Category Archives: Europe

Episode 390: The Wallaby and Wiwaxia

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Thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Rock-wallaby bite size ‘packs a punch’

Tiny Australian wallaby the last living link to extinct giant kangaroos

Extraordinary Fossil of Giant Short-Faced Kangaroo Found in Australia

Wiwaxia corrugata – The Burgess Shale

The nabarlek:

The banded hare-wallaby:

Wiwaxia was a little less cute than wallabies are:

An artist’s rendition of what Wiwaxia might have looked like when alive [picture from last page linked above]:

Show transcript:

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

Every so often I get an animal suggestion that I’m positive we’ve already covered, but then I’m flabbergasted when it turns out we haven’t. That’s the case for the animals we’ll learn about this episode, with thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo!

A while ago, Jaxon left us a nice review and suggested we talk about wallabies. I was CONVINCED we’d talked about the wallaby repeatedly, but I think I was thinking about the wombat. We’ve hardly ever mentioned the wallaby, and it’s such a great animal!

The wallaby is a marsupial that basically looks like a miniature kangaroo, although some species grow pretty large. The resemblance makes sense because kangaroos and wallabies are closely related, but everything else about the wallaby family tree is confusing. That’s because there are a lot of animals called wallabies that aren’t actually the same type of animal. “Wallaby” is just a catchall term used by people to describe any animal that looks kind of like a miniature kangaroo.

Wallabies are native to Australia and New Guinea, but various species have been introduced to other places where they’re invasive, including New Zealand, France, England, Scotland, and Hawaii. Most of these non-native populations happened by accident when pets or zoo animals escaped into the wild, but some were introduced on purpose by people who didn’t know they were causing damage to the local ecosystems.

One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the name of the family they share, Macropodidae, means big feet. So, you know, Bigfoot exists but maybe doesn’t look like most people think. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance. But there’s a lot more to this hopping than you might think.

While the wallaby or kangaroo has strong leg muscles, what’s even more important is that it has very strong, very elastic tendons in its legs. These basically act like massively strong rubber bands. When you stretch a rubber band, it stores energy that it releases when you let go of it and it snaps back and whips you in the thumb and you wonder why you did that because it hurt. The tendons in the wallaby’s legs store energy when it hops, and when it lands, the energy releases and helps bounce the animal right back into the next hop. Once it gets going, its muscles are only doing a fraction of the work to keep it hopping at high speed. Even better for the animal, a lot of its breathing is regulated by its movements when it’s hopping, so it always has plenty of oxygen to power its body while moving fast. When it lands after a bounce, the impact pushes its breath out of its lungs, but the action of bringing its legs forward helps suck fresh air in. It’s an incredibly efficient way to move, and allows the animal to travel long distances to find food and water without spending a lot of energy.

Wallabies eat plants, and naturally the bigger species can eat bigger, tougher plants than smaller species. The exception is the dwarf rock-wallaby, according to a study published in March of 2024. There are over a dozen species of rock-wallaby, but in general they live in small groups in rocky areas. They’re nocturnal and spend the day sleeping in shady areas among the rocks, under rock overhangs, or in small caves in cliffs. At night they come out to find plants, but because they live in such harsh environments, most of the plants are pretty tough. Two species of dwarf rock-wallaby in particular turn out to have incredibly strong jaws for their size, as strong as the jaws of much larger species. Their teeth are also larger to help them grind up tough plants, and one species, called the nabarlek wallaby, even grows new molars throughout its life as the old ones wear down. That’s the only marsupial known to grow new molars throughout its life.

The nabarlek is reddish-gray in color and only weighs about 3 ½ pounds at most, or 1.6 kilograms, and is barely more than a foot long, or 30 cm, with its fluffy tail almost doubling that length. When it hops, it curls its tail up over its back. It eats grass, ferns, and other tough plants. Like most species of wallaby, it’s endangered due to habitat loss and introduced predators like foxes.

Another very small wallaby is the banded hare-wallaby, which only has a few small populations remaining on a few islands. It’s almost exactly the same size and weight as the nabarlek and is gray with lighter speckles and darker stripes on its back. It’s also nocturnal and lives in brushy areas where it can hide easily.

Even though these wallabies are smaller than domestic cats, some 45,000 years ago there used to be a type of kangaroo that was extremely large. The short-faced kangaroo stood as tall as a big grey or red kangaroo, about five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, but was much bulkier—as much as twice the weight of a modern kangaroo. It was so heavy that some researchers think it couldn’t hop but actually walked on its hind legs instead like a person. (Bigfoot.)

A few years ago, scientists comparing the genetic sequence of the short-faced kangaroo to other macropods discovered that this big strong kangaroo’s closest living relative was the tiny banded hare-wallaby.

Our next animal is a suggestion from Lorenzo, who sent a bunch of requests a while back. Before we talk about the animal, I should probably explain the situation with the List. This is the list of topics that I want to cover, a lot of them suggestions from listeners and a lot of them animals I’ve added myself. It started out as a simple Word document, but after a few years I moved it over to a spreadsheet and divided it into categories. There’s a page for mammals, a page for birds, and so on. I copied and pasted Lorenzo’s suggestions into the reptiles page because I recognized the first few as reptiles, or at least therapsids.

Well, at some point I took a closer look at the list of Lorenzo’s suggestions and added a note, “these may not all be reptiles.” Then later I took an even closer look and added another note, “these down here are basal arthropods, why did you put them under reptiles?” But next to today’s animal, at some point I added the note “I think this is a bird.”

Dear listener, Wiwaxia is not a bird. Scientists aren’t actually sure what it is, but 100% it is not a bird. It lived just over half a billion years ago in the early to middle Cambrian period, which we talked about in episode 69 about the Cambrian explosion. That’s when life on earth evolved from relatively simple, tiny organisms to much larger and more complex ones. Many of the Cambrian animals look bizarre and confusing to us today because they’re so different from the animals we’re familiar with, and that’s the case for Wiwaxia.

Wiwaxia grew about 2 inches long at most, or 5 cm, and slightly less wide. It was flat underneath like a slug, and it probably moved sort of like a slug too. The upper part of its body was covered in overlapping plates called sclerites, which acted as armor. As the animal grew older, it also developed spines that grew between the sclerites in two rows, with the longest spines growing 2 inches long, or 5 cm. Modern marine invertebrates have mineralized spines and scales that make them harder, but this hadn’t evolved yet and wiwaxia’s were basically the same material as the rest of the body, but tougher. Both the scales and the spines were shed and regrown every so often.

Like all the other animals in the Cambrian, wiwaxia lived in warm, shallow ocean water. It had a feeding apparatus at its front that had tiny conical teeth, and scientists think it used this feeding apparatus to scrape bacteria off the microbial mats that lived on the sea floor in most places, or it might have lived directly on the sea floor or on rocks. Either way, its feeding apparatus is enough like the radula found in modern mollusks that it’s been tentatively placed in the phylum Mollusca. This means it may be a very distant ancestor of slugs, snails, clams, mussels, oysters, squid, octopuses, and lots of other animals.

Wiwaxia was originally classified as an ancestor or at least a relation of modern polychaete worms, and a lot of scientists still think that’s correct. Since the original description of wiwaxia in 1899, a lot of specimens have been discovered in the Burgess shale in Canada, along with lots more found in China, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Australia, with more fossils found in other places that might be wiwaxia spines.

Because all the Cambrian fossils discovered are flattened, there’s a limit to how much we know about its anatomy when alive. The best fossils are reexamined frequently as new and more powerful methods of study are invented. Wiwaxia was apparently very common throughout the world between about 520 and 505 million years ago, so as more and more fossils are discovered, we’ll definitely learn more about it.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 389: Updates 7 and the Lava Bear

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

Further reading:

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

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

Bootlace Worm: Earth’s Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin

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

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

First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered

Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction

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

A (badly) stuffed lava bear:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 387: The Link Between Fossils and Folklore

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Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode!

Further reading:

Paleontologists Debunk Popular Claim that Protoceratops Fossils Inspired Legend of Griffin

The Fossil Dragons of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland

The Lindworm statue:

A woolly rhinoceros skull:

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

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

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 384: Dragons Revisited

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This week we need to thanks a bunch of listeners for their suggestions: Bowie, Eilee, Pranav, and Yuzu!

Further reading:

Elaborate Komodo dragon armor defends against other dragons

Giant killer lizard fossil shines new light on early Australians

A New Origin for Dragon Folklore?

The Wyvern of Wonderland

The Komodo dragon:

The beautiful tree goanna:

The perentie:

Fossilized scale tree bark looks like reptile scales:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic we talked about back in episode 53. That episode was about dragons, including the Komodo dragon. Since then, Bowie has requested to learn more about the Komodo dragon and Eilee and Pranav both suggested an updated dragon episode. We also have a related suggestion from Yuzu, who wants to learn more about goannas in general.

We’ll start with the Komodo dragon, which gets its name because it’s a huge and terrifying monitor lizard. It can grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, which means it’s the biggest lizard alive today. It has serrated teeth that can be an inch long, or 2.5 cm, and its skin is covered with bony osteoderms that make it spiky and act as armor. Since the Komodo dragon is the apex predator in its habitat, it only needs armor to protect it from other Komodo dragons.

Fortunately for people who like to hike and have picnics in nature, the Komodo dragon only lives on four small islands in Indonesia in southeast Asia, including the island of Komodo. Young Komodo dragons have no armor and spend most of the time in trees, where they eat insects and other small animals. As the dragon gets older and heavier, it spends more and more time on the ground. Its armor develops at that point and is especially strong on the head. The only patches on the head that don’t have osteoderms are around the eyes and nostrils, the edges of the mouth, and over the pineal eye. That’s an organ on the top of the head that can sense light. Yes, it’s technically a third eye!

The Komodo dragon is an ambush predator. When an animal happens by, the dragon jumps at it and gives it a big bite from its serrated teeth. Not only are its teeth huge and dangerous, its saliva contains venom. It’s very good at killing even a large animal like a wild pig quickly, but if the animal gets away it often dies from venom, infection, and blood loss.

Like a lot of reptiles, the Komodo dragon can swallow food that’s a lot bigger than its mouth. The bones of its jaws are what’s called loosely articulated, meaning the joints can flex to allow the dragon to swallow a goat whole, for instance. Its stomach can also expand to hold a really big meal all at once. After a dragon has swallowed as much as it can hold, it lies around in the sun to digest its food. After its food is digested, which can take days, it horks up a big wad of whatever it can’t digest. This includes hair or feathers, horns, hooves, teeth, and so on, all glued together with mucus.

A Komodo dragon eats anything it can catch, and the bigger the dragon is, the bigger the animals it can catch. One thing Komodo dragons are just fine with eating are other Komodo dragons.

As we mentioned a few minutes ago, the Komodo dragon is a type of monitor lizard, and there are lots of monitor lizards that live throughout much of the warmest parts of the earth, including Australia. Yuzu suggested we talk about the goanna, which is the term for monitor lizards in the genus Varanus, although it’s also a term sometimes used for all monitor lizards. Goannas are more closely related to snakes than to other types of lizard.

Like the Komodo dragon, the goanna will eat pretty much any animal it can catch, and will also scavenge already dead animals. Smaller goannas mostly eat insects, especially the tiny goanna often called the short-tailed pygmy monitor or just the pygmy monitor. Its tail is actually pretty long for its size. It only grows about 8 inches long at most, or 20 cm, and babies are less than the length of your pinkie finger. It spends most of its time underground in a burrow, but comes out to hunt for grasshoppers and other insects, spiders, scorpions, and sometimes frogs and small snakes. Many species of goanna spend the hottest part of the day in a burrow, and some species will hibernate in winter.

Most goannas spend all their time on the ground unless they’re actually underground, but some live in trees. The tree goanna, also called the lace monitor or just lacy, can grow up to seven feet long, or over two meters, but is lightly built to climb around on tree branches looking for food. The tree goanna eats a whole lot of bird eggs, along with whatever animals it can catch in trees or on the ground. It eats a lot of carrion and will even get into trash cans if it smells food. When the female is ready to lay her eggs, she digs a hole in the side of a termite nest and lays them in the nest. The termites repair the hole, which hides the eggs, and when the babies hatch, they have lots of termites to eat. The mother goanna keeps watch on the termite nest and once her eggs hatch, she’ll dig into it again to let her babies out.

Genetic testing has discovered that the tree goanna is the closest living relative to the Komodo dragon, but another relative is the biggest goanna alive today in Australia. It’s called the perentie and it can definitely grow up to 8 and a half feet long, or 2.5 meters, and possibly close to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. That’s almost the length of the Komodo dragon.

Long as it is, the perentie isn’t very heavy for its size. It has big claws that allow it to dig quickly, so that if it feels threatened it can dig a burrow and hide in it in only a few minutes. It can also climb trees and is a fast runner. Sometimes it will rear up on its hind legs, propping itself up with its tail, to get a good look around. It’s covered with a maze-like pattern of spots and speckles, and it has a very long neck and a very long tail. Like most monitor lizards, its head is flattened so that it looks a little like a snake’s head. Also like other monitor lizards, it has a long forked tongue that it flicks in and out like a snake to detect the chemical signature of other animals nearby, sort of like smelling but with the tongue.

Also like other monitor lizards, the perentie has a venomous bite. Its venom isn’t all that strong, but you still wouldn’t want to get nipped by one. A big perentie will kill and eat just about anything it can catch, including wombats and small kangaroos. It’s not dangerous to humans, though, and in fact very few people in Australia have ever seen a perentie in the wild. It’s shy and lives in remote areas, mostly in the interior of the country over to the western coast.

There used to be a goanna in Australia that was even bigger than the perentie, but it went extinct around 50,000 years ago. We talked about it briefly in episode 325, but Pranav suggested we learn more about it. It’s called megalania and not only was it bigger than the perentie, it made the Komodo dragon look like a little baby lizard. Megalania may have grown as much as 23 feet long, or 7 meters, although most scientists these days think it wasn’t quite that big. The latest estimates are still pretty big, possibly 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters. It was also heavily built, more like the Komodo dragon than the perentie, so it may have weighed as much as a polar bear. That’s about 1200 pounds, or around 550 kg, but I thought the polar bear comparison was funny. We don’t know for sure how big megalania was because we don’t have a complete skeleton.

Megalania has been classified with the living goannas in the genus Varanus, so it was probably related to the Komodo dragon, although we don’t know exactly how closely. It was probably venomous, and we know its teeth were serrated like the Komodo dragon’s. It lived throughout much of eastern Australia and may have been even more widespread, we just don’t know because we don’t have very many fossils.

Megalania lived alongside another giant monitor lizard in what is now Queensland, the Komodo dragon. That’s right, the Komodo dragon once lived in Australia, although it went extinct there around 300,000 years ago. Megalania went extinct around the time that humans first arrived in Australia, so it’s very possible that the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal Australians encountered it. In 2015, a study was published detailing the discovery of a large goanna osteoderm from a cave system in Queensland. The osteoderm has been dated to about 50,000 years ago and probably belonged to megalania, and some scientists think humans may have been a factor in its extinction, along with climate change.

There are supposedly stories passed down for thousands of years among the Aboriginal Australian peoples that suggest meetings with megalania. I tried hard to find accounts of any of these stories to share, but the sources were always questionable. I did learn that European accounts of the Dreamtime, especially older ones, are inaccurate at best. European colonizers didn’t fully understand the Aboriginal cultures and in many cases weren’t interested in understanding them. They just wanted to collect stories that they would then change to fit the European worldview. This trend continues to the present day, with non-Aboriginal writers changing, misinterpreting, or even straight up inventing Dreamtime stories to fit their own interests. Sometimes that interest is cryptozoology. From what I was able to discover, there really is one aspect of the Dreaming that does apparently include a giant goanna, but that the traditions involved are especially sacred and not meant for outsiders to learn. So it’s none of our business.

As we discussed in episode 53, European stories about dragons were probably inspired by snakes, since early dragons were described as snake-like. Dragon stories in other parts of the world were probably inspired by various local reptiles such as crocodiles. Fossilized bones also played a part, since in the olden days no one knew what dinosaurs were. All anyone knew was that sometimes they found gigantic bones that seemed to be made of stone, and people made up stories to explain them.

Stories about giant reptiles are common throughout much of the world, and in 2020 a study was published suggesting that one of the reasons wasn’t an animal at all. It was a plant, specifically a 300 million year old plant called Lepidodendron, also called the scale tree.

The scale tree wasn’t actually a tree, but it was a really big plant that could grow 160 feet tall, or 50 meters. It’s been extinct for a long time, but it does have living relations called quillworts that kind of look like weird grass.

The scale tree gets its name from the diamond-shaped pattern on its trunk, which looks for all the world like reptile scales. These were just places where leaves once grew, but as the plant got taller, it shed its lower leaves as new ones grew from the top. Different species of the plant had different scale patterns. The study suggests that fossilized pieces of scale tree trunks inspired stories about giant reptiles. Since the plants grew throughout the supercontinent Pangaea and often ended up fossilized in coal beds, their fossils have been found in many different parts of the world.

Let’s finish with a dragon story from England, specifically the village of Sockburn in County Durham. It’s referred to as the Sockburn Worm, since “worm” used to mean any creature that was snakey or worm-shaped in appearance. It’s closely related to the story of the Lambton Worm that we talked about in episode 53.

Once upon a time in the olden days, maybe around 750 years ago, maybe longer ago, Sockburn and the farmland around it were terrorized by a dragon. The dragon had a poisonous breath and would eat anyone it came across, and killed and ate all the livestock it could find. No one could kill it.

Sir John Conyers was a knight who lived in the area and he decided he had to do something. He got dressed in his armor and went to the local church to pray, and said he would give up his only son’s life if it meant killing the dragon. Then he set out to find the dragon.

He didn’t so much find the dragon as the dragon found him. Instead of getting eaten, Sir John drew his magical sword and battled the dragon until finally he lopped its head off with one massive chop. Sir John survived and so did his son.

Centuries later, in 1855, a writer was inspired by the story and wrote a poem based on it. He eventually included the poem in a book called Alice Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. You may know the poem “The Jabberwock,” and now you know the dragon story that inspired it.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 381: Out of Place Birds

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

Further reading:

ABA Rare Bird Alert

One Reason Migrating Birds Get Lost Is Out of This World

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

A Vagrant European Robin Is Drawing Huge Crowds in China

Bird migration: When vagrants become pioneers

A red-cockaded woodpecker:

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

Steller’s sea eagle:

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

A robin:

Mandarin ducks:

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

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 380: Woodpeckers

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Thanks to Joel and Mary for suggesting some really interesting woodpeckers this week!

Further watching:

Rare woodpecker thought extinct spotted in Ohio

The green woodpecker really likes to eat ants [picture by Remyymer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65008314]:

The white-headed woodpecker looks like its face got splashed with paint:

The red-headed woodpecker has the prettiest shade of red [picture by colleen – originally posted to Flickr as Red Headed Woodpecker, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6639146]:

The acorn woodpecker looks like it got its face splashed with white paint and then dipped its beak in black paint [picture by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136903489]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a type of bird that several people have suggested, the woodpecker! Thanks to Joel and Mary for their suggestions, and I could swear someone else suggested woodpeckers a while back. If that was you, thank you and I’m sorry I didn’t write it down!

It’s funny that we haven’t talked about woodpeckers very often, because they are definitely strange animals. How many animals use their head to hammer holes in wood? The woodpecker has a strong, heavy bill that it uses to drill holes in trees to find hidden insects and other invertebrates. A lot of insects dig little burrows in wood, and the woodpecker hammers away at the wood until it exposes the burrow. Then it has to get the insect or grub out of the burrow without it getting away, so it has a long, sticky tongue with barbs at the end. It can stick its tongue into the burrow and use it to drag the insect out and eat it.

When I say woodpeckers have long tongues, I mean their tongues are way longer than you think. The woodpecker’s skull contains a special cavity that wraps all the way around the brain and back down to the right nostril, and this cavity is where the main part of the tongue is when the woodpecker isn’t actually using it. It also helps cushion the brain and keep it from moving too much while the woodpecker is pecking. The skull itself is lined with spongy bone to soften impacts too.

The woodpecker also has a lot of other adaptations to using its entire head like a hammer. To protect its eyes from debris and pressure damage, it has a thick membrane that it uses to cover the eye, like built-in safety goggles. It has tiny, tough feathers that protect the nostrils from debris, and its nostrils are usually very small and thin too. Even its skin is thicker than that of most birds.

Woodpeckers have weird feet too. Almost all species have four toes, two that point forward, two that point backward. This arrangement is called zygodactyly, and it’s a trait also found in parrots and some other birds, and in chameleons. It allows the woodpecker to climb trees and branches securely and easily. The woodpecker also has a relatively short tail with stiff feathers that it uses to prop itself up against a tree trunk while hammering.

The woodpecker doesn’t just use its hammering ability to find food. It also hammers to communicate with other woodpeckers, the same way other birds use song. Each species has its own pattern of drumming, and the sound can attract a mate or tell rivals that this territory is already taken. When it’s communicating, the woodpecker will drum on different surfaces than when it’s just looking for food. This might be a hollow tree that amplifies the sound, or even an artificial surface. The first time I observed this as a birdwatcher was when I noticed a red-breasted woodpecker hammering repeatedly on a metal light post.

Woodpeckers do make ordinary sounds, though. Mary suggested the European green woodpecker and pointed out that its old name is yaffle, which mimics its call. This is what the green woodpecker sounds like:

[green woodpecker call]

Birders still refer to the sound as yaffling, which is the funniest word I’ve said all day.

The green woodpecker is native to much of Europe and parts of Asia. It has a bright red head and a black mask on its face, and its body is mostly an olive green color with a yellow rump patch. It’s a large bird, with a wingspan up to 20 inches across, or 51 cm. It especially likes to eat ants and spends most of its time on the ground looking for them. When it finds an ant nest, it will use its bill to open the nest up and then it licks up all the yummy ants and larvae with its long sticky tongue. As an example of how long a woodpecker’s tongue is, the green woodpecker has a tongue 4 inches long, or 10 cm, while its entire body is 14 inches long, or 36 cm.

Unlike most woodpeckers, the green woodpecker doesn’t do a lot of drumming or woodpecking. When it does, it’s mostly on very soft or rotten wood, and it’s probably not looking for food but excavating a nest hole to lay eggs in. Its favorite habitat is open woodland, since it can nest and hide in the trees but find lots of ants on the ground.

Joel suggested we learn about the white-headed woodpecker. I’d never heard of that one before, probably because it only lives in mountainous pine forests in parts of the Pacific northwest of Canada and the United States. It’s a glossy black in color with a mostly white head and a streak of bright white on its wings. Males have a red head patch too. It mostly eats pine seeds, which are found in pine cones. The seeds are quite large and the white-headed woodpecker is relatively small, only about 9 inches long, or 23 cm.

It will take a pine seed, wedge it into a crevice in a tree, and break it into bite-sized pieces by hammering it. It also eats insects, but it mainly finds them under the bark of trees, and it will sometimes peck little holes into tree trunks and eat the sap that oozes out. Unlike pretty much every woodpecker known, the white-headed woodpecker’s tongue isn’t especially long, probably because it doesn’t need a long tongue to find pine seeds.

This is what the white-headed woodpecker sounds like:

[white-headed woodpecker call]

One of my favorite birds is the red-headed woodpecker, which has a vibrantly red head and a black and white body that almost looks checkered. It’s native to North America and lives year-round in much of the eastern and central United States, but for some reason it took me years as a birdwatcher before I saw one for the first time. I didn’t know just how beautiful it really is until I saw one in person. Red is my favorite color, and the red-headed woodpecker’s red head is my exact favorite shade of red.

The red-headed woodpecker is about the size of the white-headed woodpecker, or a little larger. It eats lots of insects but will also eat seeds, berries and other fruit, and even the eggs of other birds. It sometimes catches insects on the wing. It’s also one of only a few species of woodpecker that stores food, hiding it in crevices in trees or under the shingles of people’s houses. Occasionally when it catches too many grasshoppers to eat, it will wedge the living grasshoppers in crevices so tightly that the insect is stuck there until the bird comes back when it’s hungry. That’s disturbing.

Another bird that caches food is the acorn woodpecker, which lives in parts of southwestern North America down through Central America. It’s mostly black with white patches on the face and black and white streaks underneath. Males have a red patch on the back of the head too. As you probably guessed from its name, it eats a lot of acorns along with insects, fruit, and tree sap. Because acorns are seasonal foods, only available in the fall, the acorn woodpecker stores acorns to eat later in the year. It hides the acorns in holes and crevices, often pecking little holes in a tree specifically for storage, but as the acorns dry out they take up less space. The bird spends a lot of time throughout the year moving its acorns to better hiding spaces.

The acorn woodpecker lives in small flocks of up to about a dozen or 15 birds. All birds in the flock help raise any babies, and in years where there aren’t very many acorns, only a few of the females in the group will lay eggs. In years where there are lots of acorns, all of the females will usually lay eggs. They all lay their eggs in the same nesting cavity and the babies are raised together.

So why do so many woodpeckers have such bright colors and markings? Many are black and white, often with red or yellow markings on the head or neck. They look conspicuous to us, but the black and white patterning blends in with the pattern of light and shadow under trees. The bright spots of color help attract mates, since a bird with brightly colored feathers shows other birds that they’re healthy. In many species, only the male has a red patch, or the female’s red patch may be smaller than the male’s.

Way back in episode 9 we talked about the ivory-billed woodpecker and some of its close relations. The ivory-billed woodpecker was thought to be extinct but possible sightings and audio recordings indicate it may still be alive in remote areas of the southeastern United States. Most recently, video footage of a bird spotted in Ohio has the controversy starting up again. I’ve linked to the video in the show notes. The bird in the video is probably just the very similar-looking pileated woodpecker, but the light isn’t good so it’s hard to tell for sure. It’s just barely possible it might actually be an ivory-billed woodpecker. Let’s hope it is an ivory-billed.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 372: Mystery Bovids

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Thanks to Will and Måns for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some mystery bovids, or cows and cow relations!

Further reading:

A Book of Creatures: Songòmby

Kouprey: The Ultimate Mystery Mammal

A musk ox (top) and a wild yak (bottom):

A young kouprey bull from the 1930s:

Sculpture of two grown kouprey bulls [photo by Christian Pirkl – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73848355]:

A banteng bull (with a cow behind him) [photo taken from this site]:

A qilin/kilin/kirin looking backwards:

The “purple” calf:

The Milka purple cow:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about some mystery bovids, or cow relations, suggested by Will and Måns, whose name I am probably mispronouncing.

We’ll start with a mystery about the musk ox, which is not otherwise a mysterious animal. Måns emailed about reading a children’s book about animals that had a picture of a musk ox in the part about the Gobi Desert. The problem is, the musk ox is native to the Arctic and was once found throughout Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. So the question is, was the book wrong or are there really musk oxen in the Gobi Desert?

We’ll start by learning about the musk ox and the Gobi Desert. The musk ox can stand up to 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It has thick, dense, shaggy fur all over, a tiny tail only about four inches long, or 10 cm, and horns that curve down close to the sides of its head and then curve up again at the ends.

The musk ox is well adapted to the cold, which isn’t a surprise since it evolved during the ice ages. Its ancestors lived alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Pleistocene megafauna. Like many cold-adapted animals, its fur consists of a thick undercoat that keeps it warm, and a much longer layer of fur that protects the softer undercoat. The undercoat is so soft and so good at keeping the animal warm in bitterly cold temperatures that people will sometimes keep musk oxen in order to gather the undercoat in spring when it starts to shed, to use for making clothing and blankets. But it’s definitely not a domesticated animal. It can be aggressive and extremely dangerous.

A warm coat isn’t the musk ox’s only cold adaptation. The hemoglobin in its blood is able to function well even when it’s cold, which isn’t the case for most mammals. It lives in small herds that gather close together in really cold weather to share body heat, and if a predator threatens the herd, the adults will form a ring around the calves, their heads facing outward. Since a musk ox is huge, heavy, and can run surprisingly fast, plus it has horns, if a wolf or other predator is butted by a musk ox it might end up fatally injured.

The main predator of the musk ox is the human, who hunted it almost to extinction by the early 20th century. It was completely extirpated in Alaska but was reintroduced there and in parts of Canada in the late 20th century. Similarly, it was reintroduced to parts of Siberia and even parts of northern Europe, although not all the European introductions were successful.

So what about the Gobi Desert? It’s nowhere near the Arctic. Not all deserts are hot. A desert just has limited rainfall, and the Gobi is a cold desert. Parts of the Gobi are grasslands and parts are sandy or rocky, and it covers a huge expanse of land in central Asia, mainly divided between northern China and southern Mongolia. Some parts of it do get limited rainfall in the summer and limited snowfall and frost in the winter, but for the most part it’s dry and therefore has limited vegetation for animals to eat.

Animals do live in the Gobi, though. The wild Bactrian camel, which has two humps, is found nowhere else in the world and is critically endangered. The Mongolian wild ass lives in parts of the Gobi, as do several species of antelope and gazelle, wild sheep, and ibex. The Gobi bear, which is the rarest bear in the world, also lives in the Gobi, along with smaller animals like hares, foxes, polecats, marmots, and various lizards, snakes, and birds. Occasionally wolves and snow leopards visit parts of the Gobi. So do humans, specifically nomadic herders who travel through parts of the desert to find food for their animals.

Of all the animals found in the Gobi, and in central Asia in general, the musk ox is not listed on any scholarly site I could find. Despite its name, it’s not actually closely related to other cattle and is instead most closely related to goats and sheep. However, a close relation of the domestic cow and its ancestors is the wild yak, the ancestor of the domestic yak. The wild yak lives mostly in the Himalayas these days but was once much more widespread, and the domestic yak is farmed by nomadic herders in the colder, more mountainous parts of the Gobi.

The yak isn’t closely related to the musk ox, but it does have a very similar-looking long, shaggy coat. Its horns point forward and up like cattle horns, but to someone who doesn’t really know much about yaks or musk ox, it would be easy to get the two confused. This seems to be what has happened in the case of the children’s book Måns read and in various non-academic websites. I think we can call this mystery solved.

Next, let’s go on to Will’s suggestion of mystery bovids. The family Bovidae includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don’t have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw, and instead has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants.

One mystery bovid is a creature from Madagascar, called the habeby. It’s supposed to look like a big white sheep with brown or black spots. It has cloven hooves and droopy ears but not horns, and it’s supposed to be nocturnal and never seen in the daytime. Its eyes are very large and staring. It’s shy and fortunately not dangerous. Bovids are almost always diurnal, so a nocturnal bovid would be quite unusual.

Since sheep and other bovids aren’t native to Madagascar, it’s much more likely that the habeby is a type of large lemur that looks enough like a sheep at a distance that people thought it was a sheep. Either it’s extinct now or it lives in such remote areas that it’s never seen anymore.

Another Madagascar mystery animal is called the songòmby, which either looks like a wild ox or a horse depending on the story. Like the habeby it has floppy ears, a spotted coat, and hooves. Some stories say it has a single horn, some stories say it has a pair of horns, and other stories say it has no horns at all. It lives in mountainous areas and can run incredibly fast uphill, but is much slower downhill because its long ears flop over its eyes and it has trouble seeing where it’s going. This is fortunate, because it’s also supposed to eat people.

One clue to the songòmby’s possible real identity comes from some stories that state it always looks backwards over its back, and is only ever seen from the side. This is reminiscent of how the Chinese kilin is often represented, and also explains why the songòmby has a varying number of horns and looks like a cow or horse but is supposed to eat people. The kilin is often depicted as having both hooves and fangs, and may have a single horn, a pair of horns, or no horns at all. Arab traders began stopping in Madagascar around a thousand years ago and would have brought Chinese goods, including some items decorated with kilins. It’s possible that the kilin artwork inspired the story of the songòmby, but it’s also so similar to the habeby in some ways that details of that animal may have been incorporated into the story of the songòmby, or vice versa.

Way back in episode 100 we talked briefly about an animal called the kouprey. It’s a wild ox native to southeast Asia, sometimes called the forest ox. It can stand over six feet tall at the shoulder, or two meters, and while bulls are dark brown, cows and calves are a lighter brownish-gray. Both have white lower legs with a dark stripe down the front of the front legs. The bull’s horns look like those of a domestic cow or wild yak, but are extremely large and curve forward, but the cow’s horns grow up and back, more like an antelope’s horns. As a bull ages, the tips of his horns start to fray and end up looking almost tassled. A bull also develops a large dewlap as he ages, which in older bulls can actually be so big it touches the ground.

By 1937, when a kouprey was sent to a zoo in Paris, the animal was probably mostly restricted to the forests of Cambodia. Before then it had been completely unknown to science, but after that, European big game hunters went to Cambodia to kill as many as possible. It was already rare and by the 1950s there were probably fewer than 500 individuals left alive. By the 1960s, there were probably no more than 100 animals left alive. The last verified sighting of one was in 1983.

Recently, some scientists have questioned whether the kouprey actually existed at all. Its description sounds a lot like another bovid, the wild banteng. A bull banteng is dark brown or black while the cows are light brown or reddish-brown. Both have white lower legs and a white patch on the rump. Some scientists started to think that either the kouprey was a misidentification of the banteng or the hybrid offspring of a banteng and a domestic cow.

A 2006 genetic study suggested that this was the case, that the kouprey was just a hybrid animal. But a follow-up study, including genetic testing of a kouprey skull that dated back to before cattle were domesticated, came to a different conclusion. The kouprey was a distinct species, not a hybrid animal. The real mystery now is whether it’s still alive or if it has gone extinct in the last 40 years.

We’ll finish with a domestic cow that’s a little bit of a mystery. A popular brand of chocolate in Europe is Milka, and since 1973 many of its advertisements have included a light purple and white cow with a bell around her neck. Well, in 2012 a calf was born in Serbia that actually looked like the Milka purple cow. It was a purple cow!

In January of 2012 a bull calf was born on a small farm in Serbia. There’s not a lot of information available about it, but it looks like it was a breed of cattle called the busa, or maybe a busa cross. The busa is mainly raised in the mountainous parts of Serbia and mostly raised as a meat animal. It’s rare these days but was once extremely popular in the area, so a lot of cattle raised in Serbia have at least some busa ancestry. The busa can be white with darker markings, or a solid color with no white or very little white. It can be red-brown, black, or gray.

In pictures, the purple calf’s mother looks to be black and white. The calf itself is white with markings that look pale blue-gray, almost lilac. The pictures aren’t very good so it’s hard to tell. The farmer was surprised when he saw the calf and called a veterinarian to make sure it was healthy, which it was. The veterinarian suggested the calf’s strange coloration was just a rare color mutation.

As it happens, a blue-gray coloration is common in a variety of busa cattle raised in Macedonia. It’s also a common coloration in other breeds of cattle. A pale version of this color can look almost like a shade of lilac. Since I can’t find a follow-up to the 2012 articles about the calf, it’s probable that as he grew up, his spots darkened to look more gray than purple. The farmer said that he would be keeping the little purple cow instead of slaughtering him to make steaks and hamburgers, so hopefully there’s still a handsome purple and white bull living his best life in the mountains of Serbia.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 368: The Bison

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Thanks to Jason for suggesting this week’s topic, the bison!

Further reading:

New research documents domestic cattle genetics in modern bison herds

Higgs Bison: Mysterious Hybrid of Bison and Cattle Hidden in Ice Age Cave Art

A cave painting of steppe bison and other animals:

An American bison [photo by Kim Acker, taken from this site]:

Some European bison [photo by Pryndak Vasyl, taken from this site]:

The bison sound in this episode came from this site.

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about the bison, a suggestion from Jason. There are two species of bison alive today, the American bison and the European bison. Both are sometimes called buffalo while the European bison is sometimes called the wisent. I’m mostly going to call it the wisent too in this episode so I only have to say the word bison 5,000 times instead of 10,000.

Bison are herd animals that can congregate in huge numbers, but these big herds are made up of numerous smaller groups. The smaller groups are made up of a lead female, called a cow, who is usually older, other cows, and all their offspring, called calves. Males, called bulls, live in small bachelor groups. The American bison mostly eats grass while the European bison eats a wider selection of plants in addition to grass.

The bison is a big animal with horns, a shaggy dark brown coat, and a humped shoulder. The American bison’s shoulder is especially humped, which allows for the attachment of strong neck muscles. This allows the animal to clear snow from the ground by swinging its head side to side. The European bison’s hump isn’t as pronounced and it carries its head higher. The bison looks slow and clumsy, but it can actually run up to 35 mph, or 55 km/hour, can swim well, and can jump obstacles that are 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters.

The American bison can stand over six and a half feet high at the shoulder, or 2 meters, while the European bison stands almost 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters. This is massively huge! Bison are definitely ice age megafauna that once lived alongside mammoths and woolly rhinos, so we’re lucky they’re still around. Both species almost went extinct in recent times and were only saved by a coordinated effort by early conservationists.

The American bison in particular has a sad story. Before European colonizers arrived, bison were widespread throughout North America. Bison live in herds that migrate sometimes long distances to find food, and many of the North American tribes were also migratory to follow the herds, because the bison was an important part of their diet and they also used its hide and other body parts to make items they needed. The colonizers knew that, and they knew that by killing off the bison, the people who depended on bison to live would starve to death. Since bison were also considered sacred, the emotional and societal impact of colonizers killing the animals was also considerable.

In the 19th century, colonizers killed an estimated 50 million bison. A lot of them weren’t even used for anything. People would shoot as many bison as possible from trains and just leave the bodies to rot, and this practice was actually encouraged by the railroads, who advertised these “hunting” trips. The United States government also encouraged the mass killing of bison and even had soldiers go out to kill as many bison as possible. Bison that escaped the coordinated slaughter often caught diseases spread by domestic cattle, and the increased plowing and fencing of prairie land reduced the food available to bison. By 1900, the number of American bison in the world was probably only about 300.

As early as the 1860s people started to sound the alarm about the bison’s impending extinction. Some ranchers kept bison, partly as meat animals and partly to just help stop them from all dying out. The Yellowstone National Park had been established in 1872, and 25 bison survived there, although many others were poached by hunters. Members of various Plains tribes, who had been forced onto reservations by the United States government so the government could give their land to colonizers, collected as many bison as they could to keep them safe.

These days the American bison is out of immediate danger, although its numbers are still very low. Because there were so few bison when conservation efforts started, the genetic diversity is also low. Bison will also hybridize with domestic cattle and the resulting female calves are fertile, so the main goal of modern conservationists is to genetically test herds to determine which bison have a larger percentage of cattle genes, and mainly only breed the ones that have the least. A 2022 study determined that there is no population of American bison alive today that doesn’t have at least a small percentage of cattle genes. Cattle are domesticated animals, and it’s never a good thing when a wild animal ends up with the DNA of a domestic counterpart. Bison need their wildness in order to survive and stay safe.

There are two living subspecies of American bison, the wood bison and the plains bison. I’m happy to report that the scientific name of the plains bison is Bison bison bison. The wood bison mainly lives in Canada, where it’s classified as threatened.

As for the European bison, or wisent, it was once common throughout much of Europe and Asia. As the human population increased after the ice age, the wisent’s numbers decreased until it was mostly restricted to a few areas of Russia, Transylvania, Poland, and Lithuania. Even as early as the 16th century, people were aware it was endangered. Local rulers declared it a protected animal in most of its range.

During World War I, German troops occupying Poland killed hundreds of wisents, and as the troops retreated at the end of the war, they shot as many of the bison as they could find and left them to rot. Only nine individuals remained alive and by 1921 they had died too. By 1927, the very last wisent in the wild was killed by a poacher.

But 12 animals remained, kept in various zoos. In 1923 a preservation society was set up, modeled after the one in the United States that had helped save the American bison from extinction. Poland in particular worked hard to increase the wisent’s numbers and re-introduce it to its forest home, although its efforts were interrupted by World War II. These days the wisent is out of danger of extinction, although like the American bison its numbers are still relatively low.

American and European bison are related and can crossbreed, but they’re not as closely related genetically as was once thought. Genetic studies are ongoing, but it appears that the wisent is most closely related to domestic cattle while the American bison is most closely related to the yak.

We recently talked about the steppe bison in episode 357, which is about mammoth meat. The steppe bison is an ancestor of the American bison and lived throughout Europe and Asia across to North America, during the Pleistocene when Asia and North America were connected by the land bridge Beringia. It only went extinct around 3,000 years ago. It had much larger horns than modern bison, with a horn spread of almost seven feet across, or over 2 meters.

About 17,000 years ago, in a cave in what is now France, an ancient artist picked up a stick of charcoal and made a drawing of a bison alongside many other bison drawings made by many artists over the years. According to a study published in 2016, there are two different types of bison depicted in the cave. One type is the steppe bison, but the other is distinctly different. After a genetics study of bison in Europe, researchers made a surprising discovery. The second type of bison depicted in the cave is actually a hybrid animal. Hybrids come about when two species of closely related animals interbreed. The more closely related the species are, the more likely they are to interbreed where their territories overlap, and the more likely that the offspring will be fertile. This is exactly what happened toward the end of the Pleistocene, when climate change made it harder for the steppe bison to survive. Instead, a hybrid of steppe bison and the aurochs, the wild ancestor of the domestic cow, not only became common throughout much of Europe, eventually the hybrid species was so numerous that it became a distinct species of its own.

This hybrid bison had small horns and a smaller hump than the steppe bison, although it was still a really big animal. Eventually it gave rise to the modern European bison while the steppe bison gave rise to the antique bison, which itself is the direct ancestor of the American bison. So many bison!

This is what a bison sounds like, specifically an American bison recorded in Yellowstone National Park:

[bison sound]

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 366: The Muntjac AKA Deer with Fangs

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Thanks to Chuck for suggesting this week’s topic, a weird little deer called the muntjac!

Further reading:

Dam Project Reveals Secret Sanctuary of Vanishing Deer

Wildlife camera trap surveys provide new insights into the occurrence of two threatened Annamite endemics in Viet Nam and Laos

Getting ahead (or two?) with Vietnam’s Viking Deer – the Long-Running Saga of a Slow-Running Mystery Beast

A giant muntjac [photo by Mark Kostich, taken from article linked above]:

A Reeve’s muntjac [photo by Don Southerland, taken from this site]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a suggestion from Chuck, who wanted to learn about a small hoofed animal that I don’t think we’ve ever covered before, the muntjac. It’s a deer, but it’s a very weird deer.

In fact, it’s not just one deer, it’s at least 12 different species that are native to parts of south and southeast Asia, although it used to have a much broader range. Muntjac fossils have been found throughout Europe in particular. It prefers thick forests with lots of water around. Most species live in tropical or subtropical areas, although it can tolerate colder temperatures. It eats leaves, grass, fruit, seeds, and other plant parts, and it will also sometimes eat bird eggs and small animals when it finds them. It will even sometimes eat carrion.

The typical muntjac is small, barely larger than a fox. The largest species, the giant muntjac, stands a little over two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 80 cm, while there are several species of muntjac that don’t grow taller than 15 inches high, or 40 cm. It’s brown or reddish-brown, sometimes with darker or lighter markings depending on species. The muntjac appears hump-backed in shape like a rabbit, since instead of having a mostly level back, its back slopes upward from the shoulders to the rump. Its tail is very short and males grow short antlers that either have no branches or only one branch. Males also have a single pair of sharp, curved fangs that grow down from the upper jaw, more properly called tusks.

The muntjac is usually a solitary animal, with each individual defending a small territory. Both males and females have a large gland near the eye that secretes an oily substance with a strong smell. It also has another pair of scent glands on the forehead. The muntjac rubs its face on the ground to mark the edges of its territory with scent. It can even flare its scent glands open to communicate with other muntjacs by smell more effectively.

Unlike many deer species, the muntjac doesn’t have a particular mating season. Females, called does, can come into season any time of the year, so males are always ready to fight with other males for a doe’s attention. The male loses and regrows his antlers yearly, but mainly he only uses them to push an opponent over. He does the real fighting with his fangs.

There are other types of hoofed animals with fangs. We talked about the musk deer and the chevrotain in episode 116, but even though the chevrotain in particular looks a lot like the muntjac, it’s not closely related to it at all. Neither is the musk deer. In fact, neither the musk deer nor the chevrotain are actually deer, and they’re not even closely related to each other.

The southern red muntjac is one of the smallest species of muntjac known and is fairly common throughout much of southeast Asia, although we don’t know much about it. One thing we do know is that it has the smallest number of chromosomes of any mammal ever studied. Males have 7 diploid chromosomes and females only have 6. In comparison, the common Reeve’s muntjac has 46 diploid chromosomes. Scientists have no idea why there’s so much difference in chromosome count between species, but it works for the muntjac.

Many species of muntjac are common and are doing just fine, but others are endangered due to habitat loss, hunting, and the other usual factors we talk about a lot. But the muntjac is small, solitary, and very shy, so there are also species that are probably still waiting to be discovered.

The giant muntjac, also called the large-antlered muntjac, was only discovered in 1994 from a skull found in Vietnam. Scientists were eager to learn more about the animal, especially whether it was still alive or had gone extinct. They talked to hunters and other local people in Vietnam and Laos, and set up camera traps, and went on expeditions searching for it. The hunters said it was still around but the scientists just couldn’t find any. It wasn’t until 1997 that a camera trap took a few pictures of one near a newly constructed dam, which gave everyone hope that this animal could be saved from possible extinction.

Scientists had been searching for the giant muntjac for so long, and had only finally gotten a photograph after 13 years of trying, that they figured it would be an even longer time before they learned more about it. But then, suddenly, only four months after the first pictures of the giant muntjac were captured, a team of conservationists working to relocate animals from the flood area of the new dam ended up capturing 38 of the deer.

When a new dam is constructed across a river or other waterway, it doesn’t flood right away. It takes a long time for the water to back up behind the dam and turn into a lake or large pond, sometimes several years depending on the size of the dam and the waterway. There’s time to relocate animals to higher ground so they’ll be safe, and that’s exactly what Ulrike Streicher and her team were doing in 2007. Not only that, they made sure to transport the animals to a protected area where they’d be safer from hunters. Before they released the giant muntjacs, they had the opportunity to study them and fit some of them with radio collars so the scientists could track where they went. It turned out that the muntjacs settled into their new home just fine, so although the giant muntjac is still classified as critically endangered, at least we know that one small population is doing well.

Another muntjac search involves a camera trap in Vietnam and Laos too, but it’s still an ongoing mystery. The story actually starts back in 1929 when a dead muntjac was sent to the Field Museum in Chicago. The scientists at the museum couldn’t identify it as any known species of muntjac, so they described it in 1932 as Muntiacus rooseveltorum, also called Roosevelt’s muntjac. Modern genetic testing of the specimen determined that it’s a subspecies of Fea’s muntjac that lives in a small area of southern Myanmar and Thailand. Fea’s muntjac itself is so rare and so little known that we don’t even know if it’s extinct or not. As for Roosevelt’s muntjac, no one had seen it since the 1929 specimen was killed and it was presumed extinct.

Then, starting in 2014, a team of scientists conducted surveys in parts of the Annamites, a mountain range along the Vietnam/Laos border. Over the next five or six years, camera traps recorded every animal that passed by them in various remote locations. In addition to lots of animals the scientists expected to see, they found three animals that were either extremely rare or thought extinct. One of these was the Annamite striped rabbit we talked about in episode 254, but the other two were muntjacs.

One of the muntjacs captured on camera was identified as Roosevelt’s muntjac while the other was identified as the Annamite muntjac, a species that was only identified in 1997. The problem is that we only have pictures of the animals, and only a single specimen of Roosevelt’s muntjac to compare the pictures to. Scientists disagree as to whether Roosevelt’s muntjac is for sure still alive and well in the Annamite mountains, or whether the pictures are of a totally different species of muntjac. At least the pictures were taken in a nature reserve, so we know the muntjacs should be safe.

Muntjacs are such strange, attractive animals that rich people used to keep them as pets to show off. Sometimes they would escape into the wild, or were even released on purpose, and that’s why Japan, England, Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland all have invasive populations of Reeve’s muntjac. Reeve’s muntjac is common in southeastern China and Taiwan and only grows a little over a foot high at the shoulder, or maybe half a meter. The male has stubby little antlers and long tusks, so that his tusks are almost as long as his antlers. Cute as the animals are, they’re also bad for the local ecosystems, since they reproduce quickly and eat food that native animals need.

Rumors have circulated for a few decades now of another possible mystery muntjac, usually referred to as the quang khem. Supposedly it’s a large muntjac with unbranched antlers that lives in remote areas of Vietnam. So far it hasn’t been discovered, if it exists at all, but there’s definitely a chance that it’s yet another muntjac that’s just waiting to be spotted by scientists or their camera traps.

The muntjac is sometimes called the barking deer because of its alarm call. This is what a muntjac sounds like:

[muntjac barking sound]

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 365: A New Temnospondyl

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Let’s take a look at some new findings about the temnospondyls this week!

Further reading:

Ancient giant amphibians swam like crocodiles 250 million years ago

Fossil of Giant Triassic Amphibian Unearthed in Brazil

Kwatisuchus rosai was an early amphibian [picture taken from article linked above]:

Koolasuchus was a weird big-headed boi:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit an animal we talked about way back in episode 172, the temnospondyl. That’s because a new species of temnospondyl has been named that lived about 250 million years ago, and some other new information has been published about temnospondyls in general.

In case you haven’t listened to episode 172 in a while, let’s brush up on some history. The temnospondyls arose about 330 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. Ocean levels were high, the continents were coming together slowly to form the supercontinent Pangaea, and much of the land was flooded with warm, shallow water that created enormous swampy areas full of plants. Naturally, a whole lot of animals evolved to live in the swamps, and the temnospondyls were especially successful.

Temnospondyls were semi-aquatic animals that probably looked a lot like really big, really weird salamanders. This was before modern amphibians evolved, and scientists still aren’t sure if the temnospondyls are the direct ancestors of modern amphibians or just cousins that died out with no living descendants. Temnospondyls do share many traits with modern amphibians, but they still had a lot in common with their fish ancestors.

Most temnospondyls had large heads that were broad and flattened in shape, often with a skull that was roughly triangular. Some had smooth skin but many had scales, including some species with scales that grew into armor-like plates. The earliest species had relatively small, weak legs and probably spent most of their time in the water, but it wasn’t long before species with stronger legs developed that probably lived mostly on land.

Many temnospondyls were small, but some grew really big. The biggest found so far is Prionosuchus, which is only known from fragmentary specimens discovered in Brazil in South America. It had an elongated snout something like a ghavial’s, which is a type of crocodilian that mostly eats fish, and a similar body shape. That’s why its name ends in the word “suchus,” which refers to a crocodile or an animal that resembles a crocodilian. Inside, though, prionosuchus probably had more in common with its fish ancestors than with modern crocodiles, and of course it wasn’t a reptile at all. It was an amphibian, possibly the largest one that’s ever lived. The biggest specimen found so far had a skull that measured just over 5 feet long, or 1.6 meters. That was just the skull! The whole animal, tail and all, might have measured as much as 30 feet long, or about 9 meters, although most paleontologists think it was probably more like 18 feet long, or 5-1/2 meters. That’s still incredibly big, as large as the average saltwater crocodile that lives today.

The resemblance of many temnospondyls to crocodilians is due to convergent evolution, since researchers think a lot of temnospondyls filled the same ecological niche as modern crocodiles. If you’re an ambush predator who spends a lot of time hiding in shallow water waiting for prey to get close enough, the best shape to have is a long body, short legs, a long tail that’s flattened side to side to help you swim, and a big mouth for grabbing, preferably with a lot of teeth. A study published in March of 2023 examined some trace fossils found in South Africa that scientists think were made about 255 million years ago by a temnospondyl. The fossils were found in what had once been a tidal flat or lagoon along the shore of the ancient Karoo Sea. You didn’t need to know it was called the Karoo Sea but I wanted to say it because it sounds like something from a fantasy novel. Truly, we live in a wonderful world. Anyway, there aren’t very many footprints but there are swirly marks made by a long tail and body impressions where the animal settled onto the floor to rest.

From those trace fossils, scientists can learn a lot about how the animal lived and moved. The swirly tail marks show that it used it tail to swim, not its legs. Since there are hardly any footprints, it probably kept its legs folded back against its body while it was swimming. When it stopped to rest, it may have been watching for potential prey approaching from above, since its eyes were situated on the top of its head to allow it to see upward easily. All these traits are also seen in crocodiles even though temnospondyls aren’t related to crocodilians at all.

Other big temnospondyls that filled the same ecological niche as crocodiles were species in the family Benthosuchidae. Some grew over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. That may not seem very big compared to a dinosaur or a whale, but this is your reminder that it was an early amphibian, and that amphibians are usually little guys, like frogs and newts.

The newly discovered fossil I mentioned at the beginning of this episode has been identified as a member of the family Benthosuchidae. It’s been named Kwatisuchus rosai and was discovered in Brazil in 2022. That’s a big deal, because while temnospondyl fossils have been found throughout the world, until Kwatisuchus, benthosuchids have only been found in eastern Europe. It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, and it was probably an ambush predator that mostly ate fish.

Kwatisuchus lived only a few million years after the end-Permian extinction event, also called the Great Dying, which we talked about in episode 227. That extinction event wiped out entire orders of animals and plants. Temnospondyls in general survived the Great Dying and hung on for another 100 million years afterwards.

The last temnospondyl that lived, as far as the fossil record shows, was Koolasuchus. It lived in what is now Australia and went extinct about 120 million years ago. This is a lot more recent than most temnospondyls, so much so that when it was first discovered, scientists at first didn’t think it could be a temnospondyl. It was only described in 1997, although it was first discovered in 1978.

Not only was Koolasuchus the most recently living temnospondyl, it was also big and heavy and very weird-looking. It was about 10 feet long, or about 3 meters, and might have weighed as much as 1,100 lbs, or 500 kg. It lived in fast-moving streams and filled the same ecological niche as crocodiles, which eventually replaced it after it went extinct.

Like its relations, Koolasuchus had a roughly crocodile-shaped body with short legs and a fairly long tail, but its head was almost as big as its body. Most temnospondyls had big heads, and Koolasuchus’s was broad and rounded with a blunt nose. It also had what are called tabular horns that projected from the rear of the skull, which gave its head a triangular appearance. Its body was relatively slender compared to the chonky head, which made it look kind of like a really really big tadpole.

Remember, as an amphibian, Koolasuchus would have laid eggs that hatched into a larval form the same way frogs do today. We have a lot of larval temnospondyl fossils and even some fossilized eggs that paleontologists think were laid by a temnospondyl, which were attached to water plants the same way many species of frog do today. Larval temnospondyls did look a lot like tadpoles. In other words, Koolasuchus looked like a tadpole in shape but its larval form was also probably tadpole-like. Extra, extra tadpole-shaped.

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

Thanks for listening!