Category Archives: extinct

Episode 483: Animals with Nose Horns

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The horned gopher:

Show transcript:

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

This time we’re going to learn about some mammals with weird horns. Specifically, weird nose horns. Nose horns are properly called rostral horns, but that’s not as funny.

We’ll start with a family of extinct rodents called horned gophers, or more properly, mylagaulids. The horned gopher wasn’t a gopher, but it probably looked similar to ground squirrels like prairie dogs and marmots. It lived in what is now North America around twenty million years ago, and it had a pair of short, broad horns that pointed upwards between the nose and eyes, like a rhino’s horns but side by side and made of bone, not keratin. It was big for a rodent, about a foot long, or 30 cm, and ate plants.

So what did the horned gopher use its horns for? Both males and females had the horns and they’re too short and placed too far back for males to use them to fight each other. Horned gophers had poor eyesight so males probably weren’t trying to look and act flashy to attract females anyway.

At first researchers thought the horns helped in digging burrows. The horned gopher primarily used what’s called the head-lift method of digging, which means it pushed its nose into the dirt, then lifted its head with powerful neck muscles to remove a chunk of soil—basically using its nose as a shovel. But its horns pointed straight up and were set too far back on the nose to help with digging. Most researchers today think the horns were used for defense. If a predator tried to grab the animal by the neck, it could snap its head back and stab the predator right in the face.

The horned gopher had tiny eyes and front feet that resembled a mole’s, with long claws. Researchers think its ancestors probably spent most of the time underground, but that as it evolved to become larger, it also spent more time foraging above-ground. That led to more predators being able to attack it, so evolving horns as a defensive weapon helped it survive.

While the horned gopher was distantly related to modern squirrels, its family is completely extinct these days. But it’s still the smallest known horned mammal that ever lived.

The horned gopher is also the only horned mammal known that lived mostly underground in burrows. Almost. There was once a type of armadillo, naturally called the horned armadillo but more properly referred to as Peltephilus [pelta-FEElus], that had a pair of horns over its eyes but a little in front of them, close to where the horned gopher’s horns were. The horned armadillo’s horns developed from scutes on its head, and if you remember, scutes are bony plates embedded in the skin as armor. It might also have had a smaller pair of horns over its nostrils. It lived in what is now South America and went extinct around 11 million years ago.

The horned armadillo dug burrows liked the horned gopher did, but it was much bigger than the horned gopher, with some species as much as five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Despite its size, it probably resembled the pink fairy armadillo in overall shape rather than the more common nine-banded armadillo that lives in parts of North America. It had a short tail and its rump was squared off instead of rounded. It also had big sharp teeth. It may have eaten insects, possibly digging up ant nests, but more likely it mostly ate roots and other plant parts.

Arsinoitherium was another animal with nose horns, this one from Africa. It lived around 30 million years ago and was related to modern-day elephants, but it lived in swampy areas and tropical rainforests and ate plants. It probably looked a little like a rhinoceros and a little like a small elephant without a trunk. Different species were different sizes, but they were all pretty big, probably no smaller than about six feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.75 meters. And they had two pairs of horns, a little pair more like bumps over the eyes and two side-by-side forward-pointing giant nose horns that looked a lot like rhino horns but thicker. But they were real horns made of bone, not keratin, although they may have been covered in skin and hair like ossicones. You know, ossicones are those hornlike structures giraffes have.

Brontotherium looked a lot like a rhinoceros too, but that’s because it was distantly related to the rhino, although it was more closely related to the horse. It lived in North America around 35 million years ago and was enormous, standing around 8 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.5 meters. It was a selective browser, probably preferring tender leaves to tough grass. It carried its massive head low like modern rhinos and buffalo do, and had a humped shoulder like both those animals where its massive neck muscles attached. And it had a pair of nose horns.

Both males and females had the nose horns, but the males’ horns were much larger. The horns were blunt and shaped sort of like a V, and researchers are pretty sure males used them to fight each other. We have fossilized brontotherium rib bones that show an injury shaped just like the nose horns. The horns were probably also useful to fight predators. Even though brontotherium was related to the rhino, its horns were bone, not keratin.

Our last nose horn animal lived in North America up to about five million years ago. The various species of Protoceratidae [pro-TOSS-e-rated-die] were hoofed animals that looked sort of like deer, but were more closely related to a living ungulate called the chevrotain, or mouse deer. Protoceratid probably ate grass and other plants and may have lived in herds. Males had a pair of ordinary horns that looked a lot like cow horns, and in some species females had the horns too, although they were smaller. But males also had a horn on the nose. And it was weird.

Once again, the nose horn wasn’t like a rhino’s horn, which as we have established by now is made of keratin. And maybe I should have reminded you before now that keratin is the same protein that makes hair, fingernails, hooves, and things like that. Keratin also doesn’t fossilize. This nose horn was an actual horn made of bone, but researchers think it may have been covered with skin and fur like an ossicone.

Different Protoceratidae had different nose horns. Syndyoceras had a pair of nose horns that were fused at the base, then split apart to form a V shape. It may also have had large nasal passages that made its muzzle look much bigger than the skull would suggest at first glance. Synthetoceras had a long nose horn that grew up and slightly forward but split into a Y at the tip. Kyptoceras had a pair of nose horns that pointed forward. Researchers think the males used these nose horns to fight each other, much like deer fight with their antlers today.

One older Protoceratid that lived up to around 20 million years ago was called Protoceras, and males had three pairs of horns, although they probably resembled ossicones and were all covered in skin and hair. A small pair grew between the ears, another pair between the eyes and nose, and the largest pair grew on the nose. Females only had one smaller pair of horns between the ears, so the extra horns males had were probably for display.

Some Protoceratidae also had a pair of fanglike canine teeth that they may have used to root around in dead leaves for plant material. Male chevrotains have fangs like this too, but they use them to fight each other since they don’t have horns.

So basically, this is what we’ve learned from this episode: There used to be a lot more nose-horned animals than we have now, most of them lived in the Americas for some reason, and they were all awesome. Also, even though the first animal we think of when someone mentions nose horns is the rhino, the rhino’s keratin horns are actually unusual. Just be glad you’re not an intelligent birdlike creature from the far future trying to figure out what a rhinoceros actually looked like when it was alive.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 480: Old, Old Life

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Let’s learn about some of the oldest life ever discovered!

Further reading:

Microbiologists Find Living Microbes in 2-Billion-Year-Old Rock

Chart of life extended by nearly 1.5 billion years

Show transcript:

Back in episode 168 we talked about the longest-lived organisms known, and finished the episode by discussing endoliths. I’ll quote from that episode as a refresher.

An endolith isn’t a particular animal or even a group of related animals. An endolith is an organism that lives inside a rock or other rock-like substance, such as coral. Some are fungi, some lichens, some amoebas, some bacteria, and various other organisms, many of them single-celled and all of them very small if not microscopic. Some live in tiny cracks in a rock, some live in porous rocks that have space between grains of mineral, some bore into the rock. Many are considered extremophiles, living in rocks inside Antarctic permafrost, at the tops of the highest mountains, in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and at least two miles, or 3 km, below the earth’s surface.

Various endoliths eat different minerals, including potassium, sulfur, and iron. Some endoliths even eat other endoliths. We don’t know a whole lot about them, but studies of endoliths found in soil deep beneath the ocean’s floor suggest that they grow extremely slowly. Like, from one generation to the next could be as long as 10,000 years, with the oldest endoliths potentially being millions of years old—even as old as the sediment itself, which dates to 100 million years old.

That episode was almost five years ago, and in October of 2024 some new information was published. The study mentions the 100-million-year-old limit known so far, where living microorganisms were indeed discovered in geological layers below the ocean floor. But what they found was even older.

The scientific team analyzed rock samples from northeastern South Africa, specifically rock that formed when magma cooled below the surface of the earth. It’s called the Bushveld Igneous Complex and is very large, very old, and very stable.

The team drilled core samples of the rock from 50 feet down, or 15 meters, and cut it into thin slices to examine. To their surprise, they discovered microbial life in the rock’s cracks, which were sealed tightly with clay so that nothing should be able to get in or out of the rocks. To be sure the microbes hadn’t been introduced during the drilling or preparing process, they used infrared spectroscopy to compare the proteins in the microbes with the proteins caught in the clay. They matched, meaning the microbes had been there as long as the clay had been there, which was basically almost as long as the rocks had been in place. They were also able to verify that yes, the microbes were definitely alive.

So, how old are the rocks? TWO BILLION YEARS OLD. Billion with a B! While the individual microbes probably aren’t actually that old, the population of microbes has been living in those cracks far within the rock for two billion years. Scientists are excited to learn more about them, because by studying organisms that have been separated from all other life for that long, they can learn about how early life on earth evolved.

Even more exciting, at least if you’re me, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars is going to be bringing some rocks back to earth that are about 2 billion years old. Scientists are really excited to see if there is any evidence for microbial life inside the Martian rocks!

I know I won’t live long enough to see the first macrobial life from another planet, but I really hope I’m alive when we discover the first microbial life. I don’t think life is rare on other planets, it’s just that the distances are so enormous that getting to another planet and sending information back home is an almost insurmountable problem right now. The closest planets to us are Mars and Venus, and these days Mars just doesn’t seem like it would be very habitable for anything but microbes. But microbes can live just about anywhere!

Also in 2024, a team from Virginia Tech has put together a chart marking when various life forms started appearing in the fossil record and when they also stopped appearing in the fossil record. Versions of this chart of life have been made before, but they typically only go back to about half a billion years ago, around the time of the Cambrian. Before that, life was much less likely to fossilize, or the rocks containing the fossils have been worn away.

The team gathered fossil data from scientists and institutions around the world and compiled it into a chart of life that extends back two billion years. The farther back you look, the less changes there are among the type and differences in species. There’s even a huge stretch of time called the boring billion where things really weren’t changing much at all, at least not according to the fossil record we have available. It wasn’t until the earth’s climate became much cooler and then warmed again, between 720 and 635 million years ago, that things really began to change.

The team is considering factors that contributed to the stability of the boring billion, and why it all changed so radically. It’s a good thing it did from our perspective, since if the boring billion had continued over the next billion years until today, we’d all be single-celled organisms. I wonder if the microbes in those two billion year old rocks even noticed the changes. Probably not. They were in rocks.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 477 Albanerpetontidae

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It’s Albert the Albanerpetontid!

Further reading:

Earliest example of a rapid-fire tongue found in ‘weird and wonderful’ extinct amphibians

Amphibian skullllll:

Show transcript:

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

Let’s learn about a long-extinct amphibian that looked a lot like a reptile. It’s a family of animals called Albanerpetontidae. That’s a mouthful, so instead of talking about Albanerpetontids, I’ll talk about all the various species as though they were not only a single species, but a single individual named Albert.

Albert first appears in the middle Jurassic, around 165 million years ago, and disappears from the fossil record around 2 million years ago. That means it survived the extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and many other animals, which is also true for many other amphibians. But Albert wasn’t like the amphibians we have around today. It belonged to its own order, Allocaudata.

There’s a lot of confusion in general as to how amphibians are related to each other and how closely related, for instance, the frogs and the salamanders actually are. The same is true for Albert. What we do know is that Albert was definitely an amphibian, but it was also really different in many respects from modern amphibians.

That’s weird, because only two million years ago Albert was still around and seems to have been fairly common. Albert fossils have been found in Europe, North America, northern Africa, and parts of Asia. Two million years isn’t all that long when you’re talking about big differences between related animal groups. But although Albert appears in the fossil record at about the same time as other amphibians, it seems to have evolved very differently in many ways.

Albert looked like a salamander and was originally classified as a salamander. It was small, its body was slender and elongated, its legs were short, and it had a long tail. It had tiny teeth and seemed to prefer wet environments, which makes sense when you’re talking about an amphibian. But Albert had a lot of traits not found in other amphibians, such as scales. The scales were more fish-like than reptilian and were embedded in Albert’s skin like osteoderms, especially concentrated on the head.

These scales have caused confusion for a whole lot of scientists. In 2016, for instance, scientists identified an unusual lizard found fossilized in amber as a 99-million-year-old chameleon. That’s because it had a weird bone in its jaw shaped like a little rod, which looked like a bone found in the modern chameleon’s tongue.

It turns out that the lizard was no lizard at all but our friend Albert, an amphibian. The chameleon is a reptile and not related to Albert, but they share the same type of elongated tongue bone. When the skull of a second amber specimen was discovered that was even better preserved, including a tongue pad and other soft tissue, scientists were able to evaluate whether Albert used its tongue the same way that a chameleon does.

One trait found in Albert skulls that scientists had long been confused about was how robust and large its skull was. Some scientists suggested that it used its big head to dig burrows, ramming its head into soft mud until it created a hole big enough to hide in. But it also had big eyes, which isn’t typical in an animal that burrows.

Scientists now think that Albert’s head was so strong because it needed to withstand the forces of its own tongue. It could probably shoot its tongue out incredibly fast like a chameleon, much faster even than a frog. It’s referred to as a projectile tongue, ballistic tongue, rapid-fire tongue, or boomerang tongue. The muscles that power a chameleon’s tongue are specialized to store energy when it contracts, then launch the tongue out like someone releasing a stretched-out rubber band. Albert’s similar ability evolved separately from the chameleon’s, and much earlier.

It’s also possible that Albert didn’t undergo a larval stage the way most other amphibians do. Juvenile specimens look like miniature adults, which is unusual in amphibians but ordinary in reptiles. Albert also had lizard-like claws. But we know Albert wasn’t a reptile, and in fact it may have demonstrated one of the most amphibian traits known, breathing through its skin. Many modern salamanders don’t have lungs or gills at all as adults, and instead absorb oxygen directly through the skin, called cutaneous respiration. The specialized bone in Albert’s jaw would have made it hard to breathe in the ordinary way, and we know it didn’t have gills.

The big question is why Albert went extinct when other amphibians are doing just fine. We don’t have an answer for that, or not yet. While Albert did seem to be quite successful, fossils of tiny, delicate animals like two-centimeter-long amphibians are rare, and that means we don’t have the full picture of what happened two million years ago that drove Albert to extinction.

For that matter, some scientists wonder if Albert might not actually be extinct. It might be alive and well in remote rain forests, spending most of its time hidden in damp leaf litter and using its mighty tongue to catch tiny insects. Maybe one day a scientist will turn over a log and make the find of a lifetime.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 468: Tamarins and Other Mammals

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Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance’

The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it’s rude:

The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail:

The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153317160]:

The pangolin is scaly:

The pangolin can also be round:

The East Siberia lemming [photo by Ansgar Walk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52651170]:

An early painting of a mammoth:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to look at some mammals suggested by Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris. Let’s jump right in, because we have a lot of fascinating animals to learn about!

We’ll start with suggestions by Cillian and Eilee, who both suggested a monkey called the tamarin. Tamarins live in Central and South America and there are around 20 species, all of them quite small.

Cillian specifically suggested the golden lion tamarin, an endangered species that lives in a single small part of Brazil. It has beautiful golden or orange fur that’s longer around the face, like a lion’s mane but extremely stylish. Its face is bare of fur and is gray or grayish-pink in color, with dark eyes and a serious expression like it’s not sure where it left its wallet. It grows about 10 inches long, or 26 cm, not counting its extremely long tail.

The golden lion tamarin spends most of its time in trees, where it eats fruit, flowers, and other plant material, along with eggs, tree frogs, insects, and other small animals. It has narrow hands and long fingers to help it reach into little tree hollows and crevices where insects are hiding, but if it can’t reach an insect that way, it will use a twig or other tool to help.

The golden lion tamarin lives in small family groups, usually a mated pair and their young children. A mother golden lion tamarin often has twins, sometimes triplets, and the other members of her family help take care of the babies.

Because the golden lion tamarin is endangered, mainly due to habitat loss, zoos throughout the world have helped increase the number of babies born in captivity. When it’s safe to release them into the wild, instead of only releasing the young tamarins, the entire family group is released together.

Eilee suggested the cotton-top tamarin, which lives in one small part of Colombia. It’s about the same size as the golden lion tamarin, but is more lightly built and has a somewhat shorter tail. It’s mostly various shades of brown and tan with a dark gray face, but it also has long white hair on its head. Its hair sticks up and makes it look a little bit like those pictures of Einstein, if Einstein was a tiny little monkey.

Like the golden lion tamarin, the cotton-top tamarin lives in small groups and eats both plant material and insects. It’s also critically endangered due to habitat loss, and it’s strictly protected these days.

Next, both Tim and Stella suggested we learn about the pangolin. There are eight species known, which live in parts of Africa and Asia.

The pangolin is a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it’s threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell.

Some species of pangolin live in trees and spend the daytime sleeping in a hollow tree. Other species live on the ground and dig deep burrows to sleep in during the day. It’s a solitary animal and just about the only time adult pangolins spend time together is when a pair comes together to mate. Sometimes two males fight over a female, and they do so by slapping each other with their big tails.

Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat pangolins. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don’t do well in captivity so it’s hard for zoos to help them.

Next, Conner wants to learn about the lemming, a rodent that’s related to muskrats and voles. Lots of people think they know one thing about the lemming, but that thing isn’t true. We’ll talk about it in a minute.

The lemming grows up to 7 inches long, or 18 cm, and is a little round rodent with small ears, a short tail, short legs, and long fur that’s brown and black in color. It eats plant material, and while it lives in really cold parts of the northern hemisphere, including Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, it doesn’t hibernate. It just digs tunnels with cozy nesting burrows to warm up in, and finds food by digging tunnels in the snow.

Lemmings reproduce quickly, which is a trait common among rodents, and if the population of lemmings gets too large in one area, some of the lemmings may migrate to find a new place to live. In the olden days people didn’t understand lemming migration. Some people believed that lemmings traveled through the air in stormy weather and that’s why a bunch of lemmings would suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes. They’d just drop out of the sky. Other people were convinced that if there were too many lemmings, they’d all jump off a cliff and die on purpose, and that’s why sometimes there’d be a lot of lemmings, and then suddenly one day not nearly as many lemmings.

Many people still think that lemmings jump off cliffs, but this isn’t actually true. They’re cute little animals, but they’re not dumb.

Next, let’s learn about two extinct animals, starting with PJ’s suggestion, the woolly mammoth. We actually know a lot about the various species of mammoth because we have so many remains. Our own distant ancestors left cave paintings and carvings of mammoths, we have lots of fossilized remains, and we have lots of subfossil remains too. Because the mammoth lived so recently and sometimes in places where the climate hasn’t changed all that much in the last 10,000 years, namely very cold parts of the world with deep layers of permafrost beneath the surface, sometimes mammoth remains are found that look extremely fresh.

The woolly mammoth was closely related to the modern Asian elephant, but it was much bigger and covered with long fur. A big male woolly mammoth could stand well over 11 feet tall at the shoulder, or 3.5 meters, while females were a little smaller on average. It was well adapted to cold weather and had small ears, a short tail, a thick layer of fat under the skin, and an undercoat of soft, warm hair that was protected by longer guard hairs. It lived in the steppes of northern Europe, Asia, and North America, and like modern elephants it ate plants. It had long, curved tusks that could be over 13 feet long, or 4 meters, in a big male, and one of the things it used it tusks for was to sweep snow away from plants.

The woolly mammoth went extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, although a small population remained on a remote island until only 4,000 years ago.

Our last animal this week is Morris’s suggestion, and it’s actually not a single type of animal but a whole order. Desmostylians were big aquatic mammals, and the only known order of aquatic mammals that are completely extinct.

When you think of aquatic mammals, you might think of whales, seals, and sea cows, or even hippos. Desmostylians didn’t look like any of those animals, and they had features not found in any other animal.

Desmostylians lived in shallow water off the Pacific coast, and fossils have been found in North America, southern Japan, parts of Russia, and other places. They first appear in the fossil record around 30 million years ago and disappear from the fossil record about 7 million years ago. They were fully aquatic animals that probably mostly ate kelp or sea grass, similar to modern sirenians, which include dugongs and manatees.

Let’s talk about Paleoparadoxia to find out roughly what Desmostylians looked and acted like. Paleoparadoxia grew about 7 feet long, or 2.15 meters, and had a robust skeleton. It had short legs, although the front legs were longer and its four toes were probably webbed to help it swim. It probably acted a lot like a sirenian, walking along the sea floor to find plants to eat. Its nostrils were on the top of its nose so it could take breaths at the surface more easily, and it had short tusks in its mouth, something like modern hippos. It may have looked a little like a hippo, but also a little like a dugong, and possibly a little like a walrus.

One really strange thing about Desmostylians in general are their teeth. No other animals known have teeth like theirs. Their molars and premolars are incredibly tough and are made up of little enamel cylinders. The order’s name actually means “bundle of columns,” referring to the teeth, and the bundles point upward so that the tops of the columns make up the tooth’s chewing surface. Actually, chewing surface isn’t the right term because Desmostylians probably didn’t chew their food. Scientists think they pulled plants up by the roots using their teeth and tusks, then used suction to slurp up the plants and swallow them whole.

We still don’t know very much about Desmostylians. Scientists think they were outcompeted by sirenians, but we don’t really know why they went extinct. We don’t even know what they were most closely related to. They share some similarities with manatees and elephants, but those similarities may be due to convergent evolution. Then again, they might be related. Until we find more fossils, the mysteries will remain.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 461: Therizinosaurus and Its CLAWS

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Further reading:

Study: Giant Therizinosaurs Used Their Meter-Long, Sickle-Like Claws for Display

Show transcript:

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

I am delighted to report that Therizinosaurus lived in what is now Mongolia in Central Asia, in the Gobi Desert. 70 million years ago, the land wasn’t a desert at all but a forest with multiple rivers and streams flowing through it. Lots of other dinosaurs and birds lived in the area, including a tyrannosaurid called Tarbosaurus that was probably the only predator big enough to kill Therizinosaurus.

When the first Therizinosaurus fossils were discovered in the 1950s, they were initially thought to belong to a type of giant turtle. Later it was reclassified as a sauropod relation, not a turtle. These days, we know for sure it’s not a turtle and we’re pretty sure it’s not anything like a sauropod.

The Therizinosaurus fossils found so far are incomplete. All we have are some ribs, one hind foot, and mostly complete arms and hands. We don’t have any parts of the skull or any vertebrae, so paleontologists still have a lot of questions about what Therizinosaurus looked like and how it lived, although we have more complete specimens of some of its close relations to help scientists make good guesses. Luckily we have its hands, because its claws are enormous. Therizinosaurus had claws bigger than any other dinosaur known.

Therizinosaurus was a big dinosaur overall, with an estimated length of 33 feet, or 10 meters, although until a more complete specimen is discovered we can’t know for sure how big it really was. It may have stood up to 16 feet tall, or 5 meters, and walked on its hind legs. It’s classified as a theropod these days, a group that includes famous dinosaurs like T. rex and Spinosaurus, but it wasn’t closely related to those big fast meat-eaters. Most paleontologists think Therizinosaurus ate plants, but again, we don’t know for sure since we don’t have any of its teeth to examine. Its closest relatives were herbivorous but its immediate ancestors were carnivorous.

If Therizinosaurus was a plant-eater, why did it have such enormous claws? Its claws were seriously terrifying! Its arms were big and strong in general, measuring about 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, including long, slender fingers, and the claws measured over three feet long! That’s more than a meter long. If the claws were covered with a keratin sheath, which is probable, they would have been even longer when Therizinosaurus was alive. They were relatively thin and straight with a curve at the end.

There are many reasons why an animal develops big claws. Predators need claws to help grab prey or tear meat into pieces, or an animal may need big claws to help it dig or climb trees. Claws are also great for defense. Some animals use claws to grab tree branches and bend them closer to the animal’s mouth, which is something that giant ground sloths probably did, at least sometimes.

The new study published in February 2023 examined the claws of Therizinosaurus and lots of other dinosaurs to learn how strong they were. The claws were 3D scanned, and then the scans were used in various models that measured the stress placed on each claw in various different activities.

The study discovered that the claws of different dinosaurs were strong in different ways depending on what they were used for, which wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was that Therizinosaurus’s claws were weak no matter which model the scientists used.

In other words, Therizinosaurus probably didn’t use its claws to fight other dinosaurs unless it just had to, because they would break too easily. It wouldn’t have dug with its claws or even used them to hook branches down closer to its mouth. As far as we can tell, its claws were basically useless.

But obviously, Therizinosaurus used its claws for something or it wouldn’t have evolved to have such gigantic claws. The study concluded that the giant claws must have been for display, to attract a mate or maybe just scare off potential predators.

Lots of animals have special features used to attract a mate, like a peacock’s tail. Sometimes these features serve a double purpose, like a male deer’s antlers. The size of the antlers show how healthy he is, and he also uses them to fight other males. I’m not a claw expert, but as far as I know there aren’t any other animals known that use their claws for display only.

It’s possible that Therizinosaurus did use its claws for something else, we just don’t know what. It’s also possible that the study had flaws that a follow-up study will discover, and Therizinosaurus’s claws weren’t actually so weak. But for now, as far as we know, during mating season Therizinosaurus would strut around waving its super-long claws to show how amazing it was. And, let’s face it, Therizinosaurus really was amazing.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 457: Parrots!

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Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

World’s rarest parrot, extinct in wild, hatches at zoo

Kakapo recovery

This Parrot Stood 3 Feet Tall and Ruled the Roost in New Zealand Forests 19 Million Years Ago

The magnificent palm cockatoo:

The gigantic kakapo:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a bird episode, specifically some interesting parrots. Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions!

Parrots are intelligent, social birds that are mostly found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world, but not always. Most parrots eat plant material exclusively, especially seeds, nuts, and fruit, but some species will eat insects and other small animals when they get the chance. Most parrots are brightly colored, but again, not always. And, unfortunately, most parrot species are endangered to some degree due to habitat loss, hunting for their feathers and for the pet trade, and introduced predators like cats and rats.

All parrots have a curved beak that the bird uses to open nuts and seeds, but which also acts as a tool or even a third foot when it’s climbing around in trees. All parrots have strong clawed feet that they also use to climb around and perch in trees, and to handle food and tools.

Let’s start with Yuzu’s suggestions, the cockatoo and the parakeet. A parakeet is a small parrot, but it’s a term that refers to a lot of various types of small parrots. This includes an extinct bird called the Carolina parakeet.

It was small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States. It had a yellow and orange head and a green body with some yellow markings, and was about the size of a mourning dove or a passenger pigeon. Its story of extinction mirrors that of the passenger pigeon in many ways. The Carolina parakeet lived in forests and swamps in big, noisy flocks and ate fruit and seeds, but when European settlers moved in, turning forests into farmland and shooting birds that were considered pests, its numbers started to decline. In addition, the bird was frequently captured for sale in the pet trade and hunted for its feathers, which were used to decorate hats.

By 1860 the Carolina parakeet was rare anywhere except the swamps of central Florida, and by 1904 it was extinct in the wild. The last captive bird died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, which was not only the same zoo where the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, it was the same cage. It was declared extinct in 1939.

The parakeet Yuzu is probably referencing is the budgie, or budgerigar. It’s the one that’s extremely common as a pet, and it’s native to Australia. In the wild it’s green and yellow with black markings, but the domestic version, which has been bred in captivity since the 1850s, can be all sorts of colors and patterns, including various shades of blue, yellow all over, white, and piebald, meaning the bird has patches of white on its body.

The budgie can learn to repeat words and various sounds, especially if it’s a young bird. I had two parakeets as a kid, named Dandelion and Sky so you can guess their colors, and neither learned to talk although I really tried to teach them. Some birds just aren’t interested in mimicry, while others won’t stop, especially if they get attention when they speak.

In the wild, budgies live in flocks that will travel long distances to find food and water. The birds mostly eat grass seeds, especially spinifex, but will sometimes eat wheat, especially in areas where farmland has destroyed much of their wild food. They’re social birds that are sometimes called lovebirds, although that’s the name of a different type of bird too, because they will preen and feed their mates.

Like many birds, the parakeet can see ultraviolet light, and their feathers glow in UV light. This makes them even more attractive to potential mates, as if the parakeet wasn’t beautiful enough to start with.

Yuzu also asked about the cockatoo. There are 21 species of cockatoo, also native to Australia and other nearby places, including Indonesia and New Guinea. It’s much larger than the budgie and most species have a crest of some kind. It lives in flocks and eats various types of plant material, including flowers and roots, but it will also eat insects. The cockatoo isn’t as brightly colored as many parrots, and is usually black, white, or gray, often with patches of color on the crest, cheeks, or tail.

The pink cockatoo is white with pale salmon pink markings on the body, and brighter pink and yellow on its crest. The sulphur-crested cockatoo is white with pale yellow on the undersides of the wings and tail, and a bright yellow crest. We talked about the palm cockatoo in episode 23 because not only does it look like it should be a drummer of the Muppet Animal variety, since it’s black with red cheeks and a big messy crest, it does actually use sticks and nuts to drum against tree branches, to attract a mate.

Richard from NC suggested we learn about Spix’s macaw, also called the blue macaw, because it’s considered one of the world’s rarest parrots. In fact, it was declared extinct in the wild in 2019. It only survives at all because of intensive conservation efforts, including a captive breeding program spread over multiple zoos.

The blue macaw is native to one small part of Brazil in South America, although it used to be much more common several hundred years ago. It’s blue with a gray-blue head. It’s such a beautiful parrot that it was driven to extinction by people trapping the birds to sell as pets, even though that had been outlawed by Brazil, although its numbers had been falling for centuries due to habitat loss. It relied on a particular species of tree called the tree of gold, because its flowers are bright yellow. The blue macaw nested in these trees, and its seedpods were one of its main foods. As groves made up of the tree of gold were chopped down to make way for farmland and towns, the bird became more and more rare.

Luckily, even though the blue macaw doesn’t breed very quickly in captivity, by 2022 there were enough healthy young birds to release twenty into the wild. Just a few weeks ago as this episode goes live, another egg has hatched in captivity in a bird conservation center in Belgium, after the previous hundred eggs were infertile and never hatched.

Next, Fleur wanted to learn more about the kakapo, a flightless, nocturnal parrot that lives only in New Zealand. We talked about it in episode 313, but it’s definitely time to revisit it.

The kakapo is the largest living parrot. It has green feathers with speckled markings, blue-gray feet, and discs of feathers around its eyes that make its face look a little like an owl’s face. That’s why it’s sometimes called the owl parrot. Males are almost twice the size of females on average. It can grow over two feet long, or 64 cm, and can weigh as much as 9 lbs, or about 4 kg. That’s way too heavy for it to fly, but its legs are short but strong and it will jog for long distances to find food. It can also climb really well, right up into the very tops of trees. It uses its strong legs and its large curved bill to climb. Then, to get down from the treetop more efficiently, the kakapo will spread its wings and parachute down, although its wings aren’t big enough or strong enough for it to actually fly. A big heavy male sort of falls in a controlled plummet while a small female will land more gracefully.

The kakapo evolved on New Zealand where it had almost no predators. A few types of eagle hunted it during the day, which is why it evolved to be mostly nocturnal. Its only real predator at night was one type of owl. As a result, the kakapo was one of the most common birds throughout New Zealand when humans arrived.

But by the end of the 19th century, the kakapo was becoming increasingly rare everywhere. By 1970, scientists worried that the kakapo was already extinct. Fortunately, a few of the birds survived in remote areas. Several islands were chosen as refuges, and all the kakapos scientists could find were relocated to the islands, 65 birds in total. While the kakapo is doing a lot better now than it has in decades, it’s still critically endangered. The current population is 237 individuals according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

The kakapo may be the largest living parrot, but it’s not the largest parrot that ever lived. That would be the giant parrot. It’s known only from a few fossils dated to between 16 and 19 million years ago, but from those fossils scientists estimate that the giant parrot grew around 3 feet tall, or almost a meter, and possibly weighed almost twice what the kakapo weighs. It’s the largest parrot that ever lived as far as we know, and it was probably related to the kakapo.

We don’t know a lot about the giant parrot because only two fossils have been found, both of them leg bones and probably from the same individual. They bones are so big that scientists initially thought they belonged to an eagle. Hopefully soon more fossils will come to light so we can learn more about the giant parrot. For all we know, those leg bones belonged to a young parrot that wasn’t fully grown yet. Maybe the adults were even bigger than we 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 454: Bats!

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This week we’re going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions!

Further reading:

Why Bats Can’t Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying

On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates

Why some bats hunt during the day

Puzzling Proto-Bats

A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]:

BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too:

The western red bat looks ready for Halloween!

Show transcript:

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

This week as monster month continues, we’re going to learn about bats! We’ve talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we’ve never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions!

John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing–but I couldn’t find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly.

The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they’re specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don’t need to use their legs when flying, bats’ legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat’s hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too.

A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That’s why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs.

Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It’s not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That’s why bats hang upside-down when they’re not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can’t walk at all.

But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It’s also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka.

The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It’s brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn’t very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you’d expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees.

The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants.

One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a mate. The sound is so high-pitched that it’s not practical to share it here, because you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it, but I’ll link to an article that has a sample bat song so you can listen.

Another bat that can walk just fine is one suggested by Murilo, the vampire bat. In movies, vampire bats are usually depicted as being humongous, as big as a person! In reality, those big bats are actually megabats, and megabats mostly eat fruit. Megabats are the ones that are sometimes called sky puppies, because they don’t rely very much on echolocation so they don’t have the complicated ears and noses that microbats do. Until recently scientists thought megabats couldn’t echolocate at all, but now we know they can, they’re just not all that good at it. The vampire bat is tiny in comparison.

There are three species of vampire bat alive today. They share the same subfamily, Desmodontinae, but have been classified in different genera because they differ considerably from each other. Their other relations are ordinary bats that eat insects, fruit, and other things that you’d expect from bats. Vampire bats really do eat blood exclusively.

The hairy-legged vampire bat is the most basal of the three species, meaning it retains traits that haven’t changed as much from its ancestors. It feeds exclusively on bird blood. The white-winged vampire bat also mostly feeds on bird blood, but it will sometimes eat the blood of mammals. It’s the common vampire bat that eats the blood of mammals.

Vampire bats probably evolved from ancestors that ate insects. Scientists hypothesize that they might have originally specialized in eating ectoparasites of other animals, or possibly insects that were attracted to animal wounds. If that’s the case, the bat would have already been eating a lot of blood along with the insects, and at some point it started taking a shortcut to getting that yummy blood. We know this has happened at least one other time, in a bird.

I thought we had talked about the red-billed oxpecker in an old episode, but if we did, I couldn’t find it. It lives throughout the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa and is brown with a bright orange bill and eyes, with a yellow eye ring. It eats ticks that it picks off rhinoceroses, cattle, and other large mammals, but it actually mainly eats blood. It’s happy to eat the ticks, because they’re full of blood, and the animals it perches on are happy that it eats ticks, but the bird will also peck at wounds so it can drink blood directly from the animal.

So it’s likely that the vampire bat started out eating ticks or other ectoparasites, then began eating the blood that oozed from the wound after it removed a tick. From there it was a short step to biting the animal to cause blood to flow, and within four million years, it was fully adapted to drinking blood.

The vampire bat has extremely sharp front teeth that stick out so that it can use them to make little cuts in an animal’s skin, after first using its teeth to shave the fur down so it can reach the skin more easily. Its fangs lack enamel, so they stay razor sharp. The vampire bat’s saliva contains anticoagulants, so the blood won’t clot right away and the bat can lick it up until it’s full, which takes about 20 minutes. It digests blood extremely quickly, so that it absorbs the nutrients from the blood and starts urinating the extra liquid within a few minutes of starting to feed. That way it can eat more and it can also stay light enough to take flight if it’s disturbed. If you were wondering, its poop is the same as other bat poop. It does echolocate, although not as expertly as bats that eat insects, but the common vampire bat also has specialized thermoreceptors on its nose that sense heat. It’s the only mammal known that can detect infrared radiation, and the only other vertebrates known that can do the same thing are some snakes.

Because vampire bats have to be able to walk around on animals to find a good spot to bite them, the bats have evolved to be able to walk, run, and even jump just fine. Like the pekapeka, it folds the ends of its wings back out of the way and basically walks on the wrists of its wings and its backwards-pointing feet.

Even though the pekapeka and the vampire bat are comfortable running around on the ground, neither has lost the ability to fly. Being able to fly seems to be baked into being a bat. So while it’s not impossible that a bat might eventually become truly flightless, it’s unlikely.

As for bats that are diurnal, or daytime bats, there are a few. A study published in 2018 determined that of the four known species of bat that routinely go out hunting during the daytime, all four live on islands where there are no predatory birds. That doesn’t mean that all bats that live in places where there aren’t any hawks or eagles or crows are active during the day, because most species are still nocturnal, but that seems to be the one requirement for a daytime bat.

John was also interested in learning about the biggest fossil bat ever found. Bats are delicate creatures and don’t fossilize very well, so the bat fossil record is really fragmentary. For example, until 2015 the oldest pekapeka fossil discovered was only 17,500 years old. In 2015, a new fossilized pekapeka ancestor was discovered on the South Island that’s been dated to 16 to 19 million years ago. The fossil shows that the bat was adapted to walk just as the modern pekapeka is, and its teeth are similar so it probably had a similar diet—but it’s estimated to be three times the size of the pekapeka! That sounds like it must have been a huge bat, but the pekapeka only weighs 15 grams at most. That’s barely more than half an ounce, or about the same weight as a CD or DVD, not counting the case. Its ancestor is estimated to have weighed as much as 40 grams, which is almost as heavy as a golf ball. It’s also what a typical vampire bat weighs, if you were wondering.

An even bigger fossil bat has been discovered in a fossil site in France, a country in Europe, and another in Tunisia, a country in North Africa. It’s called Necromantis and is estimated to have weighed as much as 47 grams, which is the same weight as two mice. Two nervous mice, because Mecromantis had strong jaws and big teeth, which suggests it ate small vertebrates–like mice. It lived between 44 and 36 million years ago in areas that were most likely tropical.

An ancestor of the vampire bat was even bigger, possibly as much as 60 grams. That’s just over 2 ounces! That’s a bit heavier than a tennis ball. It lived in South America during the Pleistocene, so recently that in addition to fossils, we also have subfossil remains. That means they’re mineralized but not yet fully fossilized. It’s called Desmodus draculae, and it was most likely still around when humans migrated to South America around 25,000 years ago. Big as it was, it still wasn’t as big as a typical megabat.

Because bat fossils are so rare, it’s led to a scientific mystery. We don’t have any fossils of bat ancestors that weren’t yet bats, but were evolving into bats. In other words, we don’t know what bats looked like before they evolved to be flying animals. The best guess is that the earliest bat ancestors were shrew-like animals that lived in trees and ate insects.

So far we haven’t mentioned any bats that live in Arizona, suggested by Alexandra, so let’s learn about the western red bat. Most bats are black, gray, or brown in color, but the western red bat is a cheerful orange with white shoulder patches and black wing membranes. It’s ready for Halloween all the time! Males are usually more brightly colored than females.

The western red bat lives throughout western North America in summer. It migrates to the southern parts of its range in winter, as far south as Central America. It’s also called the desert red bat but it actually spends most of its life in forests, where its red coat blends in with dead leaves. It eats insects and while it doesn’t spend much time on the ground, every so often it will drop to the ground to catch an insect before hopping back into the air. Not only that, but when the western red bat migrates, it will sometimes fly along with flocks of migrating birds in the daytime.

Unlike many bats, the western red bat is solitary most of the year. Also unlike most bats, instead of having just one baby at a time, it can have up to four babies in a litter. The mother has four nipples instead of just two as in most bats, and for the first three or four weeks of the babies’ lives, the mother has to carry them around while she hunts, until they learn to fly.

As a last note about bats, Murilo specifically mentioned that vampire bats carry diseases that humans can catch. (If diseases bother you, you can stop listening now because we’re almost done.) The common vampire bat does occasionally bite humans, usually the bare big toe of someone sleeping outside, or sometimes the earlobe or even the nose. Vampire bats do show a lot of resistance to blood-borne diseases, but they still spread diseases. The best way to avoid catching a disease from a vampire bat is to not sleep outside without shelter if you can avoid it, if you’re in an area of South America where vampire bats live. That means that if you’re out camping, bring a tent even if it’s hot. Also, avoid eating the meat of wild boar from South America. Not only can boars catch diseases from vampire bats that they pass on to humans, but wild boars also eat fruit partially eaten by fruit bats that also carry diseases. The fruit bats drop partially eaten fruit, the wild boar eats the fruit along with the saliva left on it by the bat, and then the boar can get sick from the saliva.

Most mammals can catch rabies. If you see a bat out in the daytime crawling on the ground, don’t assume that you’re seeing a very rare daytime bat that can also walk around like a pekapeka. Leave the bat alone and contact animal control, because most likely the poor bat has contracted rabies. If you touch the bat, even if it doesn’t bite you, you will have to get a series of rabies vaccines to make sure you don’t come down with rabies, which is an incurable disease and always fatal. That is way scarier than anything else we’ve ever talked about on monster month episodes!

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 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

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Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week’s topics!

Further reading:

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

Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say

Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered

The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko:

The fluffy snow leopard:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I’ve recorded in my new apartment, so let’s make it a good one.

First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever!

The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We’ve talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It’s native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It’s an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes, and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it’s now protected in the wild.

The crested gecko has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don’t have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn’t grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you’d think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch.

The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn’t seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they’re nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn’t spotted any.

While we’re talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt’s giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it’s really interesting so let’s go over it again.

Way back 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, the same archipelago of islands where the crested gecko is from. 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.

Now we’re done with geckos for today, but we’re not done with this episode! Preston also wanted to learn about the snow leopard, and it’s amazing that we’ve never talked about it before! The snow leopard is a big cat that’s most closely related to the tiger, although they don’t look very much alike. The term big cat refers to tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars, but it can also include cheetahs and cougars depending on who you ask. Big cats have round pupils instead of slit pupils like domestic cats and other smaller cats.

The snow leopard mostly lives in cold, mountainous areas in parts of Asia, from Siberia to India. It prefers to live in rocky areas where its coat pattern hides it from its prey. Its fur is thick and it can be anywhere from pure white to tan or gray, with black spots and rosettes. Its head is small, its legs relatively short, and its tail is very fluffy and incredibly long. A big male can grow up to 1.5 meters long, or 5 feet, plus a tail that’s almost as long as his body, but he’s only about two feet tall at the shoulder, or not quite 60 cm.

The snow leopard is well adapted to cold and snow. Fur grows on the underside of its paws to keep its feet warm, its paws are really large to act as snowshoes, and its ears are small and rounded to keep the tips from being frostbitten. Its long tail helps it balance when climbing over rocks. Its tail also stores fat, and is so long and fluffy that the snow leopard can use its tail as a blanket when it’s sleeping. Built-in blanket!

Unfortunately for the snow leopard, its thick, beautiful fur has been used as a blanket by humans for a long time, and it’s still sometimes killed for its fur even though it’s a protected species almost everywhere it lives. It’s also sometimes killed by farmers and herders who think the snow leopard will kill their livestock. It actually doesn’t attack livestock very often, and almost never attacks people. It eats small animals of various kinds depending on where it lives, like mice and rats, hares and rabbits, wild goats and sheep, marmots, deer, civets, and even rhesus macaques. It mainly only kills livestock where its wild prey has been reduced because of human activity. It’s also vulnerable to habitat loss and climate change.

Snow leopards are mostly solitary, although a mated pair will hunt together and of course the mother snow leopard teaches her babies to hunt as they get older. Individuals leave scent marks and spray urine to let other snow leopards know they’re around. Males roam widely but females usually stay to a territory that they’re familiar with, although the territory may be quite large.

Most snow leopard cubs are born in the early summer, and a female usually only has two or three babies in a litter. The mother takes care of her babies by herself. She makes a den among rocks and lines it with her belly fur, but cubs are born with a lot of fur already to keep them warm. The mother takes care of them for about two years until they finally leave to find their own territories.

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

We actually don’t know a whole lot about the snow leopard because it lives in such remote places, and one big mystery is how the snow leopard ended up adapted to cold. Most cats, large and small, prefer hot climates. Until recently, we didn’t even have any snow leopard fossils to give us a clue.

Then a collection of leopard fossils revealed some snow leopard fossils mixed in. They’re about a million years old, collected in parts of China, France, and Portugal. A study of the fossils, and a beautifully preserved partial skeleton found in Portugal, has shed light on the migration and evolution of the snow leopard.

The snow leopard was already well adapted for mountainous areas, but when the climate became colder during the Pleistocene, AKA the Ice Age, it evolved to thrive in a cold climate. It spread into many parts of Asia and Europe, especially mountainous areas, out-competing other predators like leopards that weren’t well adapted to cold. With the warming climate after the ice ages ended, the snow leopard was at a disadvantage and gradually died out except around the Tibetan plateau where it still lives today, and we’re very lucky to still have 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 447: So Many Legs!

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Thanks to Mila for suggesting one of our topics today!

Further reading:

The mystery of the ‘missing’ giant millipede

Never-before-seen head of prehistoric, car-size ‘millipede’ solves evolutionary mystery

A centipede compared to a millipede:

Show transcript:

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

Let’s finish invertebrate August this year with two arthropods. One is a suggestion from Mila and the other is a scientific mystery that was solved by a recent discovery, at least partially.

Mila suggested we learn about centipedes, and the last time we talked about those animals was in episode 100. That’s because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs.

But do centipedes actually have 100 legs? They don’t. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they’ll ever have.

A centipede’s body is flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede’s species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two, which have no legs. The first segment’s legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey, and to defend itself from potential predators. A centipede pinch can be painful but not dangerous unless you’re also allergic to bees, in which case you might have an allergic reaction to a big centipede’s venom. Small centipedes can’t pinch hard enough to break a human’s skin.

A centipede’s last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they’re just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of a centipede’s legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks.

The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, but it needs a moist environment so it won’t dry out. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal.

The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It’s reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders–including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes and lizards, birds, and small mammals like mice. It’s even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by.

Some people think that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn’t actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs.

But if you think that’s big, wait until you hear about the other animal we’re discussing today. It’s called Arthropleura and it lived in what is now Europe and North America between about 344 and 292 million years ago.

Before we talk about it, though, we need to learn a little about the millipede. Millipedes are related to centipedes and share a lot of physical characteristics, like a segmented body and a lot of legs. The word millipede means one thousand feet, but millipedes can have anywhere from 36 to 1,306 legs. That is a lot of legs. It’s probably too many legs. The millipede with 1,306 legs is Eumillipes persephone, found in western Australia and only described in 2021. It lives deep underground in forested areas, where it probably eats fungus that grows on tree roots. It’s long and thin with short legs and no eyes. It’s only about 1 mm in diameter, but can grow nearly 4 inches long, or almost 10 cm.

Millipedes mostly eat decaying plant material and are generally chunkier-looking than centipedes. They have two pairs of legs per segment instead of just one, with the legs attached on the underside of the segment instead of on the sides. A millipede usually has short, strong antennae that it uses to poke around in soil and decaying leaves. It can’t pinch, sting, or bite, although some species can secrete a toxic liquid that also smells terrible. Mostly if it feels threatened, a millipede will curl up and hope the potential predator will leave it alone.

The biggest millipede alive today is probably the giant African millipede, which can grow over 13 inches long, or almost 34 cm, but because millipedes are common throughout the world and are often hard for scientists to find, there may very well be much larger millipedes out there that we just don’t know about.

As an example, in 1897 scientists discovered a new species of giant millipede in Madagascar and named it Spirostreptus sculptus. One specimen found was almost 11 inches long, or over 27 cm. But after that, no scientist saw the millipede again—until 2023, when a scientific expedition looking for lost species rediscovered it, along with 20 other species of animal. It turns out that the millipede isn’t even uncommon in the area, so the local people probably knew all about it.

But Arthropleura was way bigger than any millipede or centipede alive today. It could grow at least 8 ½ feet long, or 2.6 meters, and possibly longer. It probably weighed over 100 lbs, or 45 kg. We have plenty of fossilized specimens, but not one of them has an intact head. Then scientists discovered two beautifully preserved juvenile specimens in France, and CT scans in 2024 revealed that both specimens had nearly complete heads.

The big question about Arthropleura was whether it was more closely related to millipedes or centipedes, or if it was something very different. Without a head to study, no one could answer that question with any confidence, although a lot of scientists had definite opinions one way or another. Studies of the head scans determined that Arthropleura was indeed more closely related to modern millipedes—but naturally, since it lived so long ago, it also had a lot of traits more common in centipedes today. It also had something not found in either animal, eyes on little stalks.

There are still lots of mysteries surrounding Arthropleura. For instance, what did it eat? Because of its size, scientists initially thought it might be a predator. Now that we know it was more closely related to the millipede than the centipede, scientists think it might have eaten like a millipede too. That would mean it mostly ate decaying vegetation, but we don’t know for sure. We also don’t know if it could swim or not. We have a lot of Arthropleura tracks that seem to be made along the water’s edge, so some scientists hypothesize that it could swim or at least spent part of its time in the water. Other scientists point out that Arthropleura didn’t have gills or any other way to absorb oxygen while in the water, so it was more likely to be fully terrestrial. The first set of scientists sometimes comes back and argues that we don’t actually know how Arthropleura breathed or even why it was able to grow so large, and maybe it really did have gills. A third group of scientists then has to come in and say, hey, everyone calm down, maybe the next specimen we find will show evidence of both lungs and gills, and it spent part of its time on land and part in shallow water, so there’s no need to argue. And then they all go for pizza and remember that they really love arthropods, and isn’t Arthropleura the coolest arthropod of all?

At least, I think that’s how it works among scientists. And Arthropleura is really cool.

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!