Category Archives: cryptozoology

Episode 083: Lions, tigers, and other big cats…of mystery!

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I’ve been meaning to do a big cat episode for a while, thanks to listener Damian who suggested lions and tigers! But when I started my research, I immediately got distracted by all the reports of mysterious big cats. So here’s another mysteries episode!

Here are the links to some Patreon episodes that I’ve unlocked for anyone to listen to. Just click on the link and a page will open, and you can listen on the page. No need to log in.

Marsupial lions

Blue tigers and black lions

The Queensland tiger, which is not actually about any kind of actual tiger

A lion and cub. This picture made me die:

The Barbary lion, possibly extinct, possibly not:

Watch out! Tigers!

A king leopard with stripe-like markings instead of spots:

Further reading:

Hybrid and Mutant big cats

Peruvian mystery jaguar skulls studied

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some mystery big cats. We’ve touched on big cats before in various episodes, including the British Big Cats phenomenon in episode 52. We’re definitely going to see some more out of place animals this week, along with lots of information about big cats of various kinds. Thanks to Damian who requested an episode about lions and tigers ages ago.

I’ve also unlocked three Patreon episodes so that anyone can listen to them. They won’t show up in your feed, but there are links in the show notes and you can click through and listen on your browser without needing a patreon login. The first is about marsupial lions and the second is about blue tigers and other big cats with anomalous coat colors. The sound quality on the blue tigers episode is not that great, but it’s a long episode with lots of information about blue tigers, white tigers, black tigers, white lions, king cheetahs, and lots more. The third is about the Queensland tiger, an Australian animal that’s not a feline of any kind, but why not?

The term big cat refers to tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars, but it can also include cheetahs and cougars depending on who you ask. Big cats have round pupils instead of slit pupils like domestic cats and other smaller cats.

Lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can all roar. Snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can’t. But snow leopards, cheetahs, and cougars can purr, while lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can’t. The ability to roar is due to special adaptations in the larynx, but these adaptations also mean big cats can’t purr. So basically a cat can either roar or purr but not both.

The word panther, incidentally, refers to any big cat and not to a specific type of animal. So a black panther, in addition to being an awesome movie, is any kind of big cat exhibiting melanism, which causes the animal’s fur to be black all over. Leopards and jaguars are most commonly referred to as black panthers. Lions, tigers, and cheetahs do not exhibit true melanism as far as researchers have found.

Let’s start with lions. Lions live only in Africa these days, but were once common throughout parts of southern Asia too and possibly even parts of southern Europe. The lion is most closely related to the leopard and jaguar, less closely related to the tiger and snow leopard, but it’s so closely related to all those big cats that it can interbreed with them in rare cases.

There are two species of lion, the African and the Asian. Until recently there were also several subspecies of African lions, including the American lion, which once lived throughout North and South America. It only went extinct around 11,000 years ago. The American lion is the largest subspecies of lion ever known, about a quarter larger than modern African lions. It probably stood almost four feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.2 meters. Cave paintings and pieces of skin preserved in caves indicate that its coat was reddish instead of golden. It lived in open grasslands like modern lions and even in cold areas. There are reports of a reddish, short-maned cat supposedly called a “jungle lion” sighted in South America, but I can’t find much information about it and it’s much more likely to be a jaguar or cougar than a relic population of American lions. But wouldn’t that be awesome if it was.

The Barbary lion was a subspecies of African lion that lived in northern Africa until it was hunted to extinction. The Barbary lion was the one that battled gladiators in ancient Rome and was hunted by pharaohs in ancient Egypt, a big lion with a dark mane. The last one was supposedly killed in 1922, but recent research indicates that they survived much longer—maybe as late as 1958 or later. The last recorded sighting was in 1956, but the forest where it was seen was destroyed two years later.

One zoo in Morocco claims that their lions are purebred Barbary lions, descended from royal lions kept in captivity for centuries. But since we don’t have a full genetic profile of the Barbary lion to start with, it’s hard to determine whether the royal lions are Barbary lions. So far a 2005 DNA test on five of the royal lions indicates they probably aren’t, but DNA testing has come a long way since then and new tests on the royal lions and on preserved Barbary lion skins will hopefully be done soon.

The Sumatran golden lion, also called the cigau [pronounced chee-gow] is a mystery lion that is supposed to be golden in color with no markings, a relatively short tail, and with a mane or ruff of fur that’s sometimes described as white. It’s only about the size of a small donkey or large goat, but stocky like a lion. The most recent sightings are from the 1960s, where one supposedly attacked and killed a man. Some researchers think it may be a subspecies of the nearly extinct Asiatic lion, but others say it’s more likely to be an animal of folklore. Then again, there are tigers on Sumatra and it’s always possible it’s an anomalous coated tiger with no stripes, or stripes that are almost the same color as its coat. Tigers do have a white ruff around the face.

Lions are well known to live on the savanna despite the term king of the jungle, but they do occasionally live in open forests and sometimes in actual jungles. In 2012 a lioness was spotted in a protected rainforest in Ethiopia, and locals say the lions pass through the reserve every year during the dry season. That rainforest is also one of the few places left in the world where wild coffee plants grow. So, you know, extra reason to keep it as safe as possible.

Let’s talk about tigers next. Tigers are awesome animals, with the Bengal tiger being the biggest big cat alive today—on average even bigger than the lion. Tigers are good swimmers and most really like the water, unlike most cats. They live throughout Asia but once were much more common and widespread. I’ve found a lot of mystery tiger reports, but if you’re interested in tigers of unusual colors, I really do recommend you go listen to the unlocked Patreon episode about blue tigers.

The so-called beast of Neamt is a modern mystery from Romania. In spring of 2016, farmers started finding livestock killed during the night, but not eaten. The predator was clearly extremely strong, much stronger and larger than a dog. Its method of killing didn’t suggest a bear, which locals were familiar with anyway.

Some of the sightings seem normal, of a catlike animal the size of a calf. Other sightings were more bizarre. Some people reporting seeing a huge animal running on two legs, one guy said he’d wounded it with an axe but it didn’t bleed, and of course there were the predictable reports that animals it killed were drained of blood.

But in this case, DNA testing solved the mystery of what was killing the animals. The beast was injured by a barbed-wire fence, and a test of its blood indicated it was a Siberian tiger. The Siberian tiger is also called the Amur tiger, which we talked about in episode 44, Extinct and Back from the Brink. But there are probably no more than 500 Siberian tigers alive in the wild, and none of them live within 3,000 miles of Romania, or 5,000 km. So while we know what the beast of Neamt is, we don’t know how it got there. Out of place tigers, hurrah!

Another mystery tiger is from Chad in Africa. This one is sometimes called the mountain tiger, and it’s supposed to be the size of a lion but with reddish fur, white stripes, no tail, and huge fangs.

This doesn’t sound like anything alive today—but it does sound like an extinct cat called Machairodus. It was the size of a lion, or over 3 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1 meter, and around 6 ½ feet long, or 2 meters. It was a type of saber-toothed cat like Smilodon, although it wasn’t closely related to Smilodon and its fangs weren’t as big. It probably had a short tail. But Machairodus and its relatives died out probably a million years ago, although it might have persisted to only 130,000 years ago. That’s still a lot of years, so it’s not too likely that a population of its descendants still lives in Chad. For one thing, northern Chad is part of the Sahara, while southern Chad is a savanna. It’s not dense jungle or remote mountains.

But there are similar reports of the mountain tiger in other parts of Africa, where there are steep mountain ranges that aren’t well explored. And, oddly enough, similar reports also come from South America and even from Mexico. Machairodus did live in Africa, Eurasia, and North America, although its fossils haven’t been found in South America. Maybe the reports aren’t of a living animal but were inspired by fossil remains. Hunters who stumbled across fossil machairodus bones would recognize them as similar to tiger or lion skeletons, but wouldn’t know that the living animal was long gone.

Another South American big cat report comes from Ecuador. It’s called the rainbow tiger or rainbow jaguar, and it sounds really pretty. In the Macas region in southeastern Ecuador, in the Amazon jungle, locals have a story about a big cat properly called Tshenkutshen. The cat is the size of a jaguar, or up to six feet long not counting the tail, or 1.85 meters, but instead of having a pattern of dark rosettes on a tawny background coat, the rainbow tiger is black with stripes on its chest. The stripes are different colors: white, red, yellow, and black, which gives it the rainbow name. One report I saw says it’s white with black spots in addition to the stripes on its chest. It lives in the trees in remote areas, is rare, and at least one report says it has a hump on its shoulders and monkey-like forepaws but with claws. One was supposedly shot and killed in 1959, but there are no pictures of the carcass and no one knows where it went, if it even existed in the first place.

Naturally, the rainbow tiger isn’t actually a tiger since tigers don’t live in South America. If it is a real animal and not a folktale, it’s probably a type of jaguar. But the whole monkey hands thing implies it’s probably more of a mythological creature than a flesh and blood one, because no feline of any kind has forepaws that resemble hands.

There’s an interesting addition to the rainbow tiger mystery. Dutch primatologist Dr. Marc van Roosmalen spotted a strange jaguar during an expedition through Brazil in the late 1990s. It was mostly black, but had a white pattern around its throat.

There are plenty of other South American big cat mysteries, including the yemish that we covered in episode 59 along with the onza, a mystery cat from Mexico and central America. But one especially interesting report is from Peru. Peter Hocking is a Peruvian ornithologist, or someone who studies birds, but he’s also interested in other animals. In 1996 he got his hands on two skulls that were similar to jaguar skulls but reportedly not from jaguars, but from strange striped big cats instead.

In 2010, zoologist Darren Naish asked for and finally received high-quality plaster replicas of the skulls so he could study them. His conclusion is that both skulls are actually from jaguars, but he points out that most big cat species do occasionally produce anomalously striped individuals. No one knows where the pelts of these two jaguars are, unfortunately. Hopefully they’ll turn up eventually, or another striped jaguar will be found and can be studied so we can learn if it’s just an individual with an anomalous coat pattern, or an actual subspecies of jaguar with stripes instead of spots.

I couldn’t find any mystery cheetah reports beyond one called the Tennessee red cheetah. That excited me because I live in Tennessee and I’d never heard of it before. The Tennessee red cheetah is supposed to resemble the cheetah, golden brown with black spots, but with a reddish dorsal stripe and tail. Some reports say it’s reddish-brown all over with black spots.

That’s it. That’s all the information I can find. I was so disappointed, but basically it sounds like a tall tale or maybe a sighting of a jaguar. That’s the problem with mystery big cat reports. There are so many reports of so many animals that don’t correspond to any known species or subspecies of big cat, with few concrete details. In the case of the Tennessee red cheetah, the only details I could find were vague stories about one being shot and skinned, but the skin was missing. No date, no place, no names, nothing.

You can’t treat a report like that with anything but skepticism, so let’s move on to another mystery big cat, the Zanzibar leopard. When I was making notes for this episode, I wrote “probably extinct, may be too depressing to use.” But there’s always a chance it’s not extinct.

The Zanzibar leopard lives on Zanzibar Island off of Tanzania. It’s not a big island, only around 50 miles long, or 85 km, and 20 miles wide, or 30 km. The Zanzibar leopard was probably separated from the mainland population of leopards when sea levels rose after the last ice age. It’s smaller than a mainland leopard, with smaller spots, but not much is known about it since it hasn’t been studied in the wild and it may be extinct now. Unfortunately, many people on the island believed that the leopards were witches’ familiars, and that they should be killed. In 1964 the islanders overthrew the government, but also unfortunately, the newly installed government persecuted people it decided were witches. This included a government-run campaign to kill all leopards on the island. By the mid-1990s, conservationists suspected the Zanzibar leopard was extinct.

But there is hope. Earlier this year an Animal Planet show caught footage on a camera trap of what appears to be a Zanzibar leopard. Hopefully there are still some of the leopards remaining, and if so, hopefully they can also be protected.

Speaking of Tanzania, let’s finish with a big cat that might very well be a real animal—or something even more mysterious. The nunda is supposed to be a huge gray cat with tabby stripes, reported in Tanzania. Its paw prints are supposed to resemble a leopard’s, but are as big as a lion’s.

In a 1927 article, a British administrator named William Hichens reported about his investigation into nunda attacks around the village of Lindi in Tanzania. The attacks occurred in 1922, and started with a night watchman who was found dead one morning. Clutched in the dead man’s hand was a tuft of gray fur that Hichens thought might have been torn from a lion’s mane. But lions were rare in that part of Tanzania, and two locals reported seeing a huge brindled cat attack the man during the night. A few nights after that, another watchman was also killed in the same way, including the tuft of hair clutched in one hand, and that was followed by more attacks in other villages over the next several weeks. The attacks stopped, but resumed in the 1930s. Some huge footprints and more of the gray fur were found by a British hunter who tried to track the animal.

So what might the nunda be? The description doesn’t sound like any known big cat. Cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans suggested it might be a huge African golden cat with anomalous markings. The African golden cat is related to the caracal and the serval, both fairly small, long-legged cats. It has variable markings and coloring, from reddish to grey, from spotted to nearly plain. But it’s only about twice the size of a domestic cat. Its paws are large for its size, but it’s not anywhere near the size of a leopard, much less a lion.

Of course, it might be a larger subspecies of golden cat, or a totally different species. But there is another possibility, one that’s far creepier and darker than an unknown big cat.

According to a book called Wild Cats of the World by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, published in 2012, in the early 20th century a group of witch doctors in that part of Tanzania ran an extortion racket. They demanded money from people and threatened to turn into lions and kill them if they didn’t pay up. And they did kill people—over 100 of them, according to the book. The murders were committed by young men who dressed like lions, including wearing lion paws on their feet so they left lion paw prints.

That would explain the rash of murders in a localized area, and the fact that so many of the victims were found clutching gray fur. The fur was never tested and could have come from any animal and been planted on the victims.

Zoologist Karl Shuker suggests that if the deaths weren’t due to these lion-men, the mystery big cat might be a type of leopard with stripes instead of spots. Leopards with stripes due to genetic coat anomalies are extremely rare, but they aren’t unheard-of. They’re sometimes referred to as king leopards. I have a picture of one in the show notes. While leopards can cross-breed with tigers, tigers don’t live in Africa, so a striped leopard-tiger hybrid wouldn’t be hanging around in Tanzania, certainly not in the 1920s.

Whatever the cause, no one has reported a nunda sighting in about 80 years.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 080: Mystery Dogs

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This week we’re looking at some strange and mysterious canids from around the world!

The African wild dog:

A dhole:

An old photo of the ringdocus and a newer photo of the ringdocus:

A coyote:

Sri Lankan golden jackal:

The maned wolf MONEY SHOT:

A bush dog:

A stuffed Honshu wolf, dramatically lit:

Show transcript:

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

This week let’s look at a bunch of mystery doggos from around the world! I really like dogs, but for some reason dogs and their relations don’t come up much on the podcast. When I started looking into mystery canids, though, I found so much information that there’s no way I can stuff even half of it into one episode. So we’ll definitely be revisiting mystery dogs in the future.

The family Canidae includes dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes. Yes, foxes are canids, but not closely related to more dog-like canids. We’re going to skip the foxes this week, since foxes deserve an episode all their own eventually.

Dogs were domesticated at least 9,500 years ago, possibly as long as 14,700 years ago, maybe even as long as 36,000 years ago. Dogs and humans go way back. The closest living relative of the dog is the gray wolf, which is still alive today, but the wild ancestor of the domestic dog was a different species of wolf that has gone extinct.

There are canids called wild dogs, but they’re not the same species as domestic dogs. The African wild dog, for instance, is not very closely related to dogs and wolves—in fact, it’s the only species in its own genus. It’s a tall, lean canid with large ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. As the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, warthogs, ostriches, hares, and rodents.

The nomadic Tuareg people who live in northern parts of Africa around the Sahara have stories of a supernatural creature called the Adjule, among other names. The Adjule’s description makes it sound a lot like the African wild dog, including its lack of a dew claw. Since the African wild dog is rare in that part of Africa, it’s possible that rare sightings of what is a distinctively odd-looking animal may have given rise to the stories.

Another so-called wild dog is the dhole, also called the Indian wild dog, which is closely related to the African wild dog. It used to be common throughout Eurasia and North America, but these days it’s restricted to parts of Asia and is endangered. It looks something like a fox and something like a wolf, but is neither. Like many other canids in this episode, the dhole has its own genus. Because it tends to be easily tamed and is sometimes kept as a pet, researchers once believed domestic dogs might have descended from the dhole or an ancestral species of dhole, but genetic evidence shows that the dhole isn’t closely related to domestic dogs or to wolves.

There are three subspecies of dhole, two of them reddish-brown in color and one with fur that’s pale brown in winter. But there is a mystery animal called the gray dhole that may turn out to be a fourth subspecies or something else.

The gray dhole supposedly lives in the forests and mountains of Myanmar. It’s dark gray with a black muzzle and small, round ears, and is supposed to be smaller than the other dhole species. In 1913 a Major E.G. Phythian-Adams wrote about the grey dhole after he saw one that year, and in 1933 E.H. Peacock mentioned it in his book A Game Book for Bhurma and Adjoining Territories. In 1936 an explorer named Tsaing reported seeing one in Burma. But after these reports, the Bombay Natural History Society tried to find physical evidence of the animal in the 1950s, but couldn’t track down anything. They only found one person who even reported seeing the grey dhole. So even if it is a separate species or subspecies and not just a rare color morph of a known species of dhole, it’s probably extinct now.

Kipling wrote about the dhole in one of his Jungle Book stories, calling it the red whistling dog of the Deccan, and reporting that packs of the animals were so ferocious that even tigers would avoid them. This is true, even the whistling part. Instead of barking or howling, dhole calls are whistles. This is what a dhole sounds like:

[dhole sound]

In 1886 a Montana settler named Israel Hutchins shot a wolflike animal that had reportedly been killing livestock. No one knew what it was, so Hutchins traded it to a taxidermist for a cow. He needed the cow because when he first tried to shoot the canid, he accidentally shot one of his own cows instead. The taxidermist, Joseph Sherwood, also owned a general store in Idaho. He displayed the stuffed canid in the store, where it stayed for almost a hundred years until it disappeared. In 2007 Hutchins’s grandson, Jack Kirby, traced it to the Idaho Museum of Natural History.

The stuffed mystery canid is usually called the ringdocus, a name Sherwood made up. It has a sloping back and some other un-wolf-like features that might be due to bad taxidermy or might be due to physical anomalies in an ordinary wolf—or might be due to the ringdocus being an animal new to science. Suggestions as to what it might be include a thylacine, a hyena, a wolf-coyote hybrid, a wolf-dog hybrid, or a dire wolf. It’s not a thylacine, just going to say that straight out. Since we have the taxidermied specimen, it seems logical that a DNA test would clear up the mystery or bring us a brand new scientific mystery, if it turns out to be an unknown animal. But Kirby doesn’t want a DNA test done. That tells me it’s probably just a wolf, and he knows it’s a wolf. Prove me wrong, Kirby. I bet you ten whole dollars it’s just a wolf.

Around the same time that Hutchens was shooting at the ringdocus and killing his cow, and probably saying some very bad words when it happened, a man called Payze bought what he thought was a fox cub from some men traveling to London. It was 1883 and the men had caught the cub, along with two others, in Epping Forest. Payze named the cub Charlie, but as Charlie grew up, he started looking less and less like a fox. Payze took him to London Zoo and showed him to the superintendent, who identified him as a coyote.

But how had a coyote gotten to England? Coyotes are native to North America. The coyote is smaller than a wolf, usually a bit bigger than a fox but with longer legs, and can look fox-like. It’s gray and brown, or sometimes reddish, with large ears and a brushy tail.

It turns out that four coyotes had been brought to England and released near Epping Forest not long before, presumably for hunting. Clearly they’d had at least one litter of pups, but is it possible they survived and had more offspring? Locals do occasionally report seeing wolves or gray foxes in the area. Since coyotes readily breed with dogs and produce fertile offspring, it’s possible that some local dogs have coyote in their ancestry.

The Sri Lankan golden jackal lives in Sri Lanka and parts of India. It’s a small canid, with grizzled black and white fur above and tan or golden on the belly and legs. It’s a subspecies of the golden jackal, and it’s sometimes called the horned jackal. Local people in Sri Lanka believe that the leader of the pack has a small horn on the back of its skull, although other people report the horn is on its forehead. The horn is supposed to have supernatural powers and is considered a valuable talisman or charm.

That sounds nutty, but we actually have golden jackal skulls with small pointy horns less than an inch long, or a few centimeters. So the horns are real, but they’re not actual horns. They’re most likely bony growths resulting from an injury to the skull. No one’s sure why golden jackals grow them but not other canids.

The Falkland Islands is an archipelago about 300 miles, or 480 km, off the coast of Patagonia at the southern end of South America. When European explorers first discovered the islands in the late 17th century, no people lived there, just lots of birds and a fox-like wolf. Charles Darwin saw it in 1834 and described it as a wolf-like fox, but modern DNA research shows that it’s not only not a fox, its closest living relative is the maned wolf, which still lives in parts of South America.

The Falkland Islands wolf was tawny in color with a white tip to its tail. It had relatively short legs but was a fairly large animal, standing about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 60 cm. Its fur was thick and it barked like a dog. It may have lived in burrows. Because no mammals except the wolf lived on the Falkland Islands until settlers arrived, the wolf probably mostly ate seabirds, insects, and anything it could scavenge from the seashore.

For a long time it was a mystery how the Falkland Islands wolf got to the islands. There were no other wild canids in Patagonia, and the islands were never connected to the mainland. The islands aren’t even visible from the mainland. But the Falkland Islands wolf used to have a close relative that lived in Patagonia and other parts of South America. Dusicyon avus was about the size of German shepherd, and may have been at least partially domesticated. The grave of a young D. avus was found among human graves dating to over 2,000 years ago in Argentina. Estimates of when D. avus went extinct vary from 1,000 BCE to only around 300 years ago. Either way, researchers think that about 16,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the sea level was lower and only a shallow strait separated the mainland from the Falkland Islands. At times the strait may have frozen over, allowing animals to travel to the islands. When the glaciers melted and the sea level rose, some of the wolves were trapped on the islands. They evolved over the centuries to better fit their island habitat.

The Falkland Islands wolf wasn’t afraid of humans since it had no predators. That meant that sailors and other people who visited the islands could kill the wolves easily. It was hunted for its fur, or sometimes just poisoned by settlers who believed it killed sheep. It went extinct in 1876.

So what about the maned wolf, the Falkland Islands wolf’s living relation? It is a very weird animal, and in fact you’ll often see it listed in articles about the weirdest animals ever.

The maned wolf resembles a fox in many ways. It has reddish fur with black legs and muzzle and a black mane along its spine, a white tip to its tail, and a white patch on its throat. Its ears are big and its muzzle relatively short. Oh, and its legs are long. Really, really long. Super long. At first glance, it almost looks like a deer.

The maned wolf’s body is about the size of a good-sized dog’s, but its legs are far longer than any dog’s legs. Researchers think the maned wolf evolved longer legs to better see over the tall grasses where it lives. It’s a solitary animal and hunts small animals and birds, but about half its diet is plants. It especially likes a tomato-like fruit called the wolf apple. It marks its territory with a stinky musk that smells enough like cannabis that at least one zoo security team has mistaken it for people smoking marijuana.

Not only is the maned wolf not a wolf, it’s not a fox either. It’s not really closely related to any other living canids. It is, in fact, its own thing, the only living canid in its genus. While it’s related to the Falkland Islands wolf, its closest living relative is the bush dog, also the only species in its genus, also an odd canid from South America. But while the maned wolf is very tall, the bush dog is very short, only about a foot tall at the shoulder, or 30 cm.

The bush dog has plush brown fur that’s lighter on the back and darker on the belly, legs, and rump. Its ears are small, its snout short, and its tail is relatively short. It actually looks more like an otter or big weasel than a dog. It sometimes hunts in packs, sometimes alone. When it hunts alone it mostly eats small rodents, lizards and snakes, and birds, but packs can kill larger animals like peccaries, a type of wild pig. It lives in extended family groups and hunts during the day.

The bush dog is rare and not much is known about it. Its toes are webbed and it spends a lot of time in the water within its forest habitat. It’s so rare that for a long time it was only known from fossils found in some caves in Brazil, and was thought extinct.

Conversely, the Japanese wolf, or Honshu wolf, is a canid that is supposed to have gone extinct in January of 1905 when the last known wolf was killed. But people keep seeing and hearing it in the mountains of Japan.

The Honshu wolf was also small, not much more than a foot tall at the shoulder, or 30-odd cm, but it was a subspecies of gray wolf. Its legs were short and its short coat was greyish-brown. It was once considered a friend to farmers, since it ate rats and other pests. Wolves were also regarded as protective of travelers in Japanese folklore. But in 1732 rabies was introduced to Japan. That disease combined with loss of habitat made the Honshu wolf more of a threat to humans and their livestock, and led to its persecution.

But sightings of the wolf have continued ever since that last one was killed in 1905. Photographs of a canid killed in 1910 were studied by a team of researchers in 2000, who determined that the animal in the photos was probably a Honshu wolf. People have found tracks, heard howling, seen wolf-like animals, even taken photos of what look like wolves. The problem is that the Japanese wolf looked similar in many ways to some Japanese dog breeds like the Shiba inu and the Akita, which are probably partly wolf anyway since wolves and dogs interbreed easily and produce fertile offspring. People might be seeing dogs roaming the countryside. We can’t even DNA test hairs and old pelts to see if they’re from wolves, because we don’t have a genetic profile of the Honshu wolf. There are only a few taxidermied specimens of the wolf, and none of them have yielded intact DNA.

Another mystery not definitely solved by DNA testing, although at least they’ve tried, is the Andean wolf, sometimes called Hagenbeck’s wolf. It’s another South American mystery canid. In 1927, a German animal collector called Lorenz Hagenbeck bought a wolf pelt in Buenos Aires. The seller said the pelt, and three others, came from a wolf-like wild dog in the Andes Mountains.

The pelt is about six feet long, or 1.8 meters, including the tail, with thick, long fur, especially a thick ruff on the neck. It’s black on the back and dark brown elsewhere.

Hagenbeck didn’t recognize the pelt, so when he got home he sent it for examination. In the 1930s and 1940s, various studies suggested it belonged to a new species of canid, possibly one related to the maned wolf. One mammologist, Ingo Krumbiegel, also thought he might have seen a skull of the same canid in 1935, which he said had resembled a maned wolf skull but was much larger, and was supposed to have come from the Andes. Krumbiegel was convinced enough that in 1949 he described the Andean wolf formally as a new species. But no more specimens have come to light.

In 1954 another study determined Hagenbeck’s pelt was just a dog pelt, possibly of a German Shepherd crossbreed. A 1957 study came to the same conclusion. In 2000, a DNA analysis came back inconclusive due to the pelt having been chemically treated during preparation, and contamination with dog, wolf, human, and pig DNA. Currently the pelt is on display at the Zoological State Museum in Munich.

Finally, the dire wolf is a famous canid from books, games, and movies, but it was also a real animal. It lived throughout North and South America and was bigger than modern gray wolves, standing over three feet tall at the shoulder, or about 97 cm. It had massive teeth and powerful jaws that would have helped it kill giant ground sloths, mastodons, bison, horses, and other ice age megafauna. It wasn’t as fast a runner as modern wolves, though, and some researchers think the gray wolf may have outcompeted the dire wolf.

The dire wolf probably died out about 9,500 years ago, but there’s a group called the Dire Wolf Project that’s attempting to breed a dog that looks like a dire wolf. The group isn’t introducing any modern wolf genes into the breed, though, since they want a dog that looks like a dire wolf but doesn’t act like one. Which is pretty smart considering that dire wolves probably snacked on our own ancestors from time to time.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 078: The Great Auk and Penguins

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Let’s learn about the great auk this week, along with some lookalike birds, penguins!

A great auk, as painted by Audubon:

A razorbill, the auk’s closest living relative:

A fairy penguin, so tiny:

An emperor penguin, so big:

Tony Signorini wearing his Hoax Shoes:

Show transcript:

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

This week’s topic is one I’ve had on my list to cover for some time, and a couple of people whose names I forgot to write down also suggested. It’s the great auk, and while we’re at it we’re going to learn about penguins too.

Picture this bird in your mind. It’s big, close to three feet tall, or 85 cm, black with a white belly and white spots over the eyes during breeding season. It has a big dark bill and eats fish and crustaceans. Its feet are webbed and it’s flightless, because instead of flying, it swims, fast and agile in the water but clumsy on land. It’s social, nesting in big colonies and laying one egg, which both parents incubate. Both parents also help feed the chick when it hatches. Pairs mate for life. And it lives in cold waters of the North Atlantic from eastern Canada to Greenland and Iceland over to the western coast of Europe.

Wait a minute, you say, knowledgeably, because you know a thing or two about penguins. Penguins live in the southern hemisphere. What is going on??

The great auk is going on, my friend. And while the similarities between the great auk and the various species of penguin are striking, they’re not closely related at all. The great auk’s scientific name is Pinguinus impennis, and it was sometimes called a penguin, but the penguin is named after the auk because of the similarities between the two. The most obvious difference between the great auk and the penguin is the bill. Penguins have relatively small, sharp bills, but great auk bills were much larger and heavier, grooved and with a hook at the end.

So is the great auk still around? I sure made it sound like it was still around, didn’t I? Unfortunately, no. The last known great auks were killed on June 3, 1844, with a few sightings in the years after. The last probable sighting of a great auk was in 1852. But it had been a really common bird for a long time. What was it like, and what happened to it?

The great auk lived almost its whole life in the water. It only came out to breed and lay eggs, one egg per couple. Its babies grew fast and took to the sea when only a few weeks old, but the parents continued to feed their baby and care for it in the water. Sometimes a young auk would ride on its parent’s back as it swam.

It was incredibly at home in the water. It could hold its breath for something like 15 minutes, could dive deeply and swim so quickly that it could shoot up out of the water to land on ledges well above the ocean’s surface. Because of its swimming ability and its size, it wasn’t scared of very many animals. Polar bears, orcas, and a few other large predators sometimes ate it, but its main predator was these aggressive apes called humans. Maybe you’ve heard of them.

People killed the great auk for food, for feathers, and to use its skin and bones as decorative items. Its remains have been found at Neandertal campsites too. And because it was a large, plentiful bird, people hunted it and hunted it and hunted it. The great auk was already nearly extinct around Europe by the mid 16th century, since it was killed for its down, which was used to stuff pillows. Auk eggs were also collected for food. And as the bird became rarer, museums decided they had better get specimens while they could. The last great auks were killed so they could be stuffed and mounted.

So if there’s a great auk, is there a lesser auk? There is, and it’s still around! The little auk is only about 8 inches long, or 21 cm, but unlike the great auk it can fly. It eats small fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates. But the razorbill is a much closer relative.

The razorbill has a lot in common with the great auk but it’s much smaller, only up to 17 inches high, or 43 cm. It also flies. It was once hunted for its meat and feathers, but after it was protected in 1917 its numbers rebounded. Its primary problem these days is pollution of its breeding sites.

There was once a group of even bigger auks than the great auk. The Mancallinae were flightless and lived on the western North American coast. The largest species was Miomancalla howardae, which went extinct almost 5 million years ago. It stood more than three feet tall, or 1 meter, but was heavier and bulkier than the great auk.

As for penguins, fortunately, they’re still around although they’re all threatened due to pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. They have no natural fear of humans, probably because they have no land predators in Antarctica. Polar bears and walruses live near the Arctic, which is in the northern hemisphere, and sled dogs aren’t allowed in Antarctica. I did not know that until just now. I mean, I knew the polar bears and walruses part, not the dog part.

The smallest penguin is called the fairy penguin, and it’s only 16 inches tall at most, or 40 cm. It lives off the coast of Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. Its head is blue, which is why it’s also called the little blue penguin. Like other penguin species, it eats fish, cephalopods like squid, and crustaceans such as krill. It especially likes jellyfish.

The largest penguin is, of course, the emperor penguin, famous from March of the Penguins. If you haven’t seen that documentary, you’ll learn lots of things about emperor penguins and will also cry. The march in the  title is the migration the penguins take to breeding colonies, where they may walk over the ice up to 75 miles, or 120 km. Penguins are not very good at walking, either. Once they’ve reached the breeding colony, each female lays one small egg, which has a thick shell. The male has a brood pouch to keep the egg warm, basically a fold in his skin above his feet. The egg sits on his feet with the rest of it in the brood pouch. After that, the female leaves to go hunting, because making her egg takes a lot out of her and she needs to replace her body reserves. The male incubates the egg by himself.

It gets really cold in the Antarctic during winter. Seriously, really cold, as cold as -40 degrees. Negative 40 is the same temperature in Celcius and Fahrenheit, which is kind of neat. Emperor penguins choose breeding colonies that are protected from the wind as much as possible, but they still have to deal with wind gusts of 90 mph, or 145 km per hour. To withstand the cold, penguins have dense feathers and a thick layer of blubber. Males huddle together for warmth, with every penguin getting a turn to be on the inside of the crowd where it’s warmer, and spending their fair share of time on the edges of the crowd where it’s colder. During the two months after eggs are laid, males don’t eat anything. When his egg hatches, the male feeds the baby with crop milk, which you may remember from episode 19, about the dodo. Crop milk isn’t milk at all, but a nutritious substance formed from a parent bird’s esophagus. Only male emperor penguins produce crop milk.

A short time after the eggs hatch, female emperor penguins return from hunting. The female takes over care of the chick, feeding it with regurgitated food, so the male can leave to go hunting. Males and females trade off in this way for a couple of months, until the chick is old enough and big enough to be left alone for stretches.

The emperor penguin lives in Antarctica and can grow over four feet tall, or 130 cm, which is just ridiculously large. It can also weigh up to 100 lbs, or 45 kg. In other words, it’s as big as a small person and much bigger even than the great auk was. It’s a strong swimmer and can dive deeply—the deepest recorded dive was well over 1800 feet, or 565 meters, which is whale diving depth.

But the emperor penguin isn’t the biggest penguin that ever lived. Anthropornis went extinct around 33 million years ago, and it was a penguin that was actually the height of a tall human, some six feet tall, or 1.8 meters. It lived off the coast of what is now New Zealand and Antarctica. The New Zealand giant penguin probably lived around the same time as Anthropornis, and was around five feet tall, or 1.6 meters, but probably weighed more. Neither were direct ancestors of modern penguins, but they probably looked and acted very similar. Just, you know, enormous.

A newly discovered giant penguin, also from New Zealand, lived much earlier than the others. It was already almost five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, and well adapted to the water 61 million years ago. Remember that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event occurred around 66 million years ago. Some researchers hypothesize that penguins had already begun evolving when dinosaurs were still alive, and that they survived the extinction event.

Another extinct penguin, one that was more directly related to modern penguins, lived around South America some 36 million years ago. Icadyptes was almost as tall as the other giant penguins and had a bill that was much longer and pointier than modern penguin bills, more like a heron’s bill. It also lived in much warmer waters than most modern penguins.

Back in the 1920s and 30s, when fossils of giant penguins were first described, they caught the public’s imagination. Giant penguins appeared in science fiction of the day, including Jules Verne and HP Lovecraft. Starting in February of 1948, people in Florida began finding enormous three-toed tracks in sand on a few beaches and along the Suwannee River. The footprints were over a foot long, or 35 cm, and the animal’s stride was measured at between 4 and 6 feet long, or 1.2 to 1.8 meters. Cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson examined the tracks in November of 1948. After weeks of study he reported gravely that they’d been made by a penguin 15 feet tall, or 4.5 meters.

It turns out, though, that it was all a hoax. Two men named Tony Signorini and Al Williams had made gigantic iron feet they could wear as great big shoes, and walked in the sand overnight leaving trails of monstrous tracks ready to be discovered by beachcombers. They actually intended the tracks to be taken for dinosaur or sea monster footprints, but a giant penguin was even better. Each foot weighed about 30 lbs, or 13.5 kg, and Signorini used the weight to swing along in a sort of controlled bound that made his stride remarkably long without too much effort. Williams died in 1969 but Signorini didn’t come clean about the hoax until 1988.

He still has the feet.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 077: The Tratratratra, Lemur of Mystery!

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I swear I didn’t make up the word tratratratra! It’s a real word for an animal that was probably real, although it may be extinct now. Let’s learn about this Lemur of Mystery and some of its friends!

A mouse lemur:

An indri:

King Julian:

Further reading:

Lemur News

The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re looking at an animal with a name I swear I’m not making up, the tratratratra. Seriously, it’s a real name. The animal itself…well, we’re not exactly sure.

Tratratratra is the name of an animal that was supposedly common in Madagascar when the Malagasy people settled there around 2000 years ago. It was described as a lemur about the size of a calf with a human face but hands more like a monkey’s. Supposedly it still lives on Madagascar in remote, hard-to-reach areas.

Madagascar is a big island off the coast of East Africa, with smaller islands around it. It has been isolated from both Africa and Asia for 88 million years, so many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else on earth. Lemurs are one example. There are over 100 known species and subspecies of lemur on Madagascar, but lemurs are found nowhere else in the world. Even more species of lemur have gone extinct since humans settled on the island, including one that might be the tratratratra.

First of all, what’s a lemur? If you’ve seen the movie Madagascar, you have a pretty good idea of what a lemur looks like, although you may overestimate the amount of dancing they do.

Technically the lemur is a primate, although it doesn’t look much like other primates at first glance. Different species can look radically different, of course, but in general they’re long-bodied animals with long tails and monkey-like hands and feet with nails instead of claws. They’re mostly social animals who eat plants and fruit, although some eat insects, arthropods, and other small animals. Most lemur societies are female-led. All are endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and the illegal pet trade.

While we tend to think of apes and monkeys when we hear the word primate, the primate order contains many other types of animal. Lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini suborder, which includes bushbabies, pottos, and lorises. Apes and monkeys belong to the Haplorhini suborder, along with tarsiers. Researchers think that the ancestors of lemurs migrated to Madagascar from Africa about 50 million years ago on rafts of vegetation. This sounds ridiculous since Madagascar is more than 300 miles, or 500 km, away from Africa at its closest point, and the prevailing winds and ocean currents push floating logs and other vegetation away from the island. But 60 million years ago the currents flowed the other way. By 20 million years ago, continental drift had pushed Africa and Madagascar farther north so that the currents changed to what they are now, which helped isolate the island even further.

The smallest lemur species is the mouse lemur, which is only 11 inches long including its tail, or 27 cm. The largest is the indri, which is a black and white animal with long legs but no tail, which grows to almost 2 ½ feet long, or 72 cm. In other words, even the biggest lemur alive today isn’t all that big. But that didn’t used to be the case.

When humans first settled on the island, there were three kinds of giant lemurs. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Monkey lemurs went extinct around 1500 years ago and probably spent most of their time on the ground. They weren’t huge, probably not any bigger than the indri. We don’t have very many monkey lemur remains so we don’t know much about it, but researchers think it primarily ate seeds, although it might have also eaten grass and leaves. Its limbs were short and powerful with short hands and feet. It had a heavy skull with big molars for grinding plant material. It probably went extinct mostly due to competition with introduced livestock like pigs.

Koala lemurs were bigger than the indri, up to five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and went extinct around 1000 years ago. Incidentally, one thousand years ago there was a terrible drought in Madagascar that caused crops to fail, lakes to dry up, and wildfires to start, and which contributed to many species going extinct. Anyway, the koala lemur was shaped more like a koala than a lemur. It lived its whole life in treetops, eating leaves, and it had some weird features for a primate. Its eyes were on the sides of its head like a rabbit’s or a horse’s, instead of in the front of its head like all other primates. Its snout was long and tapered, but it had a big nasal area that probably indicates an enlarged upper lip, maybe even partially prehensile, that helped it gather leaves. It was also heavier than all other lemurs, and some of the remains we have show evidence that they were butchered by humans to eat.

Finally, sloth lemurs probably ate plants, fruit, and nuts, and some species may have hung from branches the way sloths do. Instead of big claws for climbing, sloth lemurs had long fingers. There were a number of species, so let’s look at a few of them. Don’t worry, we’re getting closer and closer to the tratratratra.

Archaeoindris was the biggest lemur that we know of. It was the size of a gorilla, maybe even a little bigger, which would make it one of the largest primates that ever lived. Its skull was large and heavy, and it probably ate leaves. It may have occasionally climbed trees but probably spent most of its time on the ground. We don’t have any hand or feet bones so we don’t know if it had adaptations for climbing trees or for walking on the ground. It was already rare when humans first came to Madagascar and went extinct shortly afterwards.

Now we’re up to Palaeopropithecus ingens, and this may be our tratratratra. It wasn’t as big as Archaeoindris but it was still much bigger and heavier than the modern indri. It ate leaves, nuts, and seeds and probably spent a lot of time in the trees. Its arms and legs were powerful and it had long fingers and toes, which it used to hang from branches like a sloth. It had other adaptations, like curved arm and leg bones, that shows it was adept at climbing on, hanging from, and brachiating through tree branches. Even the hands were curved, so that the fingers were more like hooks. But it probably wasn’t a very fast mover, so was easily hunted by humans and would have provided a lot of meat.

According to Admiral Etienne de Flacourt in his 1658 history of Madagascar, the tratratratra is “a large animal like a calf of two years old, with a round head and the face of a man: the fore feet are like a monkey (or ape), and the hind feet also. It has curly or frizzy hair, a short tail and ears like those of a man. It resembles the ‘tanacht’ described by Ambroise Paré. It can be seen near the pond of the Lipomami tribe and in that region is where it can be found. It is a highly solitary animal, the people of that country have a great fear of it and flee from it as it also does from them.”

I got that quote from an article in Volume 15 of Lemur News, from 2010. I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in lemurs, because it has lots of interesting information.

Palaeopropithecus ingens probably had a short tail like the still-living indri, which is a close relative. It probably also had rounded ears like the indri. And like the indri also, it may have had wavy or curly hair.

The tratratratra’s name probably came from its call, which might have been an alarm bark or a chattering sound. Many local lemur names do come from the animals’ calls. Some researchers consider the tratratratra’s name to be a fossil sound, and one of the very few we have.

We don’t know exactly when Palaeopropithecus went extinct. It might have been as recently as four hundred years ago, maybe even more recently. There have only been a few modern-day sightings of an animal that might be the tratratratra. A French forester in the 1930s saw what he claimed was a gorilla-like lemur with a human-like face, four feet tall, but that’s about it. So whatever the tratratratra might be, it’s probably extinct by now. But maybe it’s hanging on in the forested hills north of Tulear, where the last fragments of Madagascar’s original forests remain.

There is an interesting Malagasy tradition reported in 2003 about an ogre with the face of a human, which was helpless on smooth rocks. Since Palaeopropithecus was so well adapted to living in trees, like modern sloths it probably couldn’t walk on the ground very well. So even if the tratratratra is extinct, its memory lives on in modern culture.

The tratratratra isn’t the only mystery lemur in Madagascar. The kidoky is supposed to be a big lemur with dark fur but a couple of white spots on its face. It has a rounded face, a loud whooping call, and spends at least part of the time on the ground. When it runs, its gait is more like a baboon’s than a lemur’s.

Some people think the kidoky might be one of the giant lemur species that are supposedly extinct. Zoologist Karl Shuker suggests Archaeolemur or Hadropithecus as possible identities, both of which spent a lot of time on the ground. In fact, they resemble baboons in so many ways that they’re both known as baboon lemurs. But Hadropithecus went extinct around 1200 years ago and Archaeolemur around 800 years ago, as far as we know. But an ethnographic survey published in 1998 reports one native villager who saw a kidoky in 1952 at close range.

The tokandia is another mystery lemur, this one even bigger than the kidoky—as big as a bear. Not that they have bears in Madagascar. It’s supposed to live mostly on the ground but sometimes it would jump up into trees. It didn’t look like a human but its calls sounded like they were made with a human voice. Again, Shuker suggests it might be a koala lemur, specifically Megaladapis edwardsi—you know, the one that could grow five feet long, or 1.5 meters.

The kalanoro is a more human-like creature from folklore, usually described as a small person who steals food. Some stories say it lives in the water. If it’s based on a real animal and isn’t just the Malagasy version of little folk common throughout the world’s cultures, it might be based on a type of lemur.

One last note. In the quote earlier about the tratratratra, de Flacourt mentions an animal called the tanacht. Is it another type of lemur? Is there no end to lemur mysteries?

It’s not a lemur, no. A French priest called Father André Thévet wrote about the tanacht in 1575, but he said it lived in India. It was supposedly the size and roughly the shape of a tiger, but it didn’t have a tail, and it did have the face and hands of a human with a snub nose. It might have been a species of Asian colobine monkey such as the pig-tailed langur, which can have orangey or golden fur and only has a short tail, or it might have been a stump-tailed macaque, which has pale brown fur and no tail. But neither of those monkeys are anywhere near as big as a tiger, so who knows what the tanacht might actually be?

But for now, I’m primated out, so check back next week for an episode that’s not about primates!

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 076: The Orang Pendek

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This week we’re back to Sumatra, that island of mystery, to learn about a mysterious ape called the orang pendek.

A beautiful Sumatran orangutan:

This orangutan and her baby have won all the bananas:

This picture made me DIE:

An especially dapper siamang, a type of gibbon:

Here’s a walking siamang:

The sun bear, looking snoozy:

The sun bear, standing:

Further reading:

These are the articles where I got my quotes.

This one has some general information.

This one is by Debbie Martyr herself.

Show transcript:

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

The island of Sumatra is a place that keeps popping up in our episodes. We’ve barely scratched the surface of weirdness in Sumatra and nearby islands, but this week’s episode is about a Sumatran mystery ape called the orang pendek. That means “short person” in Indonesian.

The story goes that a human-like ape lives in the forests of western Sumatra. It walks on two legs, has short black, gray, or golden fur on its body with longer hair on its head, human facial features, and is shorter than a human but not by much. The people of the remote Sumatran villages where the orang pendek is reported say that it’s enormously strong, and has small feet and short legs but long arms. It mostly eats plants and will raid crops occasionally, but it also eats insects, fish, and river crabs.

Many people think the first report of the orang pendek outside of the Sumatran people is from a 14th century traveler called John of Florence, who visited China around 1342 and many other countries afterwards, including either Java or Sumatra. He reported seeing hairy men who lived on the edges of the forest, but since he also said that the hairy men planted crops and traded with the locals, it’s possible he was talking about a tribe of people who lived on the outskirts of mainstream society.

The various native groups in Sumatra have stories of creatures that sound like the orang pendek, including a demon-like entity called the hantu pendek, which means short ghost. But as I’ve said before in other episodes, it’s a mistake to treat folktales as if they were scientific observations. People tell stories for lots of reasons, only one of which is imparting knowledge about a particular animal. Plus, those aren’t the only stories of strange people told in the area. There are stories of giants, of people with tails, and many others. For instance, the orang bati is a bat-winged man that’s supposed to live in extinct volcanic craters in Seram, Indonesia, and who flies out at night and steals babies.

The Dutch colonized Indonesia in the early 19th century, around 1820, after centuries of varying levels of control in what was known as the Dutch East Indies. Colonists reported seeing apes or strange small people in the forest too. One fairly typical report is this one from 1917, from a Mr. Oostingh, who saw what he took to be a man sitting on the ground in the forest about 30 feet away from him, or nine meters. He said,

“His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. The colour was not brown, but looked like black earth, a sort of dusty black, more grey than black.

“He clearly noticed my presence. He did not so much as turn his head, but stood up on his feet: he seemed quite as tall as I. Then I saw that it was not a man, and I started back, for I was not armed. The creature took several paces, without the least haste, and then, with his ludicrously long arm, grasped a sapling, which threatened to break under his weight, and quietly sprang into a tree, swinging in great leaps alternately to right and to left.”

Expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s found nothing out of the ordinary. Interest trailed off until around 1990, when a journalist named Debbie Martyr decided she was going to get to the bottom of the mystery. She had traveled to Sumatra in 1989 for a story she was writing, and while she was there she learned about the orang pendek. She spent the next fifteen-odd years interviewing witnesses and setting up camera traps, but without uncovering any proof. She did spot what she thought might be an orang pendek at least once, but got no clear photos, no remains, no conclusive footprints. Martyr states that the ape she saw had much different proportions than an orangutan, much more human-like.

Other people have searched for the orang pendek too, also without success. National Geographic set up camera traps between 2005 and 2009 without getting any photos of unknown apes. One expedition found some hairs that they later sent for DNA testing, but the results were inconclusive due to the hairs’ poor quality and possible human contamination.

Interest in the orang pendek spiked after remains of the Flores little people were found in 2003, and after anthropologists made connections between those remains and local stories about small, mischievous people called the ebo gogo. As you may remember if you’ve listened to episode 26, researchers initially thought the Homo floresiensis remains were only some 12,000 years old. More recent studies have pushed this back to around 50,000 years old. But the island of Flores is not all that far from the island of Sumatra, so it’s not out of the question that the Flores little people also lived on other islands.

Sumatra is a big island with a lot of animal and plant species found nowhere else in the world. It’s certainly a big enough island to hide a population of shy apes or small human relations. But the only proof we have that the orang pendek exists, after a couple of decades of intensive searching, are a bunch of witness reports, some blurry photos and video, inconclusive plaster casts of footprints, and some ape hairs too degraded for DNA testing. If the orang pendek was a real animal, no matter how elusive, you’d think we’d at least have one good clear photo by now.

There have been hoaxes in the past. A “young orang pendek” turned out to be a dead langur monkey with its tail cut off. A video released in 2017 that purports to show a group of motorbikers who startle an orang pendek is probably a hoax. I’ve sent an alert to Captain Disillusion. If he covers the video I’ll let y’all know.

Despite the hoaxes and the lack of evidence, people are obviously seeing something. Witnesses include forest rangers, zoologists, hunters, and other people who know the local animals well. So what could they be seeing? Let’s take a look at some of the animals of Sumatra that might be mistaken for an orang pendek, at least some of the time.

The orang pendek is supposed to have small feet, about the size and shape of a human child’s foot. This sounds like the tracks of the Malayan sun bear. In fact, a footprint found in 1924 that was supposed to belong to an orang pendek was identified as that of a sun bear once it was seen by an expert.

The sun bear has sleek black fur, although some are gray or reddish, and a roughly U-shaped patch of fur on its chest that varies in color from gold to almost white to reddish-orange. Its muzzle is short and its ears are small. It’s the world’s smallest bear, only around three feet long from head to tail, or 150 cm, and four feet tall when standing on its hind legs, or 1.2 meters. It has long front claws that it uses to climb trees and tear open logs to get at insect larvae, which it licks up with its long tongue. It also eats a lot of plant material, especially fruit. It’s mostly nocturnal.

Orangutans also live on the island, but currently only in the northern part of the island, although they lived all over Sumatra and in Java until the end of the 19th century. The Sumatran orangutan is one of only three orangutan species in the world, and is critically endangered due to habitat loss. It’s slenderer than the other species, with pale orange fur. Like the sun bear, it eats a lot of insects and fruit; unlike the sun bear, it uses tools it makes from sticks to gather insects, honey, and other foods more easily. It also uses large leaves as umbrellas. It communicates not by sound, like other orangutans, but by gestures. In short, it sounds like a pretty awesome ape. Orangutan means “forest person,” if you were wondering.

Other apes and monkeys live on the island too, including several species of gibbon. Gibbons are apes, but they’re not considered great apes, only lesser apes. They look more like monkeys, although they don’t have tails. They’re also fairly small, generally about two feet long, or 60 cm, and quite slender. They live in the treetops and swing from branch to branch, which is called brachiation. Orangutans brachiate sometimes too, but they’re much heavier than gibbons and move much more slowly and cautiously. Gibbons can move. They also have loud voices and melodic calls.

The Siamang, a type of gibbon, has a throat pouch called a gular sac which, when inflated with air, enhances the voice and helps it resonate. Family groups of siamangs sing together. The siamang has shaggy black fur and is a little larger than other gibbons, around 3 feet tall, or one meter. Its arms are long, its legs short, and it mostly eats plants, especially fruit, although it also eats insects. Like orangutans and many other animals on Sumatra, it’s threatened by habitat loss.

There’s one thing that the sun bear, the orangutan, and the siamang all sometimes do that is suggestive of the orang pendek. All three sometimes walk on their hind legs. Bears usually only stand on their hind legs to get a better view of something, but they can certainly walk on their hind legs if they want to. While the orangutans of Sumatra spend most of their time in trees, since the Sumatran tiger likes to eat orangutans, it can and does come down to the ground sometimes. Males in particular sometimes walk upright for short distances. Siamangs walk upright along branches, and occasionally on the ground, usually with their long arms held above their heads for balance but not always.

So we have three animals that when seen clearly, really don’t look much like the orang pendek is supposed to look. None have especially human faces, although I’ve just spent half an hour looking at pictures of orangutans and siamangs, and those are some handsome apes. But they all have a number of features that sound like orang pendek features. They’re all the right size, they can all walk upright, their fur is black, gray, or golden, and they eat the things the orang pendek is supposed to eat.

At least some orang pendek sightings are mistaken identity of these three animals, I guarantee it. Even the most knowledgeable zoologist or forest ranger can make a mistake, especially if they only catch a glimpse of the animal or see it in poor light. And, as I often point out, people tend to see what they expect to see. In a 1993 article, Debbie Martyr herself says that when she first started studying the orang pendek sightings, people in Sumatra laughed at the thought that the orang pendek was a real animal. But, she writes, “Times have changed in Sumatra. The officials of the Kerinci Seblat have become, if not converts to the orang pendek cause, then at least openly curious about the animal. Pak Mega Harianto, director of the park, admitted, ‘We now have too many sightings, from all over the national park. It is always the same animal. Always the same description.’”

In other words, as the legend becomes more and more popular, more and more people report seeing a mystery animal that fits the orang pendek’s description. And yet, there is no more proof now than there was in 1925 of the animal’s existence.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an unknown ape living in Sumatra, of course. I just don’t think that’s what people are seeing. It would be fantastic if the orang pendek did turn out to be a real animal. It would focus more attention on the loss of rainforest and other habitats in Sumatra, and would probably bring more tourists to the island, which would help the local economy. But until someone actually finds a body or captures a live orang pendek, I have to remain skeptical.

I’m sure we’ll revisit Sumatra and other parts of the Malay Archipelago soon to learn about other little-known and mystery animals. Until then, remember that you now know at least one word of the Indonesian language. ‘Orang’ means person, whether it’s an ape-type person or a ghost-type person.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 073: Phantom and Otherwise Kangaroos

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This week we’re learning about some out-of-place marsupials, from phantom kangaroos to colonies of wallabies living in places like England and Hawaii. Thanks to Richard E. for the suggestion!

A Bennett’s wallaby and a red kangaroo:

George Stubbs’s kangaroo painting:

The controversial maybe-it’s-a-kangaroo engraving from 1593 (detail to the right). For more information, this is a great article.

You can find the 2013 video of a kangaroo in an Oklahoma cowfield here. It’s definitely a kangaroo, too.

Show transcript:

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

We started 2018 with a couple of episodes about out of place animals. I meant to make that a regular feature this year, but I keep getting distracted. Imagine that. This week I was going to revisit out of place animals in general, with lots of excellent suggestions from Richard E. But the second I started researching some populations of wallabies in places far outside of their usual home, I got sucked into the strange world of phantom kangaroos.

Reports of so-called phantom kangaroos are something between an urban legend and a genuine cryptozoological mystery. The problem with the earliest accounts is that they’re impossible to verify as real reports. Newspapers from earlier than about the 1920s would sometimes play fast and loose with reality in order to sell papers or just fill space. I suspect that at the time, most people reading the papers understood that these sorts of accounts were just fun nonsense, but we don’t have the same frame of reference to interpret them properly today. A hundred years from now scholars are going to be reading memes from 2018 and taking them at face value because they don’t understand most of the pop culture references.

But let’s dig into some of these phantom kangaroo reports and see what we can find out.

The first report of a phantom kangaroo is usually listed as one from 1899 in Wisconsin. The story goes that on June 12 of that year, a woman in New Richmond reported seeing a kangaroo run through her neighbor’s yard. Some accounts say it was her yard, and some reports say it happened during a storm. Some reports also mention that a circus was in the area, but that while people assumed the kangaroo had escaped from the circus, it turned out that the circus had never had a kangaroo.

This story doesn’t seem to appear anywhere except books and websites about unexplained phenomena. On the surface it seems to have good details, but when you think about it, it’s mostly vague. We have a specific date and a specific place…but what was the woman’s name? Which circus was in town? How did the woman know she had seen a kangaroo, and what did it look like? It was described as running, not hopping, but does that verb come from the witness or from reporters?

The next phantom kangaroo account is from 1907, and supposedly happened near Pennsburg, PA. I found it in three old newspapers, including the August 3, 1907 Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Telegraph, and the Harrisburg Daily Independent.

This is the text of the article that appears in both those newspapers, with the headline “Kangaroo” at Large Alarms a Community, with Kangaroo in quotes, a rather sophisticated touch that makes me think the story was real:

“Pennsburg, Pa, Aug. 3 Tales of a kangaroo that is said to be roaming the wooded hills in the vicinity of Pleasant Run, a few miles west of here, have occasioned intense excitement in that region. Several persons, among them Erwin Styer and Martin Stengel, have seen the strange animal within the last week, and while it is so fleet that no one has been able to obtain a good view of it, the descriptions tend to substantiate the theory that it is a kangaroo. Dogs have attacked the animal, but have always been worsted. People living in the neighborhood of Pleasant Run are afraid to venture away from home after nightfall, and there is little disposition to linger long at the village store in the evening.”

unquote

I checked and Pleasant Run, Pennsylvania is indeed four miles away from Pennsburg, so that’s accurate. I also found an article in the Pinedale (Wyoming) Roundup of December 4, 1907, with the headline “Big Kangaroo at Large” and the subheadline “Keeps Lovers from Their Sweet Summer Saunterings,” which makes me want to throw up a little. This version of the story has been expanded, but whether that was done by the original reporter or was added to give the story more flavor, I don’t know. Here it is in full:

Quote

“Tales of a kangaroo that is said to be roaming the wooded hills in the vicinity of Pleasant Run, a few miles west of here, have occasioned intense excitement. Several persons, among them Erwin Styer and Martin Stengel, have seen the strange animal within the past week, and while it is so fleet that no one has been able to obtain a good view of it, the descriptions substantiate the theory that it is a kangaroo. It is described as being of gray color, with a head shaped like that of a sheep and a body of large proportions. Upon the approach of a human being it darts away at tremendous speed.

“Dogs have attacked it, but were always worsted. They were not bitten but apparently the animal flung them off with terrific force in the manner that a kangaroo defends itself with its hind legs and tail.

“People living in the neighborhood are afraid to venture away from home after nightfall and there is little disposition to linger at the village store or tavern in the evening. Young men say that the customary outdoor rural amusements are no longer safe. ‘It ain’t that I’m afraid of any wild beast that ever roamed the jungles of Montgomery county,’ said one young swain, ‘but I certainly do object to the disgrace of being knocked out by the hind legs or the tail of a kangaroo. So I guess we fellows won’t do much stirring up with the girls for some time to come.’”

Unquote

Okay, first of all, barf. Second of all, I don’t know what people sounded like in 1907, but I lived in Pennsylvania for a while and no one talks like that there. Third of all, I’m pretty sure Montgomery County, PA, which is not far from Philadelphia, wasn’t exactly a jungle even in 1907. I guarantee you that the quote at the end of the Wyoming article was made up by some bad writer, either in Wyoming or in some other newspaper, to give it more pizzazz.

It’s possible the whole article was an invention. I suspect the original version reports a real event, but since there are so few details it’s impossible to know if the animal was actually a kangaroo.

The next phantom kangaroo is a lot more interesting. It happened near South Pittsburg, Tennessee, which is near Chattanooga and therefore not far from where I live. Over five days in January 1934, an animal people called a kangaroo was repeatedly seen outside the town. One person said it leaped across a field, others reported it had killed and partially eaten some dogs and ducks, and was even reported carrying away a sheep. Its prints were tracked to a cave, but the animal was never found. Now, I’m going to be honest here and admit that I didn’t hunt too hard for original newspaper articles on this one. I should have, but I literally ran out of time. Basically, whatever this animal was, it probably wasn’t a kangaroo. While kangaroos, like all herbivores, will occasionally eat birds or small animals, or even fish, they don’t eat dogs. They don’t live in caves. They aren’t usually aggressive at all. So basically, while it’s possible this was a mystery animal, it wasn’t a kangaroo.

People tend to see what they expect to see. If someone sees an animal they can’t identify, their subconscious will suggest the most plausible mystery animal. These days that might be Bigfoot or a dogman. In the olden days, it might have been a kangaroo. But why? Why kangaroos?

Kangaroos have been known to science and to general non-Australian people for centuries. The most famous painting of a kangaroo was by artist George Stubbs, who is best known for his gorgeous paintings of horses and dogs. Stubbs painted it in 1772 from a skin brought to England by Captain Cook, not from a live animal. As a result, the kangaroo isn’t as accurate as most of his paintings, but it’s still definitely a kangaroo. It was exhibited in London in 1773 and was a huge attraction. Prints and reproductions of Stubbs’s kangaroo were also popular, and until zoos started to exhibit live kangaroos, that’s what many non-Australians thought kangaroos looked like.

But there were earlier European depictions of kangaroos and other marsupials from Australia, definitely as early as 1711 and possibly as early as 1593. People do tend to see what they expect to see, but presumably no one outside of Australia actually expects to see a kangaroo hopping around on any given day. But something did happen around the time of the earliest phantom kangaroo reports. Kangaroos and their relations started being exhibited in zoos.

This is different from traveling menageries and circuses. The first kangaroos were known to have been in traveling menageries around 1828, when one or two kangaroos were exhibited in England, with a few others in circuses and menageries traveling mostly around Boston and Ontario in North America. But public zoos became more and more common around the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in the United States. Kangaroos and their smaller relations, wallabies, started to appear in American zoos in the early 20th century.

So it’s possible that the phantom kangaroo sightings resulted from more people being familiar with what kangaroos were and what they looked like, but not being familiar with what they ate or how they acted outside of captivity. Zoos in those days were grim places, with animals kept in small cages, so many people who saw one on display may not even have been aware they hop instead of run. If your sole experience with hopping animals is rabbits, and someone told you kangaroos hop, you’d probably picture a rabbit-like gait.

But…well…maybe people were actually seeing kangaroos, at least sometimes.

Here’s the thing. Kangaroos and wallabies are sometimes kept as pets. Apparently they can get pretty tame, although I’m just going to point out that you’d be a lot better off with a pet that’s actually domesticated. If you must have a hopping pet, rabbits are pretty awesome. Anyway, guess what. There are actual known populations of wallabies living in various places where they really shouldn’t be. And we don’t actually know how they got there in most cases. All we can do is guess they were escaped pets or escaped from zoos.

Wallabies look like miniature kangaroos, maybe the size of an average dog. They eat all kinds of plants, can bound quickly and jump fences and other obstacles, and are largely nocturnal although they also come out in daylight. Basically they fill a similar ecological niche as deer. They breed well in captivity and are cute, so are often kept in zoos. They’re marsupials native to Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea…but they are also found in parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, on the Isle of Man, in one tiny area of France, and a few other places.

We do know where some of the wallabies come from. Lady Fiona of Arran was a bit of an eccentric who kept what would have been considered exotic pets back in the 1920s and 30s: llamas, alpacas, pot-bellied pigs, and wallabies. At some point in the 1940s she turned the wallabies loose on an island in Loch Lomond, where they’ve lived ever since. The problem, of course, is that they shouldn’t really be there. They’re cute, sure, and tourists do come to see them, but some people think their presence threatens certain native bird species and they ought to be killed off, or at least captured and taken to zoos. Other people point out that the native birds on the island don’t seem to be bothered by the wallabies, which after all have been there for the better part of a century now. About sixty wallabies live on the island at any given time.

There are also wallabies in the Peak District in Derbyshire, England. This was the population Richard E. told me about, which got me started on this episode that has taken me way too long to research. We know where these wallabies came from too. A man named Henry Courtney Brocklehurst, which honestly does not even sound like a real person’s name, once kept a private zoo on the Roaches, a rocky ridge that’s part of a national park in England. At some point in the 1930s five wallabies in his zoo either escaped or were quietly turned loose, reports vary. They did well in the wild and multiplied, until at their most numerous there were around 50. For a while people thought the wallabies had all died off after some especially cold winters, but in 2009 a hiker got pictures of one.

But wallabies also live in other parts of the British isles, and we don’t know where most of them came from. At least some are probably escaped pets or escaped from zoos—wallabies are apparently pretty good at escaping—while others may be individuals from the peak district population that have gone wandering. All the wallabies in Britain are a subspecies of red-necked wallaby called Bennett’s wallaby, which is from Tasmania. This means it’s better adapted to the British climate than most other wallabies would be. They’re sometimes killed by cars or dogs.

So let’s get back to more modern sightings of phantom kangaroos. There are a lot of reports from the United States, believe me, and a few from Canada. I won’t go into detail for most of them, but they include a 1949 sighting in Ohio, a 1958 sighting in Nebraska, the “Big Bunny” kangaroo sightings in Minnesota that persisted for a decade between 1957 and 1967, and many more.

On October 18, 1974 someone called the Chicago police to report a kangaroo on their porch. Two officers responded…and found a kangaroo in a nearby alleyway. They reported it was five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, which points to its being an actual kangaroo and not a wallaby. Now, Chicago cops probably are not trained to deal with kangaroos, but you’d think they would have the sense to call animal control or a zoo or someone who does know how to deal with kangaroos. Instead, they decided to treat the kangaroo like a human criminal. That’s right, they tried to handcuff a kangaroo.

The kangaroo kicked and punched the officers, who called for backup and probably still haven’t lived that down, but the kangaroo jumped a fence and disappeared into the night.

The next day a paperboy near Oak Park reported hearing a car’s brakes squeal, and when he turned to look, he saw a kangaroo only a few feet away, staring at him. It hopped away. Over the next few weeks sightings poured in from all over Chicago, from other Illinois cities, and even from Indiana. By July 1975, sightings had tapered off and finally stopped.

In April 1978, a schoolbus driver in Waukesha, Wisconsin saw two kangaroos hop across the road. She wasn’t the only one to see them, either. The road was busy and drivers had to slam on their brakes to avoid the kangaroos. One driver actually hit one, but it just jumped back up and hopped away. More people spotted the kangaroos in the weeks that followed. By the end of the month, a kangaroo hunt was organized in an attempt to capture it. They failed, and it seems mostly to have been a joke, but an anonymous photographer sent a Polaroid of a kangaroo to the local paper, supposedly taken in the area. It turned out to be a hoax, a photo of a stuffed wallaby someone had dragged out into a field. But sightings of the kangaroo persisted for months.

And sightings of kangaroos and wallabies don’t just happen in North America and the British Isles. Between 2003 and 2010, people in the Mayama mountain district of Osaki, Japan reported seeing a large brown animal with long ears, variously described as three to five feet tall, or one to 1.5 meters. Most sightings of the animal took place on roadsides when people were on their way to work or home from work.

No one has pictures of the kangaroo seen in Japan, though. No one has photos of the kangaroos reported in Chicago or any of the other sightings from 1899 on up through the new millennium. All those kangaroos were seen but never caught or photographed. A photo of a kangaroo was, however, once passed off as a photo of the Jersey Devil. According to a century of reports, the phantom kangaroos are just that, phantoms.

But these days, many people carry high-quality cameras with them everywhere, more commonly referred to as phones. And things started to change.

On January 3, 2005, a woman in Iowa County, Wisconsin called the sheriff’s department to say she’d seen a kangaroo hopping around on her horse farm. When the sheriff arrived, he was shocked to actually find a kangaroo, specifically a male red kangaroo. He knew better than to try to handcuff it, and instead got help to lure the kangaroo into a barn. It was captured safely and taken to the Henry Vilas Zoo, where it stayed until it died five years later. No one knows where it came from or why it was hopping around loose, but it was apparently fairly tame.

In 2013, some hunters took a video of a kangaroo in Oklahoma. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but it is 100% a kangaroo and not a blurry video that might be anything. A pet kangaroo named Lucy Sparkles had escaped in November of 2012 not too far away, but it turned out that the kangaroo caught on video wasn’t Lucy. It also wasn’t an escapee from a local exotic animal farm. It was a kangaroo from a man who kept kangaroos, which means there are way, way too many kangaroos in Oklahoma than I ever imagined.

Similarly, a man driving to work in July 2013 in North Salem, Connecticut got a few seconds of video of a kangaroo or wallaby bounding down the road and up someone’s driveway. In February of 2017, police officers on patrol spotted a wallaby in Somers, New York, which is believed to be a pet wallaby that escaped three years before in North Salem.

In other words, people really are seeing wallabies and kangaroos, not phantoms. Is it possible there are populations of either living in remote areas of North America, and that occasionally one wanders closer to a town or city and is seen? It’s possible, but not especially likely. Wallabies would be easy prey for wolves and coyotes, bears and cougars, and domestic dogs. We’d also probably have a lot of roadkill wallabies. Kangaroos would be more able to hold their own against predators, but are larger and therefore easier to spot. The climate in much of the United States also isn’t ideal for kangaroos or wallabies. Red kangaroos might be able to thrive in the arid and sparsely populated parts of the southwestern United States, but sightings of phantom kangaroos aren’t generally from those areas.

I’m pretty sure that the wallabies and kangaroos seen in North America, and probably most other places, are escaped pets. Wallabies in particular seem to be escape artists. So if you’re tempted to get an exotic pet and are looking at a wallaby, trust me: you’d be a lot happier with a dog.

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

Thanks for listening!

 

Episode 071: The Not-Elephants

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Not-Elephants! They’re like elephants but WEIRD! Let’s take a look at a lot of extinct proboscidea this week.

Oh, and the Casual Birder Podcast episode where I talk about indigo buntings should be released this week, not last week. Oops.

Gomphotheres, looking deceptively normal at first glance:

THEIR FACES AAAHHHH art by Pedro Toledo:

Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon, art also by Pedro Toledo. Note the spiral on Cuvieronius’s tusks:

Stegodon:

Deinotherium, just going totally weird with the tusks and chin:

It might have looked a little something like this when alive. What the actual heck:

Anancidae tusks were just out of control:

Guess what! These two proboscidae are still alive! Hooray for Asian elephants (left) and African elephants (right)!

Okay, what the heck is going on in these genealogy sites, pretty sure elephants don’t use them:

And finally, I swiped this picture of the Mystery Tusk from Karl Shuker’s blog, specifically this post.

Show transcript:

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

We haven’t had an episode about Pleistocene megafauna in a while, so this week we’re covering some interesting mammals that are related to elephants and mammoths, but aren’t elephants or mammoths. Oh, and I jumped the gun last week with our mystery birds episode. The Casual Birder podcast is running the finch episode this week, where I have a little spot talking about the indigo bunting. I’ll make sure to put a link in the show notes so you won’t miss it if you don’t already listen to the Casual Birder podcast.

We’ll start off this week with an elephant that…isn’t an elephant. Just wait till you hear about the gomphothere, oh man. I’ve been saving this one for a while.

Gomphothere is the name for a family of animals that lived throughout much of the world, except for Antarctica and Australia. Researchers aren’t sure yet whether it eventually gave rise to elephants and mammoths or whether gomphotheres and mammoths were just cousins with a shared ancestor. The first gomphotheres evolved in Africa and spread into Asia and Europe around 22 million years ago. From there they moved into North America and eventually even into South America during the Pleistocene, shortly before they all went extinct.

So what did gomphotheres look like, and how did they differ from elephants? I’m SO glad you asked. A big part of why gomphotheres would have looked weird to us today is because their bodies were very elephantine. But their faces…were just wrong.

For instance, several species of Gomphotherium had a relatively short trunk and four tusks. The upper two tusks were on the upper jaw and jutted forward and downward. Not too unusual. The other pair of tusks were in the lower jaw. They jutted forward side by side and were flattened to form a sort of shovel. For a long time researchers thought it lived in swamps and used its shovel jaw to scoop up water plants, but more recent research suggests it used its lower tusks to cut through tough vegetation. Some species may have used the shovel to gouge bark off trees, for instance. Its head was elongated as a result of the long lower jaw, so while its body looked like a pretty average elephant, size and all, its face would have been long and flattened compared to the elephants we’re used to. I’m picturing the big reveal in an elephant horror movie where the mysterious character in the shadows turns its head and the music goes BWAHHHH and all the elephants in the audience scream.

Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon are the only gomphotheres that lived in South America. Despite its name, Notiomastodon was not closely related to actual mastodons. Both Cuvieronius and Notiomastodon evolved in North America just over 5 million years ago, then migrated into South America around 3 million years ago. Cuvieronius preferred cooler environments and lived along the Andes Mountains, and may have had thick hair to keep it warm, while Notiomastodon lived in open forests in the lowlands and along the coast, and probably had very little hair, much like modern elephants. Both stood over 8 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.5 meters. Both also probably looked pretty normal compared to elephants, and probably acted a lot like modern elephants too. Both had a single pair of tusks. But while Notiomastodon’s tusks were relatively ordinary and usually curved upward like a modern elephant’s, Cuvieronius’s grew in a spiral—although not a tight spiral like narwhal tusks. A band of enamel spiraled along the tusk’s length, and the tusk could be over eleven feet long, or 3.5 meters. Some other gomphothere tusks have enamel coverings, unlike elephant and mammoth tusks, which do not contain enamel.

Notimastodon died out in South America about the time humans migrated into the area, or maybe a little before, but it lived longer in parts of North America, as recently as 28,000 years ago in Mexico. Cuvieronius lived even longer before going extinct, with fossils dated to only about 11,500 years ago found in Chile.

Researchers are still working out the relationships between various gomphotheres and their relations. Gomphotheres, elephants, and some other relations are all in the same order, proboscidea, but different families.

Let’s jerk everything to a halt for a second while I explain the scientific classification system for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. Every living creature that has been described scientifically is assigned a place in the classification system so other researchers can get an idea of what the organism is most closely related to. Classifications can and do change as more information is learned.

The top tier is kingdom, extremely broad groups. All mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, insects, sponges, worms, jellyfish, and basically anything else that could possibly be called an animal is part of the kingdom Animalia. Kingdoms are divided into phyla, which is the plural of phylum. You may remember me talking at length about phyla in the Cambrian explosion episode a few weeks ago, and I probably should have put this explanation in that episode. Any animal with a backbone or notochord or some similar structure is in the Chordate phylum. The next section under phylum is class, and that’s where we separate mammals from birds from reptiles from fish, and so forth. Elephants, Gomphotheres, and humans are all part of the class Mammalia. But when we reach the next big section down, Order, we separate humans from elephants and gomphotheres, because those are part of the order Proboscidea while humans are in the order Primate. Under Order is family, then genus, then species. The genus and species give an organism its scientific name, such as Homo sapiens or Stegodon zdansky. There are finer gradations, like subfamily and subspecies and clade and so forth, but we won’t go over those here. Let’s get back to the not-elephants.

So, what’s Stegodon zdansky? It’s in the proboscidea order along with elephants and gomphotheres, but it’s not either. And the reason I bring it up is because it was really, really big. It could stand some 13 feet high at the shoulder, or 4 meters, and its tusks were similarly enormous—not just long, although they were over ten feet long, or more than three meters, but so big and close together that it had to drape its trunk to one side or the other of the tusks, not in between like most other proboscideans. Stegodon zdansky lived in China. Other species of Stegodon also lived in Asia, mostly in forested areas, and like zdansky they all had long tusks set close together.

Remember the island of Flores, where the Flores little people lived, Homo floresiensis? We learned about them in episode 26. Popular articles about the Floes little people often say they hunted a dwarf elephant, but it wasn’t an elephant at all. It was a Stegodon that had adapted to life on an island by becoming smaller, not much bigger than a cow. But it’s not clear if it was actually hunted by the Flores little people or if it went extinct before they arrived.

There are more proboscideans, believe me. Deinotherium, for instance, which was simply enormous. It could stand more than 13 feet tall, or 4 meters, but some big males may have stood nearly 16 feet tall, or 5 meters. Only paraceratherium, which you may remember from our tallest animals episode, was taller and heavier.

It had such weird tusks that researchers aren’t sure what it used them for. It had one pair on the lower jaw. Not only did the tusks grow almost straight downward, its lower jaw also curved downward. Some researchers think it dug up plants with the tusks, while others think it used its tusks to pull branches down so it could strip leaves off with its trunk. But no one knows for sure. Researchers also think it had a strong trunk, although we don’t know whether it was a long trunk or a short one. It lived in parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and went extinct around a million years ago.

Amebelodontidae was a family that paleontologists thought for a long time were gomphotheres, but new research has separated them into their own family. Like many Gomphotheres, the lower jaw is elongated with a pair of flat, short tusks at the end. The upper tusks are straight and reach only to the end of the jaw, or not as far as the end of the jaw in some species. Reseachers think it used its tusks to cut through tough plants. Similarly, Anancidae were once thought to be Gomphotheres but are now considered their own family. It looked a lot like modern elephants, although its legs were relatively short. Even so, it stood around ten feet tall, or three meters, and lived in forests. It had one pair of tusks…but that’s where the resemblance to modern elephants ends, because its tusks were ridiculously long: 13 feet long, or four meters, and they just pointed straight ahead. Researchers think the Anancidae used their tusks for defense and to dig up plants.

All the proboscidea are extinct now except for Asian and African elephants. It’s a shame so many amazing animals are gone, but just think about how sad it would be if we didn’t have elephants at all. We’re lucky they’re still around.

In 1904 a couple of French zoologists noticed part of a strange tusk in a market stall in Ethiopia. The tusk was darker than regular elephant ivory, oddly shaped with a single groove along its length, and only a couple of feet long, or around 60 cm. The seller didn’t know where it was from. The zoologists bought it to study, and in 1907 published a paper on the tusk. It wasn’t a complete tusk and had apparently been broken off, not sawed off. Their conclusion was that it was from a proboscidean that was not yet known to science. Unfortunately the tusk has been lost, possibly gathering dust in the depths of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris where it was donated.

While the zoologists stated that the tusk wasn’t fossilized and that they thought it might have been almost semicircular when complete, it’s possible they were wrong on both counts. It might have been a walrus tusk, possibly a fossilized one, which could explain its dark brown patina. It might have been a fossilized deinotherium tusk. But the zoologists learned something interesting soon after they bought the tusk. Some Somali hunters told them that there were hippo-like animals that lived in large lakes of East Africa, and that the animals had tusks like the one they’d bought. If you’ve listened to episode 18, where we talk about mystery elephants, you might remember the water elephant reportedly seen in East Africa prior to 1912. Could the water elephant be a real animal, and the source of the mystery tusk? Until the tusk actually turns up so it can be tested, we can’t know for sure what animal it’s from. But it’s sure fun to think about.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 070: Mystery Birds

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This week we’ll learn about birds that are mysterious in one way or another. If you need more bird knowledge, check out the awesome Casual Birder Podcast, especially this week’s episode with a guest spot by me about indigo buntings!

Lots of pictures for this one, hoo boy.

The Nechisar nightjar wing. It’s all we’ve got:

Junkin’s warbler, a mystery bird whose identity was solved by SCIENCE:

The lovely blue-eyed ground dove:

The two tapestries depicting a mystery bird:

Close-ups of the mystery bird from the tapestries:

A black grouse, that may have inspired the tapestry birds:

A wandering albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any living bird known and will CURSE YOU:

The bee hummingbird, smallest living bird known, will only give tiny curses if it’s really mad:

An olive-backed sunbird:

A hermit hawkmoth, not even kidding that this thing looks and acts like a hummingbird:

The cahow, or Bermuda petrel:

Show transcript:

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

On the same day this episode is released, the Casual Birder Podcast is releasing an episode about finches with a contribution from me. If you haven’t tried the Casual Birder Podcast, it’s a great show about birds and birding that I highly recommend. It’s 100% family friendly, the host’s voice is pleasant and calming, and it’s often funny and always interesting. I’ve got a link in the show notes, so head on over and try the finch episode, where you can hear me dropping some knowledge about the indigo bunting. And for any new listeners who came here from the Casual Birder Podcast, welcome! We’ve got a great episode this week about birds that are associated with a mystery in one way or another.

We’ll start in Ethiopia, specifically the Nechisar National Park in the Great Rift Valley. In 1990, a team of researchers was surveying a remote section of grassland in the park to see what animals lived there. One of the things they found was a dead bird, not in the field but on a dirt road, where it had been killed by a car. It was a type of nightjar, but the bird experts associated with the survey didn’t recognize it. The problem was, though, that the bird was pretty mangled and rotten. Only one wing was intact, so they took that wing back with them to the Natural History Museum in London and described a new species of nightjar from it. It’s called the Nechisar Nightjar, described in 1995 and named Caprimulgus solala. ‘Solala’ means “only a wing.”

But no one who knows about birds has ever conclusively seen a living Nechisar Nightjar: not an ornithologist or zoologist, not a bird watcher, not a local with more than casual knowledge of birds, no one. In 2009 a group of birders visited the park specifically to search for the nightjar, and caught a brief video of one flying away. But nightjars are night birds, so the video was shot at night with one of the birders holding a light, and as a result it’s not exactly great video quality. So while conservationists hold out hope that the bird isn’t actually super-rare, just lives in a hard to reach area, we still don’t know for sure.

At least we have the wing so we know the Nechisar nightjar actually exists. The wing has dark brown feathers with a pale wing panel. The birders who might have seen the nightjar in 2009 said its body was reddish-brown and it had white tail corners. Another bird, called the double-banded pheasant, is known only from a single feather found in 1871. We don’t even know where the feather came from, since it was found in a shipment of feathers sent to London to be used as hat decorations. Researchers today think it is probably just an aberrant feather taken from the well-known great argus pheasant, which lives in Borneo, Sumatra, and other islands in southeast Asia.

Next we’ll visit New York state and a mystery warbler whose identity was solved by science. In 2006, bird bander David Junkin caught a warbler in his mist net that he and his wife Sandy couldn’t identify. It had an olive green back, was bright yellow underneath, and had a gray head with a white throat and bright white eye ring, almost spectacles. The Junkins had to let the bird go, and it became known as Junkin’s warbler informally as birders and ornithologists tried to figure out what the bird was from the pictures the Junkins posted online. Then, fortunately, the following year the same individual bird blundered into the Junkin’s mist net. This time they plucked two of its tail feathers and sent them for DNA testing at Cornell. It turns out that the mystery warbler was a hybrid of a male mourning warbler and a female Kentucky warbler.

Various types of warblers do interbreed fairly frequently, and some hybrids have been mistakenly named as species of their own in the past. As if warblers weren’t already ridiculously hard to identify. Researchers think that in the case of Junkin’s warbler, its mother may have ended up outside of her usual summer range after migrating, found no Kentucky warbler males to pair with, and so took a closely-related male mourning warbler as a mate. Sometimes you have to settle, you know? At least their kid was pretty darn adorable.

When a rare bird vanishes, after years with no sightings, conservationists have to declare it extinct. But sometimes a bird thought extinct turns out to not be extinct at all. These are sometimes known as Lazarus species.

It happened with the blue-eyed ground dove, a pretty but modest dove that once lived throughout South America. It was declared critically endangered and probably extinct and hadn’t been seen in almost 75 years when, in June of 2015, ornithologist Rafael Bessa heard a call that he knew wasn’t the ruddy ground-dove common in Brazil. He recorded the call and managed to get some photographs of the dove he heard. Sure enough, it was a blue-eyed ground dove, not extinct after all.

Of course, exciting as this is, the doves aren’t out of danger. Their habitat is threatened and they only survive in a few small, widely-separated pockets of wilderness. But conservation efforts are in place now that we know the dove is still around. It’s a lovely bird, chestnut with dark blue spots on its wings and matching dark blue eyes. This is what a blue-eyed ground dove sounds like:

[dove call]

Now let’s fly to Paris, where I am visiting this August and I’m very excited. In this case, our bird is depicted in two 500-year-old tapestries at the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages, part of a series collectively called “The Lady and the Unicorn.” The tapestries show a lot of animals and birds, including our mystery bird. It’s black with a white breast and white markings on the underwings, a long tail with a lyre-shaped fork at the end, and large feet. But no one’s sure what kind of bird it is.

The best guess is that it may be a depiction of a black grouse, rendered by artists who had never actually seen one of the birds. The black grouse is a large game bird common throughout parts of western Europe and Asia. The male is black with white wing bars and undertail coverts, and red wattles. The tail is long and lyre-shaped, and when the wings are open, they show white underneath. But even if the bird in the tapestries is a black grouse, it’s still a mystery why the artist included the bird in the tapestries instead of a more well-known bird or a completely fanciful one.

Next up is a bird that’s not a mystery so much as mysterious. It has an entire epic poem written about it, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in the early 19th century.

The wandering albatross and the closely related southern royal albatross have the largest wingspan of any bird living today, 11 ½ feet across, or 3.5 meters. Both are mostly white as adults, with black markings on the wings and pinkish bills and legs. They look like gigantic seagulls.

The albatross has such an amazing wingspan, and is such an efficient flyer, that it can fly for weeks without stopping, covering more than 6,000 miles during that time, or 10,000 km, and use barely more energy than if it had stayed at home and napped. It eats fish, squid, and other small sea creatures, and will dive for food or just grab it out of the water as the bird skims near the surface. The albatross will pretty much eat anything it can find, including carrion, and it can gorge itself with as much as 25% of its own body weight in food. But when it’s that full, it’s too heavy to fly, so it may float on the water’s surface for a few hours while it digests. Its digestive system is as acidic as a vulture’s so it can digest its food quickly.

Pairs mate for life, can live over sixty years, and produce one chick every two years, gathering in colonies on a few remote islands to nest. It mostly lives in the southern hemisphere below the Antarctic, around South America and Australia. Distance means nothing to the albatross.

The albatross frequently follows ships around, especially fishing boats that might throw fish guts and heads overboard. Some sailors believed the albatross was a bird of good omen or contained the soul of a dead sailor, so if you killed one you’d be cursed. That’s what the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is all about. Other sailors believed that if you killed an albatross, you could use its hollow wing bones to make pipe stems, so they did, and presumably they were cursed for the rest of their lives but they also had nifty pipe stems so I guess it’s a trade off.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner frankly is a terrible poem. I was an English major; you can trust my judgment. It has some good lines, though, and you probably know some of them even if you’ve never read the poem. It’s where “As idle as a painted ship / upon a painted ocean” comes from, and “Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.” In the poem, a sailor kills an albatross. He doesn’t say why. When the ship is immediately becalmed, the other sailors, who blame the first sailor for killing the lucky bird, hang the dead albatross around the bird-killer’s neck. If you’ve ever heard of someone having an albatross around their neck, that’s where it comes from, and it means something bad from their past is still affecting them.

From the bird with the biggest known wingspan, let’s examine a tiny, tiny bird next. This is a genuine mystery bird from Sumatra. In the late 1950s, Otto and Nina Irrgang were living in Sumatra and one day spotted a hummingbird only 1.5 inches long, or 3.8 cm. That’s even smaller than the smallest bird known, the bee hummingbird, which lives in Cuba and nearby islands and is no more than 2.4 inches long, or 6.1 cm. The Irrgangs saw the bird at close range when it hovered no more than a foot away. They said it was brown underneath with a striped yellow back.

But Sumatra is an Indonesian island in southeast Asia, and true hummingbirds live only in the Americas, from Alaska and Canada all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and in the Caribbean, which are islands in the Atlantic between North and South America. There are birds in Sumatra that resemble hummingbirds and fill the same ecological niche, called sunbirds. Sunbirds also live in Africa, Australia, and parts of Asia. They’re tiny, although on average a little larger than hummingbirds, eat nectar and occasionally small insects, and males often have jewel-like iridescent feathers. But they can’t hover for very long and usually perch while they gather nectar from flowers. While their bills are long and slender, they are more curved than hummingbirds’ needle-like bills.

Eighteen species of sunbird and its close relative, the spiderhunters, live in Sumatra. But none have a striped yellow back with brown belly as described by the Irrgangs, and all are much larger than the reported length of 1.5 inches. The couples’ son, Mike Irrgang, has reported that his parents may have not included the bird’s tail in their estimated measurement, and that he thinks it was the same size as a “bee bird.” It’s not clear what he means by bee bird. There are birds called bee-eaters throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa that eat bees, but they’re much larger than sunbirds. He probably meant the bee hummingbird.

But there is another possibility. While the Irrgangs were adamant that they saw a bird, not an insect, there is a moth that might fit the description. It’s called the hermit hummingbird hawkmoth and it lives on Sumatra, as well as many other parts of Asia. It eats nectar and is most active at dawn and dusk, and it hovers like a hummingbird. Its body is mostly gray and brown, with yellow bands on the hind wings and the abdomen. It can grow almost two inches long, or 5 cm, with a wingspan a bit wider than its body is long.

In other words, it’s a moth that acts and in some respects looks like a hummingbird, and is just a shade smaller than the world’s smallest hummingbird, and its color and markings roughly match what the Irrgangs report. Other hummingbird hawk moths live throughout Europe and Asia, and are sometimes mistaken for birds. In North America we have hummingbird moths that look and act similar, and I have seen them in my garden in the evenings and mistaken them for hummingbirds. Sometimes I see an actual hummingbird and mistake it for a bee at first, incidentally, because it just doesn’t seem possible that a bird could be so small.

Then again, Sumatra is home to many, many birds and animals that are rare, threatened, and possibly have gone extinct since the 1950s without ever being officially studied and described. It’s possible there was once a tiny sunbird that resembled a hummingbird even more than the sunbirds and hawkmoths of Sumatra we know about. If so, let’s hope that one day, some lucky birder or ornithologist discovers it alive and well.

Finally, let’s finish with another seabird. The Bermuda petrel, also called the cahow, was a grey-brown bird that nested on various small islands in Bermuda. The Spanish visited the islands in the early 16th century, and while they didn’t settle there, they killed and ate as many cahows as they could catch along with their eggs. They also turned pigs loose on the islands so they’d have food waiting for them whenever they came back wanting bacon. Before then, approximately half a million cahows lived on the islands, but what the sailors and their rats didn’t eat, the pigs did.

The British colonized some of these islands in 1612, which were uninhabited by humans—for good reason, it turned out. The colonists kept dying of starvation. In 1614, rats ate up what little food the colonists had, so the colony evacuated to Cooper’s Island to get away from the rats and hopefully find something edible. There they found the cahow, which had moved to Cooper’s Island and a few nearby small islands to get away from the pigs. By 1620 the colonists had eaten them all. Every single bird. That was the end of the cahow…except that it wasn’t.

In 1951 Louis S. Mowbray, son of the Bermuda Aquarium director of the same name, got a few of his friends together to survey the rocky islets of the area. They were looking specifically for cahows, since reports of dead birds and even occasional live ones still trickled in. Mowbray’s father had even been given a live one which he kept as a pet, so Mowbray knew it was living somewhere.

Sure enough, they found it on four tiny islets. So how did it survive for over 300 years without anyone finding and eating them?

The cahow, it turns out, nests in burrows and a young bird stays in its burrow until it’s old enough to fly. Then, like the albatross, it soars for thousands of miles without landing anywhere but on the water’s surface for the first few years of its life, until it returns to Bermuda in November to nest. It lays one egg a year and mates for life. It arrives at night, courts its mate at night, and digs burrows in sheltered, hidden areas.

One of the people who helped Mowbray find the cahow was David Wingate, who at the time was just a kid. He later attended Cornell University, and after he graduated with a degree in zoology, he returned to Bermuda in 1958 and started his life’s work: saving the cahow and its environment.

He moved to Nonsuch Island, which had been more or less destroyed by colonists and their animals over the centuries. It’s only 14 acres in size, or 5.7 hectares, and is close to Cooper’s Island. Wingate dug up invasive plants, killed invasive animals, and planted native trees and shrubs. He even dug burrows for cahows that had special entrances to keep out the white-tailed tropicbird, which kills cahow chicks. He fought to keep developers from moving onto the island to build homes, fought the military that wanted to use the island for chemical testing. And finally, Nonsuch Island was declared a wildlife sanctuary.

The cahow’s population has grown from only 18 nesting pairs in 1951 to 105 in 2013. It is now the national bird of Bermuda. Wingate retired in 2000, but the conservation work he started continues on Nonsuch Island and other islands too. So if anyone tells you that one person can’t make a difference in the world, just tell them about how David Wingate saved Nonsuch Island, the cahow, and hundreds of other bird, animal, and plant species native to Bermuda. You can do anything if you’re willing to work hard enough.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 068: The Dingiso and the Hoan Kiem Turtle

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It’s time to look at two more supposedly mysterious, supposedly identified animals off those “Ten Cryptozoological Animals That Have Been FOUND Please Click Please Click” articles.

First is the dingiso, or bondegezou, which is just about as adorable as an animal can get:

Next is the Hoan Kiem Turtle:

Dat FACE

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re revisiting those “top ten cryptozoological animals found to be real!” clickbait articles that pop up online sometimes. In episode 24 we looked at two animals frequently found on those lists, so let’s examine two more today.

We’ll start in Papua New Guinea, a country that gets mentioned a lot on this podcast. I was curious, so I looked it up and now I’ve learned some geography that I desperately needed to know. Papua New Guinea is a country in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. Only Greenland is a bigger island than New Guinea, so we’re not talking a dinky little islet like the ones where cartoon shipwreck survivors end up. New Guinea has a huge mountain range, rainforests, wetlands, savannahs, coral reefs, and pretty much everything else an animal could want. More species live on New Guinea than in all of Australia. More species live on New Guinea than in all of the United States. More species live on New Guinea than in Australia and the United States combined. So it’s not surprising that new species are found there all the time.

People live on the island too, of course, and have for at least 40,000 years, probably much longer. People have lived on the island for so long, in fact, that something like 1,000 different languages are spoken there among the various tribes. The first animal we’re going to learn about today was known to the Moni tribe long before any scientists got wind of it.

The Moni people live in the remote mountainous rainforests of Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t find much information about the Moni except through Christian missionary sites, so as far as I can tell their culture was never studied before it started being influenced by outside groups. But one thing we do know is that the Moni are familiar with a black and white animal called the dingiso, or bondegezou, which holds the spirit of an ancestor. When one is encountered, it will sit up, whistle, and raise a paw in greeting.

No one outside of the Moni tribe paid any attention to this story until the 1980s, when someone sent a photograph of a dingiso to Tim Flannery, an Australian zoologist. He recognized it as a young tree kangaroo, but not one he was familiar with. In May of 1994 he led a wildlife survey expedition in the area and was able to examine a dead dingiso for himself. Sure enough, it was new to science.

The dingiso’s fur is black with white underparts and white markings on the face. Its fur is long and thick to keep it warm in the mountains, since it lives in high elevations just below the tree line. It’s about two and a half feet long, or 75 cm, not counting its tail, which doubles its length. Its face looks something like a bear’s.

Most of the information we have about the dingiso is based on what we know about other tree kangaroos, so may or may not be completely accurate. Females probably give birth to one baby at a time, which stays in its mother’s pouch while it grows. It eats leaves and fruit and lives both in trees and on the ground, although the Moni report that it spends most of its time on the ground.

The dingiso was formally described in 1995. In 2009, a BBC documentary spent eleven days searching for a dingiso with Moni tribesmen as their guides, and finally found and filmed one.

Naturally, the Moni don’t harm the dingiso, since you don’t hurt your ancestors. That has probably saved it from extinction, since the dingiso reproduces slowly and is a docile, harmless animal. Other tribes don’t have the same restriction, though, and hunt the dingiso for food. That and habitat loss due to mining and farming mean the dingiso is endangered. So little is known about it, and so few have ever been seen by scientists, that it could go extinct before we know much more about it than that it exists. But conservation organizations are working to protect it and other animals in New Guinea.

Oh, the whistling and waving activity the Moni describe is probably a threat display. But I like the Moni’s explanation better.

Our next cryptid supposedly identified is the Hoan Kiem Turtle from Vietnam. Specifically, it’s from the Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. According to the story, in the early 15th century emperor Lê Lợi, a great hero who led Vietnam to independence from China, had a magical sword called Heaven’s Will. Depending on which version of the story you hear, the sword was either given to him by a god called the Dragon King, given to him by the Golden Turtle God, or was found in the lake by a fisherman and given to the emperor. One day not long after Vietnam had successfully won independence, the emperor was boating on the lake when a turtle surfaced, grabbed the sword, and disappeared with it into the lake. In other stories, the turtle surfaced and asked for the sword, and the emperor realized it was the Golden Turtle God. Hoan Kiem Lake means “Lake of the Returned Sword.”

The lake isn’t deep, only six and a half feet, or 2 m, at its deepest, and it only covers around 30 acres in the middle of a very large city. There doesn’t seem to be a metric equivalent of acre, but if hectares mean anything to you, 30 acres is a little over 12 hectares.

Softshelled turtles of enormous size have been known in the lake for a long time, specifically the Yangtze giant softshell turtle. It’s the biggest freshwater turtle known, and can measure over six feet long, or almost 2 meters. It lives in rivers and lakes in Vietnam and China and eats pretty much anything, from plants to frogs, fish, crustaceans, and snails. Its nostrils look like a tiny pig’s snout. It’s a shy turtle that doesn’t surface very often, and it’s also extremely rare, almost extinct. There may only be three or four specimens left in the world. Captive breeding has not been successful so far.

So why is the Hoan Kiem Turtle considered a cryptid? Why is it on those identified cryptid lists? Two reasons.

First of all, until its death in January of 2016, there was one in the Hoan Kiem Lake, and rumor had it that this was the same individual that had taken the emperor’s sword back in 1428. Turtles can live for a long time, but probably not for 600 years. But no one knew there was a turtle remaining in the lake after the last one was killed in 1967, not until 1998 when someone caught it on video. The turtle was captured in 2011 for treatment of some injuries, possibly caused by the lake’s pollution, then released, and lived for another five years before it was found dead in the lake.

Second, there’s some controversy regarding whether the Hoan Kiem Turtle is actually a Yangtze giant softshell turtle or a different species. Most researchers think it’s the same species. A few Vietnamese biologists think it’s not, but the DNA studies they cite to back up their claims haven’t been published formally and may not have been conducted correctly.

So while there are mysteries associated with the turtle, it’s not really accurate to call it a cryptid that’s been identified. But that doesn’t mean it’s not really interesting. I hope researchers find more of them in the wild that can be relocated to a safe area where they can breed successfully.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 067: More Sea Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

Sei whales are neat and have gigantic mouths:

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

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

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

Hagelund’s sketch of the little animal he caught:

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

The strange animal seen from the Valhalla:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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