened to Douglas Shelton and Thomas after all the excitement died down. Douglas and his family were awarded custody of Thomas by the judge, with Mrs. Hicks rewarded a single dollar in damages, but whatever happened after that has vanished into the pre-internet vacuum. I’m sure Thomas lived a good life with the Sheltons, and Douglas is probably still alive today. He would be about the right age to be a granddad by now, so I bet he tells his grandkids stories about the time he had a cat with wings. I bet they don’t even believe him.

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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 110: Three mystery animals from India

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Thanks to Pranav for this week’s suggestion! We’re going to look at three mystery animals from India, ones you may not have heard of.

A photograph reportedly of a kallana pygmy elephant, although scale is hard to tell:

A pink-headed duck, deceased:

Show transcript:

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

It’s time for a mystery animals episode, and this one was a suggestion from Pranav, who suggested mystery animals from India. Pranav also gave me lots of other excellent suggestions that I’ll hopefully get to pretty soon.

When I got the suggestion, I realized the only mystery animal from India I really knew about was one we talked about in episode 55, the buru. I had no idea what else might be hiding in the forests and mountains of India. Apologies in advance for undoubtedly mangling names and places from India. I tried to look up pronunciations to at least make an effort to get them right.

India is in south Asia, and it’s a huge country. The area is often referred to as the Indian subcontinent because it mostly sits on its own tectonic plate. Around 100 million years ago it was connected with Madagascar, then split off around 75 million years ago and for many millions of years it was a giant island. But it moved northward slowly—and we’re talking only around 8 inches a year, or 20 cm, which is actually pretty fast for a tectonic plate—and slowly crashed into Eurasia, shoving beneath the Eurasian plate and causing it to crumple upwards, creating the Himalayas.

About half of India’s landmass projects southward into the Pacific Ocean like someone dipping their foot into a bath to see if it’s too hot. As a result, the country has a lot of coastland. So there are amazingly high mountains to the north, tropical coasts to the south, and everything from desert to tropical rainforest in between. It even has some volcanic islands off its coast. It pretty much has everything you could want in a country, and that means it has an amazing variety of animal life too.

Many of India’s animals are ones everyone is familiar with from zoos and storybooks: elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, cobras, pangolins, and lots lots lots more. But it also has its share of mystery animals. We’ll look at three of those mystery animals today. I think you’re going to like all three of them.

Let’s start with the mande burung. It’s supposed to be a giant ape-like animal as much as 8 or 10 feet tall, or up to 3 meters, with black hair. It lives in the remote forests of northeast India—specifically, in Meghalaya.

The mande burung has long been a creature of folklore in the area, until November 1995 when someone saw one. But I can’t find any information at all about what that sighting entailed. Interest in the mande burung has increased steadily since then, with cryptozoologists from India and other parts of the world mounting expeditions to look for it. They report finding footprints up to 15 inches long, or 38 cm, hair from unidentified animals, and nests made from leaves and grass. But there are no photographs of the animals, no mande burung feces, no dead bodies, and very few sightings, all of them within the last few decades and some of them decidedly questionable.

It’s certainly possible that there’s a mystery animal living in the area. Meghalaya is heavily forested outside of the cities and farmland. Some areas of forest are considered sacred, so they’ve never been logged, no one’s ever lived there, and no one hunts there. As a result, these sacred forests contain some of the richest habitats in all of Asia, containing plants and animals that live nowhere else. Meghalaya also has wildlife sanctuaries. So it’s pretty much guaranteed that there are animals living in Meghalaya that are unknown to science.

But while Meghalaya is primarily an agricultural region, tourism is becoming more and more important. A 2007 press release even talks about how the mande burung legend will bring more tourists to the area, and that a local group had started offering tours for people looking for the mande burung. That doesn’t mean the sightings aren’t genuine—I think most of them are—but as I’ve said many times, people see what they expect to see. The more people talk about the mande burung, the more likely people will think of it when they see a large animal they can’t identify. And there are lots of big animals living in the forests of Meghalaya, including an endangered species of gibbon, four species of macaque, and three species of bears. Any of these might resemble a bigfoot type of creature if seen in low light or poor conditions.

In 2001, a hair found in what’s called a “cedar tree root den” was DNA tested. Bear and human DNA was ruled out, and the DNA results didn’t match any known animals. But a follow-up test in 2008 gave a result that was just as surprising to scientists: the hair belonged to a Himalayan goral, a bovid that wasn’t known to live in the area until the DNA results came in. The goral is a small antelope-like animal with short horns that lives in the southern slopes of the Himayalas. It’s dark gray or gray-brown in color with a darker eel stripe along the spine. Generally, websites that like to talk about Bigfoots mention the first DNA test but don’t mention the follow-up, but I think the discovery of Himalayan goral hairs in Meghalaya is exciting. Who knows what else might be hiding in the forests too?

For instance, maybe a pygmy elephant! Well, okay, reports of a suspected dwarf elephant species called the kallana come from southern India, not northeastern. But it’s definitely a mystery animal.

The Indian elephant is a subspecies of Asian elephant that lives throughout much of mainland Asia. It’s smaller than the African elephant but still pretty big, with males standing as much as 11.3 feet at the shoulder, or 3.4 meters, although most are much smaller than this. Females are smaller than males and have smaller tusks, or sometimes no tusks. It was once common throughout India but is now endangered due to habitat loss and poaching. Tame elephants help with farming and with carrying heavy items and human riders across uneven terrain, but the elephants aren’t actually domesticated.

The kallana elephant reportedly only grows to around five feet high, or 1.5 meters, and while it looks like an ordinary Indian elephant except for its size, it doesn’t mix with Indian elephants and even appears to avoid them. It lives in rocky hills in and around the Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary in southern Kerala. It’s shy and can move much faster than regular elephants, and it doesn’t appear to have trouble with steep slopes the way elephants usually do.

In 2005, a wildlife photographer named Sali Palode got pictures of two kallana elephants, one alive, one a dead one they found by a lake. He took more photos in 2010, and in 2013 he got brief video footage. But there are no photos of a herd of kallana elephants, just solitary animals. Without being able to examine a kallana elephant in person, researchers don’t know if the elephant photographed is a new species or subspecies, or just an Indian elephant with a genetic anomaly similar to dwarfism in humans. The photos might even just be of young elephants that haven’t grown to their full size yet.

Until someone gets definitive footage of a herd of Kallana elephants, an individual is captured and studied, or someone takes samples of the elephant dung found throughout the hills and sends it for DNA testing, there’s no way of knowing if the small elephants Sali Palode has photographed and the local tribespeople report seeing are something special. Not that regular elephants aren’t special enough already, but if there is a population of anomalous elephants in the area, it’s important to learn about them so they can be further protected.

Our final mystery animal of India is the pink-headed duck. It lives in wetlands in parts of eastern India and a few nearby countries, and it gets its name because the male has a pink head and neck. It builds its nests in dense elephant grass and its eggs are almost completely round. It’s shy and prefers remote, isolated areas with deep ponds or lakes and thick grass.

So why are we talking about the pink-headed duck in a mystery animals episode? Well, unfortunately, there hasn’t been a single confirmed sighting of the duck since 1949. Some researchers push this back ever farther to 1935. The main reason it hasn’t been classified as extinct is that the occasional report of one occasionally trickles in.

The difficulty in knowing whether there really are pink-headed ducks still alive out there is that the areas where they are known to have lived are really hard to get to. I mean, unless you’re a duck. Then they’re great. The decline of the species started in the 19th century when British big game hunters would come through and basically just shoot everything that moved. It was already considered rare by the turn of the 20th century, which made hunters even more eager to shoot it so they’d have a rare trophy. Habitat loss and trophy hunting drove it nearly to extinction even if it’s not actually already extinct.

Recent expeditions by conservationists and birders hoping to find some pink-headed ducks haven’t found any definitive proof that any are still alive. A 2017 expedition to Myanmar didn’t find any of the ducks, but the team did interview locals who said they’d seen the ducks as recently as 2010.

We don’t know a whole lot about the pink-headed duck. Researchers think it was a diving duck, but it may have been a dabbler. A dabbling duck tips its body forward, head underwater and tail sticking up, to forage in shallow water, often on plants. A diving duck dives for its food, usually small animals of various kinds. We know the pink-headed duck ate snails and plants, but it probably ate other things too that we don’t know about.

A study of a taxidermied pink-headed duck’s feathers in 2016 determined that the pink color came from carotenoids, a pigment that also gives the flamingo its pink color. The only other duck with feathers pigmented by carotenoids is the pink-eared duck of Australia, which is only distantly related to the pink-headed duck. It has a tiny pink spot on each side of its head.

Conservationists and birdwatchers hold out hope that the pink-headed duck is still alive, hiding its round eggs in clumps of elephant grass far away from humans. Some researchers have even suggested it might be nocturnal, which would explain why it’s always been hard to find. It was never much of a duck for moving around, preferring to stay put instead of flying off to other areas. Hopefully someone will discover a healthy population one day, possibly somewhere no one’s even looked yet, and we can protect it and learn about it before it’s too late. Once a duck is gone, a duck is gone forever.

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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 102: Three Mystery Apes

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It’s mystery ape time! Learn about de Loys’ ape and two other mystery apes this week!

The only photograph we have of de Loys’ ape:

A white-fronted spider monkey:

Oliver the so-called “ape man”:

A better picture of Oliver late in his life:

A Bili ape:

A regular gorilla (top) and a regular chimp (bottom, hearing no evil) for comparison with the Bili ape and Oliver:

Show transcript:

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

I don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for a mystery animal this week. So let’s really dig in to a topic I haven’t covered much before, mystery apes!

A lot of people get apes and monkeys confused, but it’s actually easy to tell them apart. For one thing, there aren’t very many apes. Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos are called great apes, and gibbons and siamangs are called the lesser apes, mostly because they’re smaller.

Apes never have tails and are closely related to humans. Humans, in fact, are considered great apes, but it’s rude to say so. We like to think we’re special because we can make podcasts and bulldozers and delicious cakes. Monkeys usually have tails, although not always, and a monkey, unlike an ape, can’t stand fully upright and can’t straighten its elbow out so that its arm is flat.

Now that we have a pretty good idea of what an ape is, let’s look at three mystery apes.

We’ll start with a big mystery from 1920, an ape supposedly killed in South America and subsequently dubbed de Loys’ ape. It’s not just one mystery, it’s several mysteries wrapped up together. And while the ape’s body has been lost, we still have a photograph.

In 1917, geologist François de Loys led an expedition to Venezuela and Colombia to search for oil. It was a disaster of an expedition, since not only did they not find oil, almost everyone in the expedition died. According to de Loys, in 1920 what was left of the group was camped along the Tarra River on the border between Colombia and Venezuela when two large animals appeared. De Loys said he thought they were bears at first, then realized they were apes of some kind. They were large, had reddish hair and no tails, and walked upright. The apes became aggressive toward the humans and, fearing for their lives, the geologists shot at the apes. They killed one and wounded the other, which fled.

The dead ape looked like a spider monkey, which was fairly common in the area, but it was much larger and had no tail. There was no way for the expedition to keep the body, so they propped it up on a crate with a stick under its chin to keep it upright, then took pictures. Only one of those pictures survived, since de Loys said the others were lost when a boat capsized later in the expedition.

But after de Loys got home to Europe, he didn’t tell anyone about the ape. He said he forgot all about it until 1929 when the anthropologist George Montandon noticed the surviving photograph in de Loys’s papers. After that, De Loys wrote an article about the ape which was published in the Illustrated London News.

It was a sensational article, not meant to be scientific. Here’s an excerpt:

“The jungle swished open, and a huge, dark, hairy body appeared out of the undergrowth, standing up clumsily, shaking with rage, grunting and roaring and panting as he came out onto us at the edge of the clearing. The sight was terrifying…

“The beast jumped about in a frenzy, shrieking loudly and beating frantically his hairy chest with his own fists; then he wrenched off at one snap a limb of a tree and, wielding it as a man would a bludgeon, murderously made for me. I had to shoot.”

Montandon was enthusiastic about the ape. He wrote three articles for scientific journals and proposed the name Ameranthropoides loysi for it. But scientists were skeptical. Who was this de Loys guy and did he have any proof that the ape wasn’t just a spider monkey? Did he even have proof that the photograph was taken in South America?

Because that’s one of the mysteries. Quite apart from what kind of primate de Loys’ ape might be, if it really is an ape, is it an ape native to South America? There are no apes native to the Americas at all, only monkeys. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos live in Africa, while orangutans, gibbons, and siamangs live in Asia. If de Loys really did find an ape new to science in South America, it radically changes what we know about ape evolution.

De Loys said he measured the animal as 157 cm high, which works out to about 4.5 feet. This is much larger than a spider monkey, which tops out at about 3.5 feet high, or 110 cm. But we have only de Loys’s word to go by, and as it happens, de Loys was a known practical joker. He also didn’t talk about the ape very often and seems to have only written his article at the urging of Montandon, his friend the anthropologist. We’ll come back to Montandon in a minute.

In 1962, a medical doctor, Enrique Tejera, read an article about de Loys’ ape in a magazine called The Universal. Tejera had worked with de Loys during part of his expedition as a camp doctor, and he had firsthand knowledge about de Loys’ ape. The letter was published, and published again in 1999 in the Venezuelan scientific magazine Interciencia. I’ll read an excerpt of the translated letter:

“This monkey is a myth. I will tell you his story. Mister Montandon said that the monkey had no tail. That is for sure, but he forgot to mention something: it has no tail because it was cut off. I can assure you, gentlemen, because I saw the amputation. In 1917 I was working in a camp for oil exploration in the region of Perijá. The geologist was François de Loys and the engineer Dr. Martín Tovar Lange. De Loys was a prankster and often we laughed at his jokes. One day they gave him a monkey with an infected tail, so it was amputated. After that de Loys called him ‘el hombre mono,’ the monkey man.

“Some time later de Loys and I entered another region of Venezuela, an area called Mene Grande. He always took his monkey along, who died some time later [in 1919]. De Loys decided to take a photo and I believe that Mr. Montandon will not deny it is the same photograph that he presented in 1929.”

The monkey Dr. Tejera said de Loys had been given was a white-fronted spider monkey. And that’s exactly what the photo de Loys took looks like.

I’ll put the photo of de Loys’ ape in the show notes if you want to look at it. There are no people in the photo, nothing except the crate it’s sitting on to use as a size reference. You can’t even see whether the animal has a tail or not.

The white-fronted spider monkey is endangered these days due to habitat loss and hunting, but in the early 20th century it was still common in Colombia, Venezuela, and other parts of northwestern South America. It’s mostly black with a white belly, a long tail, and long arms and legs. That’s why they’re called spider monkeys, incidentally. Long arms and legs like a spider. The white-fronted spider monkey mostly eats fruit, but it also eats leaves, flowers, and other plant parts, and occasionally eats insects. Like many monkeys, its tail is somewhat prehensile and has a bare patch near the end that helps it grip branches like an extra finger. Since the spider monkey doesn’t have actual thumbs on its hands like most primates, it needs that tail to help it get around in trees.

If you look closely at the photograph of de Loys’ ape, you can see that the poor dead monkey does not have thumbs on its hands the way an ape would. It also looks like it has a penis, but that’s actually not a penis. Female spider monkeys have an organ that retains droplets of urine and drips them out as the monkey travels around, leaving a scent trail, and which looks superficially like a penis. It’s actually called a pseudo-penis and it makes it difficult for researchers to determine whether a spider monkey in the wild is male or female at first glance. It’s also an organ only found in spider monkeys and a few other types of monkey, never apes.

So we can be pretty sure de Loys’ ape was actually a spider monkey. But there’s more going on here than a simple hoax. Here’s another excerpt from de Loys’s 1929 article. He writes,

“Until my discovery of the American anthropoid, we could only imagine that man migrated to these shores. But now, in the light of this discovery, it is obvious that the failure of the otherwise well established principle of evolution when it was applied to America was due only to imperfect knowledge. The gap observed in America between monkey and man has been eliminated; the discovery of the Ameranthropoid has filled it.”

What? WHAT? What is that mess of a paragraph trying to say?

Well, basically, it’s promoting Montandon’s theory that humans of different races evolved from different apes. We know these days that that’s nonsense. All humans are genetically the same species, despite superficial physical differences like skin and hair color. Montandon thought that, for instance, people from Africa had evolved from gorillas, Asians evolved from orangutans, while people from Europe—you know, white people—were the only ones actually descended from early Homo sapiens.

In other words, Montandon wasn’t just a terrible scientist, he was a terrible human being, because his theory was pure racism. He was delighted to learn about de Loys’ ape because he decided that was the ape that native Americans must have evolved from. Again, nonsense science, awful person, I’m glad he’s dead. The French Resistance killed him during WWII.

It’s possible that de Loys wasn’t even trying to hoax anyone initially. He just had a pet monkey that died, took a photo as a creepy joke, and stuck the photo in his papers. It was Montandon who came across the photo and urged de Loys to write about it. It’s very likely that Montandon decided to claim the animal was an ape to further his racist theory, and de Loys went along with it, possibly reluctantly given how little he talked about it.

Ugh. Let’s move on to something less infuriating.

Oliver was a strange-looking chimpanzee sometimes referred to as an ape-man back in the 1970s. Oliver had been part of a traveling animal act, but he never fit in with the other chimps in the act and preferred to spend his time with humans, helping with chores. He walked fully upright at all times.

In 1976 an attorney called Michael Miller bought Oliver, mostly because Oliver just looked weird. His head was oddly shaped compared to other chimps and his jaw was smaller and more human-like in appearance. His ears were slightly pointed. The popular press found Oliver interesting and for a short while he was famous, or infamous. Some claims about Oliver were that he had 47 chromosomes instead of a chimp’s normal 48, that he was a mutant, that he was a hybrid between a chimp and some other primate, like a bonobo, or even an ape-man somewhere between a human and a chimp.

Oliver had a rough life, honestly. Michael Miller sold him to a theme park in 1977, and after that Oliver was passed from theme park to theme park. Interest in Oliver died down after a while, and in 1989, he was bought by a laboratory that leased out animals for testing. Oliver was never used as an experimental animal, but he lived for seven years in a cage so small he could barely move, so that his muscles atrophied.

Fortunately, in 1996 Oliver finally got a break and moved to an animal sanctuary in Texas. He had a spacious territory of his own, a chimp mate called Raisin, and lived out the rest of his days in peace. He died in 2012 at the age of about 55.

When the sanctuary acquired Oliver, they had him genetically tested to see if he really was a hybrid animal. It turned out that Oliver’s chromosome count was normal for a chimpanzee, and that he was genetically dead normal in every respect. So why did he look so weird?

Mainly, it was because his teeth had all been pulled at an early age so he couldn’t bite. This barbaric practice resulted in his jaw muscles being underdeveloped and his jaw bones becoming shortened. His head and ear shape were well within normal range for chimps, but only looked strange when combined with his poorly developed jaw. And the reason he walked upright all the time was because he’d been trained to do so.

After Oliver died, the sanctuary cremated his body and spread his ashes on the grounds where he had lived peacefully for the first time in his life.

Our last mystery ape this week is called the Bili ape. In 1898, a Belgian army officer donated some skulls to a museum in Belgium, skulls which he said were from gorillas killed in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Specifically, he said the gorillas lived in a forest near the village of Bili in an area referred to as Bondo. So after a museum curator examined the skulls and realized they weren’t the same as other gorilla skulls and not from an area where gorillas were known to live, the mystery ape was dubbed the Bili ape or the Bondo ape. The curator thought the Bili ape was a subspecies of gorilla.

In 1970 a mammalogist examined the skulls and determined that they were just regular old western lowland gorilla skulls. Nothing exciting. But a conservationist and photographer named Karl Ammann wasn’t convinced. He decided to go out and see if he could find the Bili ape for himself, take pictures, and see what the ape really was. In 1996, he took his cameras and went looking for gorillas.

He didn’t find any, but he did find a skull. It looked sort of like a gorilla skull, which has what’s called a sagittal crest that runs along the top of the skull and which allows the attachment of a gorilla’s powerful jaw muscles. But the rest of the skull looked more like a chimpanzee’s. Ammann also bought a photograph taken from a poacher’s trail cam that showed what looked like huge chimps. He also found great big poops and great big footprints, larger even than a gorilla’s footprint.

He had enough evidence to interest researchers, so in 2001 he and a team of scientists returned to find the Bili ape. They had no luck, partly because there was a civil war going on in the area at the time and getting around without getting killed was difficult. But they did find evidence that the apes were there, and the evidence was confusing. Gorillas build nests on the ground to sleep in, and the team did find big nests on the ground. But gorillas don’t like swampy ground and they move around a lot and build a new nest every night. These nests were often in swampy areas and showed evidence that they were reused. Chimps prefer to sleep in trees. But while the feces the researchers collected from around the nests were big enough to be gorilla poops, they indicated the apes’ diet was high in fruit, which is typical of chimps.

The team returned to the area in 2003 after the civil war ended, and this time they found the Bili ape.

The first scientist to see a Bili ape was a primate behavior specialist named Shelly Williams. The whole group heard the apes in the trees around them, very close to them, and then four apes rushed at the group. Williams knew they weren’t trying to intimidate the humans, they were going to kill them—I mean, that’s what it means to be a primate behavior specialist. It apparently means you know when you’re about to die at the hands of an enraged mystery ape. But the apes caught sight of her, stopped short, and returned into the brush.

If that happened to me, for one thing I would wet myself, and for another I would wonder for the rest of my life if I was an extra pretty human, or if I was extra pretty for a chimp or gorilla. But as it happens, Williams knew that the apes weren’t after the humans specifically but had responded to a call made by the team’s tracker, who had imitated the noise a wounded antelope makes. Imagine the scene from the apes’ point of view. You’re out hunting with your buddies, you hear some loud noises of animals walking through the forest. Then you hear an antelope. You and your buddies rush out, already thinking about how good that antelope is going to taste—and instead of antelopes, you see a bunch of humans. Of course you’re going to beat feet, because those humans might be hunting you.

Williams was the only scientist in the group to get a look at the apes that day, and they confused her. They mostly looked like chimps, but they were huge. A male common chimpanzee is about five feet tall when standing, or 1.5 meters, with females usually about a foot shorter, or 30 cm shorter. The Bili ape was way bigger, closer to six feet tall, or 1.8 meters. This is the height of a gorilla. Williams wasn’t sure if she’d seen giant chimps or weird gorillas or something else entirely.

After that first sighting, the team was able to get video and photos of the Bili apes. They resemble large chimps with gorilla-like heads, and Williams thinks the females and young mostly sleep in trees, while adult males sleep on the ground. They seem to live and travel in small groups, compared to chimps that usually live in troupes of up to 50 members.

The locals in the area say there are two different kinds of Bili ape. The smaller ones prefer to live in trees and are known as tree-beaters. The larger ones live on the ground and are called lion-killers. The lion-killers are supposed to be immune to the poison-dart frog secretions that locals use to poison their arrow tips.

DNA samples from dung and hair finally cleared up the mystery. Results indicate that the apes are chimpanzees, specifically a known subspecies of the common chimpanzee. Researchers think the Bili ape may look and act different since it’s so isolated from other chimps and may be somewhat inbred. Bili apes encountered far from villages show very little fear or aggression toward humans, only curiosity. Unfortunately, the chimps are under increased threat from poaching, since gold mining began in the area in 2007 and the population of humans has increased. Hopefully protections can be put into place soon so these rare chimpanzees can remain safely in their homes and can continue to be studied by researchers.

One exciting thing to remember is that the area where the Bili ape lives is still quite remote. There could very well be other animals unknown to science hidden in the forests. That’s yet another reason to protect the forest and everything that lives in it. You never know what might be out there ready 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. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!