Category Archives: extinct

Episode 497 Megarachne

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Megarachne as we know it now:

Show transcript:

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

Megarachne is only known from two specimens, neither of which is complete, which adds to the confusion. It lived around 300 million years ago in what is now South America. It was described in 1980 from the first specimen discovered and was named Megarachne, which means big spider. The scientist who described it thought it was a type of primitive spider related to modern tarantulas, but much bigger. He estimated its legspan was 20 inches, or 50 cm, with a body length of just over 13 inches, or 34 cm. That made it the largest spider ever known by a lot.

Other palaeontologists, especially arachnologists who specialize in spiders and their relations, weren’t convinced Megarachne was a spider. But it wasn’t until 2005 when a more complete specimen was discovered that anyone could say for sure what it was. The second specimen made it clear that it wasn’t a spider at all but a sea scorpion, or eurypterid, and not an especially large one compared to some. It probably grew to 21 inches long, or 54 cm.

But by then, Megarachne had gotten really popular as a giant spider. It was in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters, although the producers changed its name to Mesothelae right before it aired, which was just after the new findings about Megarachne came out. Mesothelae is a suborder of big spiders from parts of Asia that retain many traits of ancestral spiders. It was a valiant attempt by the BBC to make the documentary less incorrect, but of course the spider they were talking about still wasn’t a spider and no spider known has ever grown that large.

But while Megarachne isn’t a giant spider, and isn’t even a very big eurypterid, it is important since not very many eurypterids are known from South America. It also appears to be closely related to Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, similar-looking euripterids from North America and Europe. But some researchers think it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. Instead of three similar creatures living in different areas, they think there’s something else going on.

Eurypterids were arthropods, the phylum that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton that they molt periodically as they grow, and many arthropods have complicated life stages compared to other animals. When a shark hatches, it looks like a miniature adult and just grows larger as it gets older, but when an arthropod hatches, it usually doesn’t look anything like its adult form. Some arthropods go through many stages of life before reaching the adult body plan. Crustaceans have numerous larval stages, for instance, that often look very different from the adult. Some researchers think that Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus were all the same animal, and that the differences are due to it being in three different stages of development when it died and was preserved.

We don’t have any way to know if this was correct, of course, not until we hopefully find more fossil remains. Other eurypterids did appear to go through some physical changes during maturation, as far as researchers can tell with the remains we have, but Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus belonged to a different family from other eurypterids and are much rarer. They might have been quite different developmentally.

We can also look at the living relations to see how likely it is that eurypterids had different larval stages where they looked different from the adult form. Eurypterids were probably most closely related to horseshoe crabs, although not everyone agrees. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years and are really neat animals that we’re lucky to still have in the world. The horseshoe crab hatches into a larva that looks a lot like a trilobite. It does indeed go through physical changes as it grows and molts over the course of three years, so it’s reasonable to assume that eurypterids did too.

On the other hand, some researchers think eurypterids were more closely related to modern scorpions. Scorpions actually give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, and the female carries the babies on her back for several days up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once the babies have their first molt they look a lot more like miniature adults and pretty soon are able to leave their mother and hunt on their own. So again, it’s possible that eurypterids had a system more like this instead of like the horseshoe crab’s.

While we’re talking about scorpions, did you know that scorpions glow blue-green in ultraviolet light? The scorpion’s exoskeleton contains fluorescent chemicals, but we’re not sure why. Scorpions do have incredibly light sensitive eyes, and can navigate at night using only starlight. Their eyes can’t form sharp images like ours can, though. And scorpions have a lot of eyes. Spiders have four pairs of eyes, but some scorpions have more than that. All species have a pair on top of the cephalothorax, which corresponds to the head, and more on the sides of the cephalothorax. Some species have up to five pairs of eyes in addition to the ones on top of the head. Twelve eyes seems like overkill but it works for the scorpion. Eurypterids had both compound eyes and simple eyes.

That’s all we know about Megarachne right now, at least until we find more fossilized specimens. Let’s hope we do, and while we’re at it, let’s hope we find some more fossilized giant spiders because that would be cool.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 494: Four Water Animals

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Further reading:

New species of extinct vampire-squid-like cephalopod

When teeth grow on the body

Fossil shark turns into mystery pterosaur

Scientists Had Never Seen This Elusive Whale Alive—Until Now

Show transcript:

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

This month I wasn’t sure what to cover in this episode, so I decided to just click on four random bookmarks of scientific articles that I’ve had waiting for attention, and we’ll discuss them. We haven’t done a four articles episode in a long time!

The first article is from March 2022, and it’s about the discovery of an ancient cephalopod. Cephalopods include octopuses and squid. Octopuses famously have eight arms, while squid have eight arms and two feeding tentacles. Despite its name, the deep-sea vampire squid is actually more closely related to octopuses than to squid, and a newly discovered fossil is an ancestor to both.

The fossil is 328 million years old and was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 1988 but was only studied recently. Fossils of soft-bodied animals are incredibly rare, and this one is remarkably well-preserved. All of the animal’s arms are preserved, including the suckers, but instead of eight arms, it had ten.

Scientists have long suspected that the ancestors of modern octopuses and vampire squid had ten arms. The vampire squid has eight arms and two feeding filaments that are vestigial arms. But this is the first fossil found that shows ten arms.

The fossil is of an animal with a torpedo-like body shaped like a modern squid. Two of its arms appear to be elongated compared to its other arms. It’s about 4 and a half inches long including its arms, or 12 cm. That’s pretty much all we know about it now, but hopefully the fossil will reveal more information as it continues to be studied.

Our next article is from October 2017 and is intriguingly titled “When teeth grow on the body.” It sounds horrific, but it’s actually a study of certain catfish that grow bony plates with tiny teeth on their bodies as defense.

Catfish don’t have scales, but some species of denticulate catfish that live in South America grow bony plates that act like armor. Many of these plates are covered in thin little teeth–actual teeth, including enamel and dentin, with pulp inside. They’re called extra-oral teeth, dermal denticles, or odontodes, and the study determined that they appeared about 120 million years ago in ancient catfish that hadn’t yet evolved the bony plates. The teeth regrow when they’re lost, and in some species, males grow larger teeth than females and use them to fight other males. Imagine biting someone without needing to open your mouth.

Our next article is from November 2020, about more fossils. The fossils were discovered in a collection at the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton in England, and were originally found in the latter half of the 19th century by miners. A PhD student at the University of Portsmouth was studying fossilized shark spines from the collection when he realized they weren’t actually shark spines. Instead, they were jaw fragments from pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that filled many ecological niches that birds fill today. One of the species identified from the collection is called Ornithostoma, which means bird mouth, an animal that lived in the early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago, in what is now Europe. We know very little about it except that it didn’t have teeth, but it probably ate fish.

But there were some other jaw fragments that didn’t belong to Ornithostoma, and in fact don’t match up to any known pterosaur jaws. It may belong to a new species, but the fossils are so fragmentary that there’s no way to know for sure. The rocks that the fossils came from were completely destroyed more than a century ago during phosphate mining, so unless more fragments are found in other collections, we may never learn more about this mystery pterosaur.

Our last article is from July 2022, and I have no idea why I haven’t talked about it on the podcast before now. It’s about Sato’s beaked whale, also called kurotsuchi. It’s a type of four-toothed whale with a short beak, and it’s dark gray and can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. It was only identified in 2016 as being different from the two other known species of four-toothed whales, after careful analysis, including DNA analysis, of dead individuals that had been found washed ashore.

Until the summer of 2021, no one had ever seen a living Sato’s beaked whale. Then some researchers studying orcas spotted 14 of the beaked whales swimming together between Hokkaido, Japan and the Kuril Islands. The scientists recognized that these were unusual whales and they were able to get a small skin sample from one. Genetic testing confirmed that they were indeed Sato’s beaked whales.

Researchers think the whales may spend at least part of the year in tropical waters, since that’s where cookie cutter sharks live and the whales show circular bite scars from cookie cutter sharks. Not much is known about most species of beaked whale, and Sato’s beaked whale is especially mysterious. But at least we know it’s alive and well right now.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 493: NEW The Mystery of Esconichthys and Friends

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Yes, this is a NEW episode! Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions this week. (Actual episode starts at 3 minutes 28 seconds.)

Find the Backerkit campaign here!

Further reading:

Nix Illlustration: Esconichthys

The southern hognose snake [picture by Caudatejake – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

A beach wolf spider [photo by Memer15151 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

Oviraptor may have looked kind of like this when alive [art by PaleoNeolitic – Own work, CC BY 4.0]:

Two halves of an esconichthys fossil:

Show transcript:

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

Oh, hi! This is a brand new episode, earlier than I expected! I noticed recently that one of the Patreon episodes I’d scheduled for September is one that I’d already run in the main feed a few years ago. I decided to just make a new episode for this week and move the episode that would have run this week to that September slot, because I have an announcement!

For our five-year anniversary I published the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, with a lot of the entries taken from episodes but also some new topics added. I always intended to do a follow-up for our ten-year anniversary, and have even done a lot of work on it. It’s called Small Mysteries, focusing on smaller mystery animals that don’t get a lot of attention. It’s about half the length of Beyond Bigfoot, all or almost all chapters taken from the podcast. But at this point, I don’t think I have time to finish it. I’m staying very busy and happy, with a part-time job taking care of people’s pets while they’re on vacation, and I’m also writing fiction again.

But since that book is half-done, and a lot of people might want a copy even if I don’t add much more to it, I’m going to make it available as an ebook only. Do you remember last time I made a crowdfunding campaign, and the people who backed the campaign got a copy of the book as soon as it was published? I’m doing that again, but NOT for Small Mysteries. It’s for a different book, called The Moonhound, a cozy fantasy set in an alternate reality Smoky Mountains. The main character is a rabbit who moves to the mountains and meets a possum, and they have adventures. Even if this doesn’t interest you, there’s a $1 backer tier and if you click that, you have the option to add the Small Mysteries ebook for $2. That means the book is $3. Does that make sense? I feel like it’s confusing.

The campaign starts on July 15, 2026 and runs through August 15, 2026. If you’re listening to the episode before July 15, 2026, you can click through the link in the show notes and follow the campaign, so that you get an email when it goes live. If it’s between July 15 and August 15, 2026, click the link in the show notes and there’s the campaign! If it’s after August 15, 2026, see if there’s a link in the show notes that will take you to a place where you can buy the ebook.

Okay, that took way too long, so let’s get to this week’s episode! We have some suggestions that have come in recently, so we’ll cover a few of those animals, and we’ll finish up with a small fossil mystery in honor of the book. Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions! A quick shout-out to Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions too. I’ll get to those in the 500th episode that will run at the end of August.

We’ll start with Viki’s suggestion, the hognose snake. The name hognose is used for various species of snake, most of them in North and South America, but some in Madagascar. It’s a common snake in many parts of North America, so since we talked about the eastern hognose back in episode 81, let’s talk about the southern hognose in this episode. It’s found along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, including parts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida, and because it has a restricted range where people like to live too, it’s vulnerable to habitat loss. It used to live in other states too but its range has shrunk considerably since it was first described in 1766.

The southern hognose grows about two feet long, or 61 cm, and like other hognose snakes, its nose turns up like a little pig’s snout. The shape of its nose actually may help it dig into leaf litter and dirt to hide. Some individuals are brown or gray, some are red or yellowish. It has darker blotches on its upper side and adults have white bellies. It has a big head that makes some people believe it’s venomous, but it’s actually harmless to humans and most animals.

The only animals that really need to worry about the hognose are amphibians, like toads, frogs, and salamanders, although it will also eat lizards, small mammals like mice, and even large insects. It especially likes to eat toads, and while some toads are toxic, the hognose snake is resistant to toad toxins. A toad will frequently puff itself up to make it appear larger and make it hard for a snake to swallow, but the hognose has a solution for that too. It has big teeth at the rear of its upper jaws, like fangs in the back of its mouth. It uses those teeth to puncture puffed-up toads so they deflate, just like a horrible balloon.

But the most memorable thing about the hognose is what it does when it feels threatened. Phase one is aggression. The snake will flatten its neck to look more threatening, raise its head like a cobra, and hiss and strike—but without biting. It’s just trying to scare you away. If that doesn’t work, the snake puts phase two into effect. It will flop down and roll onto its back like it’s dead, its tongue hanging out of its mouth. It even emits a foul musky smell from its cloaca. If you call its bluff and roll drama queen snake onto its belly, it will turn onto its back again, because it’s really insistent that it’s dead.

Since we’ve already scared away a lot of people who don’t like snakes, let’s learn about a spider next. Grace suggested we talk about the wolf spider, and also wonders if wolf spiders live in northern California.

Wolf spiders are common throughout the world, and while they look scary, they bite people very rarely and their venom is weak, no worse than a bee sting. The wolf spider with the biggest legspan is Hogna ingens, with a legspan less than 5 inches across, or 12 cm. It lives on one island in the Maderia archipelago, and is a beautiful soft gray with white stripes on the legs. The Carolina wolf spider is the most common one found in North America. A big female can have a legspan of four inches, or 10 cm, but its body is not much more than an inch long, or 35 mm, and the spider actually weighs less than an ounce. That’s barely 28 grams, or just a little heavier than five sheets of printer paper.

The wolf spider is a hunting spider, mostly solitary, and most species don’t spin webs. When a female lays her eggs, she attaches the egg case to the underside of her abdomen so she can take them with her while she hunts insects. When the eggs hatch, the teensy babies ride around on the top of her abdomen for a few weeks until they’re big enough to not need their mother’s protection.

Some species of wolf spider will dig a burrow to rest in, and will jump out and grab any insect that happens by, while other species of wolf spider rest in rock crevices and other small spaces. Males are smaller than females and often have flashier patterns. The Carolina wolf spider is mainly gray or brown with darker and lighter longitudinal stripes down the head and body.

Most species of wolf spider won’t come into your house, but if you do have a wolf spider in your house, you should actually consider yourself lucky. They love to eat cockroaches and ants, which are house pests. The wolf spider hunts mostly by sight and has good vision, and its eyes will even demonstrate eyeshine of various colors, depending on species, if you shine a flashlight around in the dark. Maybe don’t do that if you’re afraid of spiders.

And yes, there are wolf spiders in northern California, because there are wolf spiders in just about every part of the world except for Antarctica! Northern California actually has at least six species of wolf spider. One species does actually build a web, and there’s even a species that lives on the beach. That’s the beach wolf spider, which is a pale sandy color with darker and lighter stripes to help it blend in with sand and pebbles. It’s quite small but it moves really fast, and it’s mostly nocturnal. It lives not just in northern California but throughout beaches in North and Central America.

Next, Eesa sent a list of suggested animals, including oviraptor. I could have sworn we already covered oviraptor, but we haven’t! It’s a really interesting dinosaur, so let’s take a look now.

Oviraptor is a name that means “egg thief,” and it got this name because it was found near fossilized eggs. It lived in what is now Asia about 75 million years ago, and the first specimen was found in Mongolia (still my favorite country) back in 1923. The partial specimen was found lying across a nest of dinosaur eggs. When the dinosaur was described in 1924, it was given the name egg thief because the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn assumed it died while robbing a nest to eat the eggs.

But even Osborn wrote that he might be wrong about the dinosaur, and in the 1990s new discoveries of oviraptor nesting sites proved this was the case. Oviraptor wasn’t stealing eggs, it was protecting them, because they were its own eggs. It probably actually ate fruit, seeds, and other plant material, along with small animals like lizards.

Oviraptor was a small dinosaur that was a little more than six feet long, or about 2 meters, and was the height of a medium to large dog. It walked on its hind legs. It had feathers on its arms and tail, and probably also had feathers over much of its body. It didn’t have teeth but it did have a beak that would have probablylooked a lot like a parrot’s beak. Its arms had three small claws but probably looked a lot like a wing in many ways, although scientists don’t think oviraptor could fly.

In other words, oviraptor probably looked a lot like a big, weird chicken, and like a chicken and many other birds, scientists think it sat on its eggs to keep them warm.

When a bird incubates its eggs, it’s not like you dropping down to sit on a chair. The bird’s feet are typically on either side of the eggs, and the bird squats down carefully so that its underside makes gentle contact with the eggs without crushing them. Female chickens and many other birds have a spot on the lower breast that doesn’t have any feathers, called a brood patch, which contains extra blood vessels just under the skin. This helps keep the eggs warm and is a soft part of the hen’s body, which helps cushion the eggs. We don’t know, but it’s possible oviraptor had something similar to a brood patch, and its feathered arms and tail also helped protect the eggs from cold air and rain. We now have numerous specimens that died while sitting on nests, probably buried in sandstorms, so we know that oviraptor basically brooded its nest the way modern birds do.

Finally, let’s finish with our small mystery fossil. It’s called Esconichthys apopyris and it lived about 308 million years ago in what is now the state of Illinois in North America. 308 million years ago, Illinois was a tropical area and partly covered by a warm, shallow sea. In a particular place known as the Mazon Creek formation, for a few million years conditions were just right to preserve dead animals and plants in astounding detail. A river carried dead plant materials and mud into an estuary along the ocean’s edge, where it sank and settled to the bottom of the sea floor. When an animal died, if it wasn’t eaten by something else, its body sank into this soft muddy mess. The bacteria in the mud produced carbon dioxide that combined with iron also present in the mud, which formed a mineral called siderite. This mineral encased the dead animal and slowed decay long enough for a detailed impression of the body to form in the mud. As the centuries passed and the mud became stone, the fossilized body impression was surrounded by a protective ironstone nodule. That’s why we know about the soft-bodied animals from the area, even though soft-bodied animals rarely leave fossil evidence.

Mazon Creek is where the Tully monster lived, which we talked about in episode 339, but the Tully monster isn’t the only mystery animal discovered there. Another one was Esconichthys.

We have lots of Esconichthys fossils, partly because it seems to have been extremely common, but also because it was a vertebrate. That means it had a notochord, a type of backbone. Most of the fossils we have are body impressions, so we do know a lot about what Esconichthys looked like when it was alive. What we don’t know is what it actually was.

Esconichthys was named for the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois, ESCONI, and the latter half of its name means fish. But it doesn’t actually seem to have been a fish, even a larval fish. It grew up to about 3 inches long, or 8 cm, and had a pair of very obvious eyes, two pairs of feathery external gills, and a single fin on the underside of its tail. It didn’t have legs or any other fins. Some individuals had wide-set eyes, others had eyes that are close together, which may indicate two separate species, but we don’t know.

Esconichthys fossils are sometimes referred to as ghosts, because the limbless body with two dots for eyes does kind of look like a cartoon ghost. Other people call Esconichthys fossils grasshoppers or blades. This is because the animal’s gills were quite long and are often preserved pointing away from the rest of the body, or sometimes the rear of the body is folded upward. This can make it look roughly like a grasshopper or a pocket knife with one blade unfolded.

Esconichthys has been proposed as a larval lungfish or a larval amphibian, but it doesn’t really match either animal group. It’s the most common fossil found at the Mazon Creek formation by far, preserved in amazing detail, but scientists still have no idea what it is or what it might be related to.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 492: Basilosaurids

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Further reading:

Giant early whale Basilosaurus hunted the calves of other whales

Show transcript:

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

Let’s look at some extinct whale ancestors this month, basilosaurids.

We talked about the ancestors of whales in episode 72, about weird whales. After mosasaurs went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, basilosaurids evolved to fill the ecological niche they left. Mosasaurs were big marine reptiles while basilosaurids were big marine mammals, but in many ways basilosaurids looked more like mosasaurs than they did modern whales.

Basilosaurids differed from their ancestors in that they were fully aquatic. They didn’t come out of the water at all and probably couldn’t. They did still have hind legs, but they were tiny and scientists think the animal probably only used the legs to help stay in place while mating. The hind legs were really small in comparison to the body, only 14 inches long, or 35 cm, in a 52-foot specimen, or 16 meters. Tyrannosaurus rex would look at that and say, “you’ve got really small legs, bruh.” Its front legs were larger and more flipper-like, although it still had an elbow joint that modern whales have lost, although modern seals still have an elbow joint.

The reason Basilosaurids have a name that sounds an awful lot like a dinosaur name is because the person who described the first one scientifically thought it was a reptile. That was a man named Richard Harlan, an early paleontologist, who thought the fossils he was sent belonged to a marine reptile, possibly a mosasaur relation. In 1839 he named it Basilosaurus, which means “king lizard.” Then he took the fossils to another Richard, Richard Owen, who gave them a second look. Owen pointed out that the teeth didn’t look anything like reptile teeth and that the animal was probably some kind of whale. He and Harlan decided to rename the animal Zeuglodon, but it was too late! The first name was published, and Basilosaurus stayed king lizard despite not being a reptile. That didn’t stop many paleontologists from using Zeuglodon instead for quite a while, which has caused all kinds of confusion.

Fossils of that particular species are especially common in the southern United States, so common in some places that the fossilized vertebrae were sometimes used as house supports. We talked about Basilosaurus in the paleontological frauds episode, because bones from six different basilosaurs formed the fake sea serpent skeleton exhibited around the United States and Europe in 1845.

Basilosaurus did look a little bit like a sea serpent in that it was very long and relatively slender, and its body wasn’t rigid like a modern whale’s. It grew up to 66 feet long, or 20 meters, and probably longer, and is sometimes described as eel-like. It probably had small flukes at the end of the tail, but it didn’t swim like a modern whale. Its vertebrae were large, hollow, and filled with fluid. This made Basilosaurus buoyant but probably also meant it had trouble diving very deeply.

There are only two species in the genus Basilosaurus, although there are lots of other Basilosaurids in other genera. The other Basilosaurus was slightly smaller and is most well known from an incredible bone bed in Egypt called Wadi al Hitan.

Around 35 million years ago, Wadi al Hitan was a shallow coastal area full of life. It wouldn’t have looked all that weird to us at first glance, because a lot of the animals and plants that lived there were early relations of the ones that are still around today. These included sea cows that ate marine plants, various crocodilians, sea turtles, sea snakes, lots of birds, including pelicans, and lots of fish, including sawfish, sharks, and rays. There was even a kind of elephant living along the coast of this warm, shallow sea, Moeritherium, which probably looked more like a hippo or tapir than an elephant.

There were also whales, specifically a type of dolphin-like animal called Dorudon. Dorudon was also a basilosaurid, but it only grew about 16 feet long, or 5 meters. It ate fish and other small animals and probably looked a lot like a miniature Basilosaurus—in fact, it was initially thought to be a juvenile Basilosaurus when it was first discovered. Dorudon may actually be a direct ancestor of modern whales, although we don’t know for sure.

Paleontologists think Dorudon used Wadi al Hitan as a calving ground. About half of the Dorudon fossils found there are of calves. But there are also fossils of Basilosaurus, and it was there to hunt.

In 2016, a complete skeleton of a Basilosaurus was discovered at Wadi al Hitan. Complete skeletons are incredibly rare in the fossil record, and this one was beautifully preserved. It even had the remains of its last meals preserved in the space that had once been its stomach, the first time preserved stomach contents had ever been found associated with a basilosaurus. Paleontologists knew Basilosaurus was a meat-eater because of its teeth, but they assumed it probably mostly ate fish. There were remains of a big fish in the stomach, but there were also remains of two young Dorudons. The remains are in pieces with bite marks on the skulls, which suggests that basilosaurus hunted like orcas do, where they bite the skulls of humpback whale calves.

Basilosaurids had small brains compared to modern whales and didn’t have the adaptations that would indicate it could echolocate. However, it did have a slightly asymmetrical skull, which is something needed for echolocation. Researchers think this was the first adaptation that later led to echolocation, and it probably helped the animal hear better underwater.

Finally, one important thing. If a big basilosaurus fought a megalodon shark, who would win? The answer is, this would never happen because megalodon didn’t evolve until 23 million years ago while basilosaurids all died out by about 33 million years ago. Sorry, I’m no fun. Also, megalodon would have won because megalodon was a better swimmer.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 486: Two Rediscovered Birds

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Further reading:

https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird

https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html

The black-naped pheasant-pigeon:

Confuciusornis:

Show transcript:

We’re going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately.

The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to the back of the neck, and this bird does have a black neck. It’s a dark blue-black all over, in fact, with reddish-brown wings, a red bill, red eyes, and long yellow legs. It looks almost identical to the other three species of pheasant-pigeons known, although some scientists think they’re subspecies. Those three are the white-naped, the green-naped, and the grey-naped pheasant-pigeons, and if you’re wondering if the spot of color on the back of the neck is the easiest way to tell these birds apart, you are exactly right. All four species are native to parts of New Guinea or small islands nearby.

Pheasant-pigeons look a lot like pheasants and are about the size of a chicken, although they’re actually pigeons. They live in forests and eat seeds and fruit, and while they can fly they spend almost all of the time on the ground. We don’t know a whole lot about them because they’re so secretive and hard to spot in the wild, although the white-naped and green-naped birds are sometimes kept in zoos. In the case of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, all scientists knew about it was from two specimens collected in 1882. It hadn’t been seen since…until September of 2022.

A team of scientists visited Fergusson Island off the east coast of Papua New Guinea in September, as part of a worldwide collaboration of scientists called The Search for Lost Birds. This is similar to the Search for Lost Frogs that has been active for over a decade, discovering lots of new amphibians and rediscovering even more. The 2022 search was actually a follow-up to a 2019 expedition that had failed to find the bird, although it did make other discoveries.

In 2022, the team brought more people and equipment, determined to make the best effort possible to find the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. They consulted with local hunters to find the best places to search, and talked to lots of residents to see if anyone had seen one, and spent day after day hiking through forested mountains. For weeks they had no luck. Then, in a remote mountain village, they finally met some people who were familiar with the bird. One man led them to the right part of the forest and they set up camera traps, but at that point they only had a few days left before they had to leave the island.

When they checked the pictures captured by the camera traps, though, they’d found it! Two of the cameras had taken pictures and video of what were definitely black-naped pheasant-pigeons, and since the cameras were several kilometers apart the pictures were probably of different individuals. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon wasn’t extinct, which means it can be protected. Habitat loss, especially from commercial logging, and feral domestic cats are the two main threats to birds in the area.

The other bird we’re going to talk about today hasn’t been seen in even longer: 119 million years, in fact. The article about this fossil was only released a few days ago as this episode goes live. You can check the show notes for links to this article and a good one about the pheasant-pigeon too.

Paleontologists discovered the bird’s fossil remains in northeastern China, in fossil beds that contain incredibly well-preserved animals and plants. The Jiufotang Formation in China dates to the early Cretaceous, between about 122 and 119 million years ago, and researchers think it’s from an area that was once a shallow lake surrounded by forests. Every so often, a nearby volcano would erupt and the resulting ash would fall into the lake, causing anoxic conditions that helped preserve animals that died and sank into the mud at the bottom of the lake. There are lots of fish, pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs among the fossils discovered, most of them small but a few quite large. This includes a type of tyrannosaur that probably grew around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. A few early mammals have been discovered too. In one case, the remains of 40 individual birds were found on one big slab of stone, and scientists think an entire flock of birds was killed by a volcanic ashfall or poisonous gases from the volcano.

The newly described fossil we’re talking about today was almost complete and almost completely articulated, preserved with the impression of feathers around its body. The bird has been named Confuciusornis shifan and was a little smaller than a modern crow. It had a toothless beak and a short tail, although it probably had long tail feathers. Other Confuciusornis species have been discovered with the impressions of long tail plumes.

All of the Confuciusornis fossils discovered so far were birds that could fly well but probably nowhere near as well as any bird today. But C. shifan had an adaptation in its wings not seen in any other bird, living or extinct. It had a small extra bone in the wing that acted like a cushion and probably helped the wings withstand the stresses of flight.

The most interesting thing about the different Confuciusornis species is that if we could go back in time and see them when they were alive, they probably wouldn’t have looked unusual to most people, except to bird experts who would instantly freak out. For the most part, they just looked like birds. Some specimens show preserved melanosomes under electron microscopy that indicate the feathers were various colors including white, brown, red, and black. There’s even evidence of a pattern of spots and streaks on some feathers. Their feet were adapted for perching the way many modern songbird feet are. But Confuciusornis wasn’t a direct ancestor of modern birds as far as we know.

Even though we have lots of beautifully preserved Confuciusornis fossils, the fossils can only tell us so much. We have a pretty good idea of what the birds looked like, but we don’t know much about how they lived. One specimen was found with the remains of a tiny fish inside its body, so researchers think the birds may have eaten fish or might have just been omnivores that weren’t picky about what they ate. One specimen was found with an egg beside it that was the right size to have fit through its pelvic opening, but we can’t know for sure if the egg belonged to the bird or was from another bird and just happened to have settled near the dead bird when it fell in the water.

Still, even though we only have fossil remains, that’s much better than having no knowledge of these early birds at all.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 485: Cryodraken’s Very Bad Day

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Further reading:

Rare pterosaur fossil reveals crocodilian bite 76m years ago

Show transcript:

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

Let’s learn about a type of pterosaur that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now Canada, and we’ll specifically learn about an individual young pterosaur that had a very bad day, a bad day that’s preserved in the fossil record.

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, but weren’t actually dinosaurs. Some of them got as big as small airplanes while some were barely the size of chickens. Cryodrakon was one of the biggest ones, with an estimated wingspan of 33 feet, or 10 meters, for an adult animal—maybe even bigger. We don’t know the adults’ size for sure because we only have a few fossils of adult Cryodrakons, and those are incomplete. Mostly we have fossils of young individuals. The older juveniles had a wingspan of around 16 feet, or 5 meters, which is still pretty darn big.

Cryodrakon was the first pterosaur discovered in Canada, with fossils found in Alberta in 1972. Since then more fossils have been discovered in the same province, especially in what’s called the Dinosaur Park Formation.

Like other pterosaurs in the family Azhdarchidae, Cryodrakon had long legs and a very long neck with long jaws. Most scientists think it spent a lot of time on land, hunting small animals. It could fold the longest part of its wings up out of the way in order to walk on all fours.

A flying animal’s wing, whether it’s a pterosaur or a bird or a bat, is a modified arm. Insects are different because they’re invertebrates. In bats, the fingers are elongated with strong skin stretched between them to form a wing. In birds, the fingers are fused into a sort of stump and most of the flying surface is feathers. In pterosaurs, one or two fingers were elongated like a bat’s, but the other fingers were short and blunt. These are the fingers that azhdarchids could walk on when the rest of the fingers, and therefore the wing, was folded up so it wouldn’t get in the way. We know it’s possible for a winged animal to walk this way because vampire bats do it just fine, and they’re able to run around quite fast on the ground.

An adult Cryodrakon walking on all fours would have been about as tall as a modern giraffe because of its long neck. Its neck was strong and its head large, so it could easily grab a little running dinosaur and swallow it whole, maybe giving it a good chomp with its toothless jaws first. While azhdarchids probably couldn’t run, because the hind legs weren’t very strong and the feet were small, it could probably walk pretty quickly. And, of course, it could fly extremely well. Scientists think it launched into the air by pushing off the ground with its wings, not its back legs.

In older episodes we’ve talked about some other species of pterosaur from this same family, especially Quetzalcoatlus, a genus of exceptionally large pterosaurs discovered in North America. The largest individuals may have had a wingspan potentially more than 36 feet, or 11 meters. But in 2002 a remarkably complete pterosaur fossil was discovered in Romania, and while we don’t have the complete wing bones, estimates suggest this new species might even be larger than Quetzalcoatlus. Some estimates put its wingspan at 39 feet across, or 12 meters. It had a shorter neck than other azhdarchids but a massive head. Its neck was about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, while its skull was at least that long and possibly as much as 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters.

The Romanian specimen was named Hatzegopteryx but the specimen has been nicknamed Dracula (also the name of my cat). Some scientists initially argued that Dracula was just an especially big Quetzalcoatlus, but while it was probably a close relative, it’s too different to be the same species.

Despite their huge size, pterosaur bones were delicate because the animals had to be light enough to fly. That means they had air pockets or spongy internal structures in their bones, and that means their bones were much less likely to preserve. The most likely reason we have so many more fossils from young pterosaurs than old ones is because many species of pterosaur appear to have nested together. It’s a sad fact of life for wild animals that many young ones don’t survive, so the fossils of young pterosaurs probably come from nesting areas.

And that brings us to our young Cryodrakon who had a terminally bad day. In 2023, researchers found a neck bone of a cryodrakon that had a puncture right through it. The hole in the bone is about 4 mm across and circular, and the scientists who examined it think it’s from a crocodilian tooth. We don’t know if the baby pterosaur was chomped to death by a crocodilian or if it was already dead and the crocodilian was scavenging it.

That’s not even the only Cryodrakon fossil that shows tooth marks. In 1995 the fossils of a young animal were found in a scattered state, with tooth marks on some of the bones. Even better from a scientific standpoint, but definitely not from a cryodrakon standpoint, a little piece of chipped-off tooth was found embedded in one of the bones. Researchers think the tooth comes from a small dromaeosaurid dinosaur found in the same area, Saurornitholestes. It only stood about two feet tall, or 60 cm, so if it was running around biting baby cryodrakons, I hope it was really fast. The mother pterosaur would eat a dinosaur that size like a potato chip.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

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!