Category Archives: extinct

Episode 503: The Mystery of Typhloesus

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Further reading:

A possible home for a bizarre Carboniferous animal: is Typhloesus a pelagic gastropod?

Typhloesus

An artist’s rendition of what Typhloesus might have looked like [pic taken from the Nix Illustration link above]:

Show transcript:

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

I recently discovered the excellent Nix Illustration blog, which is about scientific illustration and palaeontology. I’m finding so many fun topics that I keep going back to it, so I hope you don’t mind another invertebrate mystery I learned about from the site. There are links in the show notes if you want to read the original blog posts.

This month’s mystery is Typhloesus wellsi, sometimes referred to as the “alien goldfish” because of its shape and its peculiar anatomy. It definitely wasn’t a fish. It lived around 324 million years ago and was first discovered in the early 1970s in Montana, in the middle of North America. It grew up to four inches long, or 10 cm, and was shaped not like a real goldfish but kind of like a goldfish cracker. Its body was roughly cylinder-shaped, and it had a vertical tail fin and a pair of fin-like lobes on its sides that are referred to as keels. But it didn’t have eyes or, as far as scientists can determine, an anus. It did have a mouth and gut cavity–but it also had something truly unexpected and mysterious in its body, a pair of disc-shaped organs that contained a lot of iron but whose function is completely unknown and unlike anything scientists have ever seen.

Those initial specimens also contained lots of conodont teeth, which led scientists to hope they’d finally discovered the conodont animal. We’ve talked about conodont teeth before, but it’s been quite a while ago. Conodont animals were incredibly common for around 300 million years, and their teeth are found throughout the world. Technically they’re not teeth but tooth-like structures called conodont elements, some of them microscopic, some of them almost an inch long, or 2 cm. Each animal had three types of conodont elements, and they interacted in a way that we don’t fully understand since they were completely different from modern animal mouthparts.

Until the 1980s, no one knew what the conodont animal looked like. The only fossils we had were the tiny teeth. Then some body impressions of the conodont animal were discovered. Now we know it was shaped like an eel and grew up to 20 inches long, or 50 cm. We also know it had large eyes, a notochord (or primitive spine), and fins on the tail end. It was probably related to hagfish and lampreys and may have looked similar, although not everyone agrees with this classification.

Whatever the conodont animal was related to, Typhloesus definitely wasn’t one. It turns out that the conodont teeth associated with Typhloesus fossils were actually in its gut, after the alien goldfish ate a conodont animal.

So scientists were back to square one. What was Typhloesus?

In 2022, a study of several specimens revealed a clue. Typhloesus had a radula. That’s a mouthpart that resembles a tooth-studded tongue. Snails, for instance, use tiny radulas to scrape algae and other food off of rocks. True radulas are a trait of mollusks, which means Typhloesus was most likely an early mollusk, maybe even a gastropod like snails and slugs.

That’s a start to classifying Typhloesus, but it doesn’t explain the pair of weird disc-shaped organs. It’s called a ferrodiscus and we still don’t know what it was for. Because of its placement just under the midgut and its high concentration of iron, which would have made it quite hard in comparison to most of the rest of its body, the ferrodiscus might have had something to do with digestion. Then again, it might have had something to do with chemoreception, which is probably how Typhloesus found its food. Some modern mollusks have a chemoreceptor organ under the radula, but it’s mainly a bundle of nerve cells and not any kind of weird iron discs. We just don’t know what the ferrodiscus was.

Typhloesus probably swam around until it encountered a small animal like a conodont, and then it would stick its radula out like a spiky tongue and use it to grab the animal. Typhloesus had no anus, so after it digested its meal it just spat out the indigestible parts. It might also have been a scavenger that used its radula to pull pieces off of a dead animal to eat.

Not every scientist agrees that Typhloesus was a mollusk. Only mollusks have true radulas, although not all mollusks have them, but other animals have evolved similar structures. Typhloesus is so different from known mollusks, living and extinct, that scientists can’t definitively determine what it was related to. It had no gills and no notochord, so we know it had to be an invertebrate. Some cnidarians, which include jellyfish and sea anemones, have no anus, but Typhloesus has even less in common with that phylum of animals than it has with mollusks. Some flatworms have no anus, but again, Typhloesus doesn’t seem to have a lot of other traits in common with flatworms.

Until we learn more about it from studying well-preserved fossils, we can only speculate about where Typhloesus fits in the tree of life and what the ferrodiscus actually was. Mysteries like this are part of the challenge of science, and part of the fun too.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 502: Back to the Ocean

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Show transcript:

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

Life arose in the oceans and only much later spread to the land. But some land animals returned to the ocean and eventually became fully marine animals. That’s our topic this month, animals that returned to the sea.

Vertebrates that evolved on land are called tetrapods, meaning four-footed. It applies even to animals like birds that have two legs and two wings, and snakes that have no legs, because all the ancestors of tetrapods had four legs.

Returning to marine life as a tetrapod eventually results in an animal developing certain characteristics. Even animals like sea turtles become more streamlined, which helps the animal swim more easily, and arms and legs develop into flippers for the same reason. Sometimes limbs are lost completely, like the rear legs of cetaceans and sirenians, because they’re not needed. One interesting note is that as far as we know, all marine tetrapods still have to breathe air, which requires them to come to the surface of the water periodically.

The ancestors of marine tetrapods probably all started out as partially aquatic and gradually became more and more at home in the water. That’s true even for animals as well adapted to marine life as whales.

Some of the earliest whale ancestors were the ambulocetids, which probably looked sort of like a cross between a hippopotamus and a crocodile. Ambulocetid means “walking whale,” but there’s some evidence that it might have already evolved to be fully aquatic 49 million years ago. It had short legs that might not have been strong enough to support it out of water. It might have been covered with short fur like a seal but it might have had little to no fur, more like a hippopotamus. Either way, it had long toothy jaws, strong legs with webbed toes that it used to propel itself through the water, and a tail that probably resembled that of an otter. It grew about ten feet long, or 3 meters.

Ambulocetids lived in shallow coastal areas where the land was swampy, and it may have spent part of its time in fresh water. It wouldn’t have looked or acted much like a whale to us, but it was already developing features now found only in whales.

By around 41 million years ago, the basilosaurids and their close relations had evolved, and were definitely fully aquatic. Their nostrils had moved almost to the location of modern whales’ blowholes. Their forelegs were basically flippers with little fingers, their hind legs had almost disappeared, and they had tail flukes. They were also much bigger than their ancestors. Basilosaurus could grow up to 60 feet long, or 18 meters, and probably looked more like a gigantic eel than a modern whale. It was long and relatively thin, and may have mostly lived at the ocean’s surface instead of diving for food.

Dakosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur despite its name, although it lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, about 145 million years ago. It was a crocodylomorph that grew up to about 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and looked kind of like a shark with legs—but also a lot like a crocodile wearing a shark costume. Its tail had a fin near the end that made it resemble a shark’s tail, and its legs were flipper-like but still obviously legs. It had a whole lot of big serrated teeth in a deep skull with strong jaws. Because its jaws and teeth were so strong, in fact, scientists think Dakosaurus probably ate other marine reptiles instead of just fish.

While Dakosaurus was streamlined and well adapted to life in the ocean, we don’t know if it left the water to lay its eggs on land the way sea turtles still do or if it gave birth in the water. We don’t have any nest sites or young specimens one way or another.

Other marine reptiles definitely gave birth in the water, including ichthyosaurs. Ichthyosaurs and their close relations were incredibly successful, first appearing in the fossil record around 250 million years ago and last appearing around 90 million years ago. Most ichthyosaurs grew around 6 and a half to 11 feet long, or 2 to 3.3 meters, depending on species, so while they were pretty big animals, they weren’t enormous. They would have been fast, though, and looked a lot like fish or dolphins, with four flippers, a dorsal fin, a long tail with fins, and a long thin rostrum with lots of little teeth. We know they gave birth to live young because we have fossils of female ichthyosaurs who died in the process of giving birth, with the baby’s tail outside of its mother but the rest of it still in the birth canal. We have other fossils of ichthyosaurs with partially developed young in what would have been the mother’s uterus.

We also have lots of ichthyosaur coprolites that show us what it ate, since the coprolites fossilized with pieces of undigested food in them. This includes fish scales and squid beaks.

Of course, if you want to talk about big marine reptiles, you have to talk about mosasaurs. They lived in the late Cretaceous and went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs. The earlier species of mosasaur are pretty small, but after ichthyosaurs went extinct, mosasaurs got really really big. Some estimates for the largest species range up to almost 50 feet long, or 15 meters, and maybe even longer. Mosasaurs looked kind of like streamlined iguanas, with four flippers, a shark-like tail, but a very lizard-like head. They probably ate other marine reptiles, including smaller species of mosasaur, along with sharks and other fish, dinosaurs that made the mistake of getting in the water, and sea turtles. Honestly, mosasaurs could eat whatever they could catch, and they could probably catch just about anything. Their jaws were double-hinged, which allowed them to swallow prey whole like snakes do.

We even have some skin impressions of mosasaurs that show smooth scales similar to those of snakes, and one study suggests that mosasaurs might have had forked tongues too. Mosasaurs were distantly related to snakes, but they were more closely related to monitor lizards that also have forked tongues.

Speaking of snakes, we’ll finish with an animal that people don’t usually remember when they think of animals that have returned to the ocean: sea snakes.

Not all sea snakes are fully marine. One genus spends part of its time on land and still lays eggs, but fully marine sea snakes give birth to live young. Researchers aren’t sure if the sea snakes that are fully marine were able to completely stop returning to the land because they already gave birth to live young or if that developed after the snakes started spending part of the time in the water.

The sea snake has a single lung, like most snakes, but unlike snakes that live on land this lung extends almost the length of the whole body (but not the tail). The snake’s nostrils are at the top of its snout so it can breathe without sticking too much of its head above water, and its extra-long lung can store lots of air so the snake doesn’t have to breathe too often. Some sea snakes can stay underwater for up to about two hours, partly because of the air stored in the lung, but also because they can absorb some oxygen from the water through their skin. Studies have shown that a sea snake can absorb almost 25% of the oxygen it needs through its skin.

Sea snakes are pretty big, with the largest growing up to 10 feet long, or 3 meters. Most are about half that length. They live in warm tropical oceans, usually in shallow water, and eat fish and other small animals. The sea snake’s body is slightly flattened side to side and its tail is much more flattened like a paddle, which is how it swims. In most cases, if a sea snake is washed ashore, it’s unable to crawl and is pretty much helpless. Terrestrial snakes have enlarged ventral scales that the snake can move up and down, allowing the edges of the scales to grab dirt or leaves or whatever the snake is moving over. This gives it a purchase, and as the scales move they push the body forward. Most sea snakes don’t have these specialized ventral scales and have regular smooth scales instead.

But while most sea snakes can’t move on land, if you see one stranded, don’t try to pick it up to help it. All sea snakes are extremely venomous. (Use a long paddle to push the sea snake back into the water, or better yet, call an expert who can safely return the snake to the water.) Most sea snakes are brightly colored as a result, to warn potential predators away. Many have stripes and are absolutely gorgeous.

Generally, if you encounter a sea snake while you’re swimming, the snake isn’t going to bite you. You’re too big for it to swallow and it doesn’t want to waste its venom on you. Don’t bother it and it won’t bother you unless it feels threatened. Just swim calmly away and be glad it’s not a mosasaur.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 501: The Wee Waa Monster and Tupandactylus

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Further reading:

Pterosaur melanosomes support signalling functions for early feathers

Show transcript:

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

This month we have a small mystery from Australia, which as far as I can find is still unsolved.

In 1950, a man named George Gray started hearing bellowing from the gum swamp near his house. His adult son, Ted, heard it too and reported it was loud enough to hear half a mile away, or about 800 meters.

The bellowing sounded like a crocodile. The problem is, the Grays lived just outside of the small town of Wee Waa in New South Wales, Australia. Very, very rarely a saltwater crocodile wanders down the coast as far as New South Wales, but Wee Waa is a five or six hour drive inland. It’s not crocodile country. It gets cold in winter and it’s surrounded by farmland.

Ted Gray found tracks in the swamp where a large animal had flattened tall grass, although the footprints didn’t have claw marks. He estimated that if the animal was a crocodile, it was only about 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, although he did note that none of the trails seemed to lead to the water. The bellowing mostly occurred in early morning and around sundown and continued for several months.

Attempts to search the wetlands were unsuccessful, mostly because of heavy rain that spring and summer. The water was ordinarily no more than 3 feet deep, or about a meter [actually about 92 cm, got this wrong], but was much deeper that year. Hundreds of people came to listen to the bellowing, though, and one constable perched in a tree for most of a day hoping to shoot the animal. He never saw it.

Seven years earlier, during World War II, an armored division of troops stayed in the area. The troops had been based in northwest Australia for a time and were supposed to have brought some baby crocodiles with them as mascots. The soldiers were told to kill the crocodiles, but newspapers in 1950 suggested they’d been released instead and that one had found its way to George Gray’s swamp. That doesn’t explain how it survived seven winters or why no one had seen or heard it until then.

Then again, one man named Ross Tuckey claimed he’d seen a crocodile several years before about 20 miles away, or 32 kilometers. He’d first thought it was a goanna, which is a type of monitor lizard that lives in Australia. Some species of goanna can grow more than 8 feet long, or about 2.5 meters. When Tuckey’s dog rushed at the animal, it bowled the dog away with its tail and slid into a dammed stream. Tuckey watched it float in the water with only its nostrils visible.

The Wee Waa monster was never identified.

That’s all there is! I tried to find out more but if anyone ever found what animal was bellowing in George Gray’s swamp, the newspapers didn’t report about it. I actually only learned about this animal mystery when I was searching for something else, which is always a lot of fun.

***

115 million years ago a colony of strange flying animals lived in what is now northeastern Brazil in South America. It was a reptile that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but it wasn’t a dinosaur. It wasn’t a bird either. Its wingspan might have been as much as 13 feet across, or 4 meters, which was big for a pterosaur, which of course is what it was. Specifically, it’s Tupandactylus imperator [too-pan-DAK-tillus imper-AH-ter], and it is a complete weirdo.

Tupandactylus was only described in 1997, but we have several really well preserved specimens, including nearly complete skulls. And it’s the skull that makes it so bizarre. Many pterosaurs had large crests that were probably brightly colored and probably used to attract mates, but Tupandactylus had what may be the largest crest ever found. It was just ridiculously large, nearly as big as its whole body, not counting its wings, of course.

Tupandactylus’s skull is hard to describe. I’m going to do my best, but you might want to click through to the show notes and look at the picture.

First, imagine a pelican’s bill. It’s long and has a pouch underneath. But in your mental picture, push that pouch forward so that it’s at the base of the lower jaw like a chin, and made of bone instead of soft tissue. Tupandactylus had a sort of keel on the underside of the end of its lower jaw that was probably for display.

Next, the upper jaw is tall but narrow. Maybe it will help to picture a toucan’s bill, but unlike a toucan, Tupandactylus’s upper jaw had a projection at the top that formed the base of the crest. This projection is a big triangular piece of bone that tops the upper jaw, and at the upper point of the triangle there’s a long, thin spur of bone that points upward and bends back. It’s ridiculously long.

Finally, the rear of the skull has another projection that points straight back to form the back of the crest. The tall rod of bone on top of the upper jaw forms the front of the crest. The crest itself was mostly made of soft tissue and keratin stretched between the two bony rods.

To finish our description of the skull, Tupandactylus had no teeth and probably also had a keratin beak at the very tips of its jaws, especially its lower jaw. We don’t know what it ate, but some paleontologists hypothesize it might have mostly eaten fruit and other plant material. It probably spent a lot of time on the ground looking for food and hanging out in its flock, sort of like geese do today.

We have a pretty good idea of what the crest looked like because a few specimens have soft tissue impressions left by the crest when the animal died and fell into mud. The complete crest was like a big sail, although there’s no evidence that it helped the animal fly.

What we don’t know is what color the crest was, but researchers have long assumed it was brightly colored and probably patterned to attract a mate.

In an article published in Nature in April of 2022, a team of paleontologists from Brazil and Belgium announced that they’ve found some amazing details in a newly discovered Tupandactylus skull. Tupandactylus had feathers.

They discovered the feathers at the bottom of the crest, some of them fluffy and some of them longer and more like modern bird feathers. And that’s not all. The feathers are so well preserved that under electron microscopes, the team found preserved melanosomes, which are pigment granules. We still don’t know what colors the feathers were, but they were definitely different colors because the melanosomes are different shapes, and in bird feathers different melanosome shapes correspond to different colors. Simple feather fibers have also been found on the jaws, which suggests that Tupandactylus might have had feathers over much of its body. That means other pterosaurs probably did too.

There are actually two species of Tupandactylus known, T. imperator and T. navigans. T. navigans is smaller and has a smaller, less extravagant crest. Some researchers suggest the two species might actually be the same species, with sexually dimorphic males and females (meaning they look different). Maybe one day we’ll find out for sure.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 499: The Mystery of Amiskwia

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Further reading:

Cambrian Explosion Month #18: Stem-Gnathifera

Ambiguous Amiskwia

Amiskwia, possibly [picture taken from above link]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for May 2025!

We’ve talked about a lot of strange and mysterious animals from the Cambrian in past episodes, especially episode 69, but I don’t think we’ve learned about Amiskwia yet. For a long time it was another mystery animal from the Burgess Shale and a few other places, dating back as much as 518 million years ago, but as of only a few years ago the mystery seems to be solved, at least mostly.

Amiskwia grew about an inch long, or 2.5 cm, which actually made it one of the larger animals that lived in the Cambrian. It probably looked superficially like a slug, with a slightly flattened body and a pair of short tentacles on its head. It had a paddle-shaped tail and two flaps on its sides that probably acted as fins to help it swim. Its mouth was on the underside of its head and was surprisingly complicated, with two pairs of plates with little spikes on them. We even know about its internal anatomy, since some of the Amiskwia fossils are so well preserved that its insides can be studied too. It had a brain and a simple digestive tract.

Amiskwia was described in 1911 by Charles Walcott, who described a lot of the Burgess Shale fossils. Walcott classified it as a type of arrow worm. When scientists gave it a closer look later, not everyone agreed it was related to modern arrow worms. Some suggested it might be a type of ribbon worm, or maybe an early mollusk, while others argued that it was so different from known animals that it belonged in its own phylum.

A 2019 study suggested that Amiskwia’s weird mouth plates matched up with the mouth plates in a living animal, and a 2022 follow-up study confirmed the 2019 findings. Not everyone agrees, but as of now, Amiskwia is considered an ancestral gnathiferan.

There! Mystery solved! Wait, what do you mean you don’t know what a gnathiferan is?

As everyone knows, especially me, I definitely didn’t just learn about this type of animal myself just now, gnathiferans include a lot of different animals with complex jaws—not like your own jaws, but with little plates and spikes and moving parts made of chitin. Most gnathiferans are tiny, microscopic or barely a few millimeters long, so Amiskwia was a giant in comparison.

Arrow worms are also generally considered to be gnathiferans, so Wolcott wasn’t too far off in his description of Amiskwia. We don’t know what Amiskwia ate, but it could probably swim pretty well and most likely hunted other animals or scavenged already dead ones. Scientists think it probably spent most of its time swimming well above the sea floor, which is why it’s a relatively rare fossil.

Another Cambrian mystery animal that lived even earlier than Amiskwia, around 520 million years ago, and which is probably related to it, is Timorebestia. Its fossils were discovered in Greenland and only described in 2024. It had a pair of long tentacles or antennae, a rounded paddle-like tail, and fins on each side of its wide, flattened body. Its tentacles were around half the length of its body–and if Amiskwia was a giant compared to modern gnathiferans, Timorebestia was a colossus! It grew almost 8 inches long, or over 20 cm, not even counting its tentacles!

Some Timorebestia specimens are so well preserved that scientists can identify what they ate right before they died, and it looks like they mostly ate small arthropods. Timorebestia was probably the biggest and strongest predator in the area when it was alive, one of the earliest apex predators discovered.

Another similar animal was Nectocaris, which has been discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada and other Cambrian fossil sites in China and Australia. It was flattened and had a pair of tentacles on its head, and a fin on both sides of its body–but it had a lot of features not found in Amiskwia and Timorebestia, including eyes. It also seems to have had a tube or funnel of some kind that emerged from the underside of the body near the head. It might have been a proboscis of some kind, but some scientists think it was a funnel like the ones found in modern squid, used to jet through the water quickly. Many scientists even think Nectocaris was a precursor to squid and other cephalopods, but other scientists disagree. Some specimens are about one inch long, or around 3 cm, while others are around 4 inches long, or about 10 cm. This might mean there were two species, or that the small ones were juveniles, or that males and females were different sizes. We just don’t know.

Small animals, especially ones with mostly soft bodies, don’t fossilize as often as larger and more robust animals. We’re very lucky that we have so many beautifully detailed Cambrian fossils, since so many modern gnathiferans and their close relations aren’t otherwise found in the fossil record at all.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

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.

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