Category Archives: reptile

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!

NEW Episode 500: Crikey, it’s 500 episodes!

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It’s our 500th episode! Wow!

Thanks to Rosie, Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Crikey! Newly Discovered Snake Species Named After Steve Irwin

Steve Irwin’s Treesnail

A young Steve Irwin’s tree snail [photo taken from link above]:

A marbled lungfish:

A fennec, smallest and cutest of all foxes:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have a brand new episode, because it’s episode 500! Congratulations to me and to you too, listening to the 500th episode of a podcast! That doesn’t happen very often!

Despite the big 5-0-0, I’m going to treat this like a regular episode. Thanks to Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, Remy and Julien, and Rosie for their suggestions this week!

We’ll start with Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, who live in Australia. A while back now they got to visit the Australia Zoo, which is run by the Irwin family. Steve Irwin was a conservationist, science educator, and wildlife rehabilitator, also known as the Crocodile Hunter for his work relocating crocodiles who were endangering people, and vice versa. He died tragically young in 2006 but his wife and children continue his work.

Michelle pointed out that Irwin has been honored by scientists who have named newly discovered animals for him, so let’s learn about a few of them!

The most recent one is a type of wolf snake discovered on the Great Nicobar Island off the coast of India and described in 2025, Lycodon irwini. It’s mostly black in color with a slender body, and can grow as much as 47 inches long, or 119 cm. That’s almost four feet long! Luckily it’s non-venomous, plus it has only been found on that one island in evergreen forests, so you’re not likely to run across one by accident. It probably eats small animals like frogs, but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet.

Back in 1990, Steve Irwin caught a strange turtle while fishing with his father, Bob, who was also a conservationist. Between them, the two men knew a whole lot about Australian wildlife but they didn’t know what the turtle was. They sent pictures to a turtle expert, who determined that yes, it was a species new to science. It was described in 1997 and named Irwin’s turtle, Elseya irwini.

Irwin’s turtle has a black and yellow carapace and lives in the lower part of the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. The female also has a light-colored head and other pale spots on the body.

Like some other turtles, it can absorb oxygen from the water through its cloaca, which is often referred to as its butt. A chamber at the end of the cloaca contains structures that act like gills and absorb oxygen. This allows it to stay underwater longer, and in fact it can’t survive in water that doesn’t contain enough oxygen.

As a result, Irwin’s turtle is endangered due to habitat loss, especially from pollution and the damming of its river home. It used to be common but its numbers are in decline. The Australia Zoo started a captive breeding program to help conserve the species, and in 2023 they succeeded in hatching the very first Irwin’s turtle babies ever bred in captivity.

The last one is my favorite, a land snail named after Steve Irwin. It was described as a new species in 2009, only a few years after Irwin died, and was named Crikey steveirwini. It’s the only species in the genus Crikey. It only lives in high altitudes in the tropical rainforests of northeastern Queensland. It’s rare and not much is known about it, because it’s so hard to find and so small. It has a cone-shaped shell that’s striped with spiral bands of brown, yellow-brown, and white, and it only grows 15 mm long at most.

Next, brothers Remy and Julien wanted to learn about the African lungfish. Lungfish are fascinating fish, because as you can probably guess from the name, they have gills but they also have lungs, and the fish needs both to get enough oxygen.

Four species of lungfish live in Africa, all belonging to the family Protopteridae. They’re eel-like in shape although they’re not closely related to eels at all, with soft scales, and a dorsal fin that continues down the fish’s back and continues around the end of the tail, since the dorsal fin and tail fin are actually fused into one big fin. Its only other fins are the pectoral and pelvic, which are very thin and are more like flexible legs than actual fins. The lungfish can actually crawl along the bottom of the swamp or lake with its fins, although it can also swim like an eel.

While the African lungfish does have gills, they’re small and are mostly associated with eliminating carbon dioxide instead of absorbing oxygen. The lungs do most of the work. The fish surfaces periodically to gulp fresh air into its lungs. It’s one of the few fish that can drown if it can’t surface for air.

African lungfish eat insect larvae, especially of aquatic insects, crustaceans, mollusks, small fish, and frogs, but it can also sometimes eat seeds and other plant material. It usually lives in shallow water like swamps and small rivers, where there’s not a lot of oxygen in the water. In many cases, its waterways dry up periodically, but the fish can still survive. As its water gets lower and lower, the lungfish digs into the mud and curls up, then secretes a thick mucus that helps retain moisture and stops its body from drying out. Its metabolism slows way down so it doesn’t need to breathe very often, and it doesn’t need to eat. It can survive this way for up to four years, although it usually only has to stay in its cocoon for a few months, until the rains return and its waterways fill up again.

The smallest species of African lungfish is the East African lungfish, which only grows about 17 inches long, or 44 cm, while the largest is the marbled lungfish that can grow a whopping six and a half feet long, or two meters.

Lastly, Rosie suggested we learn about the fennec fox, which lives in northern Africa. It’s the smallest fox in the world, barely eight inches tall at the shoulder, or 20 cm, but it has incredibly large ears. Its ears can be as much as six inches long, or 15 cm.

Part of the reason its ears are so big is so it can hear insects and other small animals moving around underground, but they’re also big because they help dissipate heat from the fox’s body into the air. Since the fennec lives in deserts, that’s only one of many adaptations it has to the heat and lack of water.

For instance, the fennec gets most of its water through the food it eats. It’s also a nocturnal animal. The pads of its paws are protected by long, coarse hairs that grow between the pads, so hot sand won’t burn its toe beans. The hair also gives the fox better traction in loose sand.

The fennec’s fur is a pale sandy color with a black tip to the tail, and it has dark eyes. It eats rodents, birds and their eggs, insects, scorpions, and other small animals, as well as fruit and other plant material. It can jump really far, some four feet in one bound, or 120 cm. Not only can it run really fast, it can change directions really quickly too. This helps it escape predators and catch prey.

Fennecs can be social animals and like to play, even as adults. Pairs mate for life and both parents take care of the babies. A fennec’s burrow can be very large and may even link up to neighboring fennec family burrow, so neighbors can visit each other without going out into the heat of the day.

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

Thanks for listening!

Thanks to those of you who backed my recent crowdfunding campaign! Right now the Small Mysteries book isn’t available yet, but in the Halloween episode in October, I’ll make sure to put a link where you can buy the ebook.

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 467: The Dragon Bird and Friends

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Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down. 🙁

Further reading:

Bobolinks

A frill-neck lizard showing off:

A bobolink:

The great-eared nightjar [picture by Venkata Shreeram Mallimadugula, taken from this site]:

Another great-eared nightjar [Picture by Nigel Voaden from UK – Great Eared-Nightjar, Tangkoko, Sulawesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39857392]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we have an episode about some birds and reptiles. Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions! If this episode showed up later than usual in the podcast feed, it’s because I’ve been having trouble with the website and couldn’t get it uploaded until it was fixed.

We’ll kick off the episode with an animal that can’t kick, because snakes don’t have any legs. Audie suggested we learn about the scaleless rat snake, which means that first we have to learn about the rat snake, the ordinary one with scales.

Rat snakes are constrictors and are common throughout many parts of Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, and they’re called rat snakes because they eat rats and other small animals like lizards, frogs, and baby birds.

Rat snakes are popular pets because they’re so pretty and they aren’t dangerous to humans. Different species are different colors and patterns, and the rhinoceros rat snake, also called the Vietnamese longnose snake, even has a little hornlike projection on the tip of its nose that points forward. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about that particular rat snake before on the podcast, but I can’t look up which episode because the website is down.

Most rat snakes don’t grow much bigger than 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, but a few species can get longer than that. The black rat snake, which lives in North America, can grow over 8 feet long, or more than 2.5 meters. It’s black with small white markings on the head, but snakes bred for sale as pets are sometimes white all over or partially white, or even albino, meaning an individual has a mutation where its body doesn’t produce pigment. Pet black rat snakes are also bred that don’t have scales.

That brings us to the scaleless rat snake. It’s an ordinary rat snake but it has a mutation that causes it to have very few scales. This is a mutation that happens occasionally in the wild since it’s a recessive trait, and while it can make the snake a little more vulnerable to injury, scaleless snakes can survive just fine in the wild. They do have belly scales like a normal snake, which are the ones that allow them to move around, and they may have a scattering of scales on other parts of the body too. A scaleless snake still sheds its skin once a year like an ordinary snake, since it’s actually the outer layer of skin that sheds along with the scales.

Scaleless rat snakes are popular as pets because they’re so soft and because their coloration is usually very bright. A snake’s coloration comes from pigments in its skin. A snake’s scales are actually transparent, so without a layer of scales, a scaleless snake looks even more colorful than a regular snake. Many species of snake have been found in the wild that are scaleless, but it seems to be a little more common in rat snakes.

Next, Dylan and Emily wanted to learn about the frill-neck lizard, which is found in northern Australia and the very southern part of New Guinea. It’s a big lizard that can grow almost three feet long, or 90 cm, including its incredibly long tail. Males are larger than females on average, with a bigger frill.

The frill is a flap of skin around the head and neck, and most of the time it’s folded back over the neck and shoulders so it’s not that noticeable. The lizard is pretty ordinary-looking that way, just a big gray or brown animal with a big head. But when the lizard feels threatened, or if it comes across another frill-neck lizard, it can extend the frill by moving the small bones and cartilage that act as struts, which also requires the lizard to open its mouth.

When extended, the frill is as much as a foot across, or 30 cm, and it’s marked with bright colors. Different individuals have different colored frills, red, orange, yellow, or white, or a mixture of colors and patterns. The size and color of the frill opening up so quickly will often startle a potential predator, allowing the lizard to escape. The frill-neck lizard can even run on two legs if it needs to, although it has to run with its head pointing straight up in the air.

The frill-neck lizard mostly eats insects, especially termites. It spends most of its time in trees and some people believe it can use its frill as a parachute, but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

Let’s move on to a few birds next. Maryjane suggested we learn about the bobolink, a type of blackbird native to the Americas. In summer the male bobolink is black with a pale yellow nape and white markings, and in winter he molts into a drab outfit of brown to help him hide. The female is brown with black streaks and stripes.

In the summer the bobolink flies to the northern United States and Canada to nest and raise babies, and it migrates to southern South America in winter. This is a huge distance for such a little songbird to travel, but it’s a strong flyer and can travel over a thousand miles, or 1,800 km, in a single day. It navigates using the stars at night and can sense the earth’s magnetic field too, which helps it find its way.

The bobolink prefers prairies and grassy areas. It eats seeds and insects, and especially likes rice and a type of caterpillar called the armyworm. It’s sometimes considered a pest because it eats so much rice, but then again armyworms are also considered pests and the bobolink eats so many of them that it has probably saved a lot of crops that way. While the bobolink is still numerous, its numbers have been in decline for years due to habitat loss.

The bobolink is most famous for its song. Both males and females sing, and males not only sing while perched, they sing while flying. The bobolink’s songs are varied and lovely. This is what the bobolink sounds like, first a song recorded while the bird was flying:

[bobolink song]

And here’s another song recorded while a different bird in a different place was perched and singing:

[bobolink song]

Finally, both Katie and Eilee wanted to learn about the great-eared nightjar, also called the dragon bird or the baby dragon.

Nightjars are nocturnal birds, and the great-eared nightjar is found in parts of southern and Southeast Asia. It can grow up to 16 inches long, or 41 cm, and is a chonky bird with big dark eyes and a broad bill that can open very wide. The “ears” in its name are tufts of feathers on the top of its head that look like ears or little horns. It can raise the ears if it wants to, but most of the time they just stick out backwards. Like other nightjars, the great-eared nightjar’s head looks flattened most of the time, and the bird itself spends a lot of time crouched down looking like a very flat bird, but then it sits up and pricks up its ear tufts, and it looks more like a thin owl with a long tail. The bird is brown with black markings, which makes it almost invisible at night.

During the day, the great-eared nightjar sits in a tree or just on the forest floor, so well camouflaged by its feathers that it blends in with the leaf litter or kind of looks like a piece of stump or broken-off branch. At night it flies around catching insects on the wing like a bat.

Instead of building a nest and laying eggs in it like other birds, the great-eared nightjar just lays a single egg among dead leaves on the ground. The egg, and the baby when it hatches, are so well camouflaged that it’s as safe on the ground as it would be in a nest way up in a tree.

The great-eared nightjar has an eerie call. This is what it sounds like:

[great-eared nightjar call]

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 462: Cryptic Coloration

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Thanks to Måns, Sam, Owen and Askel for this week’s suggestions!

Further reading:

Shingleback Lizard

What controls the colour of the common mānuka stick insect?

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has skin flaps that hide its shadow. There’s a lizard in this photo, I swear! [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92125100]:

A shingleback lizard, pretending it has two heads:

The beautiful wood nymph is a beautiful moth but also it looks like a bird poop:

The Indian stick insect (photo by Ryan K Perry, found on this page):

The buff tip moth mimics a broken-off stick. This person has a whole handful of them:

A cuttlefish can change colors quickly [photo by Σ64 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77733806]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to talk about a few types of camouflage, a suggestion by Måns, and we’ll also talk about some camouflaged animals suggested by Sam, Owen and Aksel, Dylan, and Nina.

There are lots of types of camouflage, not all of it visual in nature. Back in episode 191 we talked about some toxic moths that generate high-pitched clicks that bats hear, recognize, and avoid. Naturally, some non-toxic moths also generate the same sounds to mimic the toxic moths.

Måns specifically suggested cryptic coloration, also called crypsis. It’s a type of camouflage that allows an animal to blend into their surroundings, which can involve multiple methods.

Some animals have cryptic coloration mainly along the edges of the body, to defeat a skill many predators use called edge detection. A lot of amphibians and reptiles have patches surrounded by an outline, with dark patches having a darker outline and light patches having a lighter outline. This acts as disruptive camouflage, hiding the outline of an animal’s body as it moves around. Some animals take this camouflage even further, with a way to hide their own shadow.

This is the case with the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which is native to the forests of eastern Madagascar. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail, and it’s nocturnal. Its tail is flat and broad, sort of shaped like a leaf, but it doesn’t disguise itself as a leaf.

The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has a complicated gray and brown pattern that looks like tree bark, and it can change its coloration a little bit to help it blend in even more. At night it’s well hidden in tree branches as it climbs around looking for insects, but in the day it needs to hide really well to avoid becoming some other animal’s snack while it’s sleeping.

It does this by finding a comfortable branch and flattening its body and tail against it so that it just looks like another part of the branch. But to make it even more hidden, it has a flap of skin along its sides that wraps even farther around the branch. Not only do these skin flaps hide its edges, it hides its shadow, since the flaps are really flat and there’s no curved edge of a lizard belly pressed against a branch that a predator might notice.

The most common kind of cryptic coloration is called countershading, and it’s so common that you might not even have noticed it although you see it almost every time you see a fish, amphibian, reptile, and many birds and mammals. Countershading is an animal that’s darker on top and lighter underneath, like a brown mouse with a white belly. It’s even found in some insects and other invertebrates.

Countershading is another way to hide a shadow. If a dolphin, for instance, was gray all over, its underside would look darker because of shadows, since sunlight shines down from the sky and makes shadows underneath the body. That would make its body shape look rounder, meaning it stands out more and a predator would notice it more easily. But most dolphins are pale gray or even white underneath. There’s still a shadow, but it’s no longer darker than the rest of the body. The lighter colored underside makes the shadow paler, and as a result, from a distance the dolphin looks almost the same shade all over, which makes it appear flat and the edges of its body harder to see. We even know that some dinosaurs were countershaded, with lighter colored bellies.

Countershading is so common in animals that it’s almost impossible to pick one example. Dylan suggested we learn about the shingleback lizard, an amazing animal found in many parts of Australia. It’s also called the stumpy-tailed lizard, the bobtail lizard, or the two-headed lizard. All three of those names refer to the animal’s tail, which is short and fat and actually looks like a second head. This is an example of automimicry, similar to animals that have markings that look like eyes. The lizard is brown with darker and lighter speckles and it sometimes has yellow spots too. Its belly is pale with dark spots. Its scales are large and overlap each other, and its eyes are tiny, like little black beads. It grows about a foot long, or 30 cm.

The shingleback lives in arid and desert areas, and its tough skin and overlapping scales help reduce water loss. It eats snails, insects, flowers, and other small animals and plants. When threatened, it will open its mouth wide and stick out its large, dark blue tongue. It is an impressively blue, impressively big tongue, and the inside of the shingleback’s mouth is bright pink, so the lizard has a chance to escape while its predator is startled and wondering if the lizard is dangerous. The shingleback can give a painful bite, although it’s not venomous.

The shingleback mates for life, and the female gives birth to two or three live young every year instead of laying eggs. In many reptiles that give birth to live young, the eggs basically remain in the mother’s body until they hatch, and then she gives birth. But in the shingleback’s case, her babies develop in placentas in a process very similar in many ways to placental mammals. The babies eat the placenta after they’re born, giving them a quick first meal, and they’re born ready to take care of themselves.

Sam suggested we talk about animals that can be confused with inanimate objects, which is a type of camouflage referred to as mimicry. Mimicry of all kinds is a really common type of camouflage, like all those harmless insects that have yellow and black stripes to mimic bees and wasps that can sting.

My favorite inanimate object mimic is a moth we talked about in episode 191, the beautiful wood nymph of eastern North America. It has a wingspan of 1.8 inches, or 4.6 cm, and it is indeed a beautiful little moth. Its front wings are mostly white with brown along the edges and a few brown and yellow spots, while the rear wings are a soft yellow-brown with a narrow brown edge. It has furry legs that are white with black tips. But when the moth folds its wings to rest, suddenly those pretty markings make it look exactly like a bird dropping. It even stretches out its front legs so they resemble a little splatter on the edge of the poop.

If you think about it, it makes sense that a tiny animal like an insect would want to resemble something common in its environment that’s also not eaten by very many other animals. For instance, a stick.

Owen and Aksel wanted to learn more about the walking stick, since it’s been a long time since we talked about it, episode 93. Walking stick insects are also called stick insects or phasmids. When I was a kid I was terrified of the whole idea of a stick insect, although I don’t know why. I think I thought one day I’d climb a tree and discover that some of those sticks were not actually part of the tree. I guess I spent a lot of time climbing trees, but I never actually saw a walking stick insect. Maybe that’s because they were so well camouflaged that I thought they were sticks!

Walking sticks live in trees and bushes, naturally, especially in warm areas, but they’re found on every continent except Antarctica. They’re long, thin insects with long, thin legs and they really do look like sticks. Some are green, some are brown or gray, and many have little patterns, projections, and ridges that make them look even more like real sticks. They’re closely related to another type of phasmid called a leaf insect, which as you may have already guessed, mimics a leaf. All phasmids eat leaves and other plant material and most are nocturnal.

Some phasmids can even change colors to help blend in with their background. The Indian stick insect, which is indeed found in southern India although it’s been introduced in many other parts of the world and is considered invasive in some places, grows up to about 4 inches long, or 10 cm. It’s usually brown, but it can change its color in response to light levels by moving pigment granules in its cuticle that absorb and scatter light. The Indian stick insect has many other ways to hide in plain sight. If it feels threatened, it will stretch out with its rear legs folded flat against its body and its front pair of legs stretched forward to make it look even longer. It will stay perfectly stiff even if someone picks it up, but if it thinks it’s in danger, it will spread its front legs to show a patch of red at the base of the legs. This can startle or frighten a potential predator long enough to let the stick insect get away.

One interesting thing about the Indian stick insect is that almost all individuals are females. Females don’t need to mate with a male to reproduce. The female’s babies are little clones of herself, and she drops an egg every so often onto the ground. It looks like a tiny seed, and ants think it’s a seed and will collect it and take it back to the nest to be stored for later. The egg is then protected until it hatches, when the larval insect leaves the ant nest and finds a tree or bush to hide in.

The buff tip moth also looks like a twig or branch when its wings are folded, but not in the same way the walking stick insect does. It looks like a broken-off branch instead. It’s a fairly large moth with a wingspan more than 2 and a half inches across, or 7 cm, and its wings are mostly gray with a rounded buff patch at the end. The end of its abdomen is buff too, so that it looks like the inside part of a tree branch, that’s paler than the bark. It lives throughout much of Europe and Asia, and different populations look slightly different because they’ve evolved to resemble the branches of different species of tree.

Let’s finish with Nina’s suggestion, about an animal that can change colors really fast to blend in with its background. That’s the cuttlefish, and Nina wanted to know how it changes colors so fast, and while we’re at it, why octopuses are so flexible.

The cuttlefish is a cephalopod, closely related to octopuses and squid, but is quite small in comparison. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles, just like the squid, but its arms are really small in comparison to its mantle. There are over 100 species known so far, most of which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But unlike the squid or the octopus, the cuttlefish has an internal structure called the cuttlebone. It’s not a bone at all but a modified shell, which is your reminder that cephalopods are mollusks and are distantly related to clams, snails, and many other animals that have shells. The cuttlebone helps the cuttlefish stay buoyant without effort, and it also incidentally makes the body a little more structured than its squid and octopus cousins.

Octopuses are flexible because they have no bones. Basically the only hard structure in an octopus is its beak. A cephalopod’s mouth is in the middle of its arms, so it’s usually hidden from view. Way back in episode 142 we talked about how octopus muscles work, so let’s revisit that briefly. In animals with bones, muscles are attached to the bones. But octopuses don’t have bones.

The octopus’s muscles are structured differently than muscles in animals with bones. Our muscles are made up of fibers that contract in one direction. Let’s say you pick up something heavy. To do so, you contract the fibers in some muscles to shorten them, which makes the bone they’re attached to move. Then, when you push a heavy door closed, you contract other muscles and at the same time you relax the muscles you used to pick up something heavy. This pulls the arm bone in the other direction.

But in the octopus, the fibers in its muscles run in three directions. When one set of fibers contracts, the other two tighten against each other and form a hard surface for the contracted fibers to move. So they’re muscles that also sort of act like bones. It’s called a muscular hydrostat, and it actually can result in muscle movements much more precise than muscle movements where a bone is involved.

So, if you combine the octopus’s strong, precise muscle movements with its general lack of hard structures, you get a very flexible animal. Basically an octopus can squish itself through extremely small openings, as long as its beak will fit through. This can make it really hard to keep an octopus in captivity, because in addition to being flexible and squishy, the octopus is also really intelligent. It can survive for short periods of time out of the water, and it can figure out how to open its enclosure and get out to explore, or just escape.

But, back to the cuttlefish, which is small and needs to hide from predators. Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish can change color and pattern in less than a second, and can even change the texture of its skin if it wants to look bumpy like the rocks around it.

Cephalopods have specialized cells called chromatophores in their skin. A chromatophore consists of a sac filled with pigment and a nerve, and each chromatophore is surrounded by tiny muscles. When a cuttlefish wants to change colors, its nervous system activates the tiny muscles around the correct chromatophores. That is, some chromatophores contain yellow pigment, some contain red or brown. Because the color change is controlled by the nervous system and muscles, it happens incredibly quickly, in just milliseconds.

But that’s not all, because the cuttlefish also has other cells called iridophores and leucophores. Iridophores are layers of extremely thin cells that can reflect light of certain wavelengths, which results in iridescent patches of color on the skin. While the cuttlefish can control these reflections, it takes a little longer, several seconds or sometimes several minutes.

Like other cephalopods, the cuttlefish uses its ability to change color and pattern in order to hide from predators. It also uses these abilities to communicate with other cuttlefish, because it’s a social animal. It will also sometimes frighten potential predators away with a bright, sudden display of color changing.

The most amazing thing of all is that cuttlefish can’t see colors. They have no color receptors in their eyes. But they accurately change color to match their background, even though they can’t see the color, and they can even do so if it’s almost completely dark. While scientists have some theories as to how the cuttlefish manages this, we don’t yet know how they do it for sure. So it is still a mystery!

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 460: Blue Blobs and Graveyard Snakes

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Further reading:

Mysterious ‘blue goo’ at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists

Three new species of ground snakes discovered under graveyards and churches in Ecuador

Show transcript:

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

I’ve come down a cold this week, and while I’m feeling better, it is settling into my chest as usual and I’m starting to cough. Since I’m still recovering and need to be in bed instead of sitting up researching animals, and since my voice is already sounding a little rough, here’s a Patreon episode this week instead of a regular episode. I had been planning to run old Patreon episodes for a few weeks in December so I could have some time off for the holidays, and those were already scheduled, so I just moved one of those episodes up to use this week instead.

This is a Patreon episode from October of 2022, where we talked about two very slightly spooky animal discoveries.

We’ll start with a suggestion from my brother Richard, about a strange newly discovered creature at the bottom of the ocean.

On August 30, 2022, the NOAA Ocean Exploration research team was off the coast of Puerto Rico. That’s in the Caribbean, part of the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was mostly collecting data about the sea floor, including acoustic information and signs of climate change and habitat destruction. Since the Caribbean is an area of the ocean with high biodiversity but also high rates of fishing and trawling, the more we can learn about the animals and plants that live on the sea floor, the more we can do to help protect them.

When a remotely operated vehicle dives, it sends video to a team of scientists who can watch in real time and control where the rover goes. On this particular day, the rover descended to a little over 1,300 feet deep, or around 407 meters, when the sea floor came in view. Since this area is the site of an underwater ridge, the sea floor varies by a lot, and the rover swam along filming things and taking samples of the water and so forth, sometimes as deep as about 2,000 feet, or 611 meters.

The rover saw lots of interesting animals, including fish and corals of various types, even a fossilized coral reef. Then it filmed something the scientists had never seen before.

It was a little blue blob sitting on the sea floor. It wasn’t moving and it wasn’t very big. It was shaped roughly like a ball but with little points or pimples all over it and a wider base like a skirt where it met the ground. And it was definitely pale blue in color.

Then the rover saw more of the little blue blobs, quite a few of them in various places. The scientists think it may be a species of soft coral or possibly a type of sponge, possibly even a tunicate, which is also called a sea squirt. All these animals are invertebrates that don’t move, which matches what little we know about the blue blob.

The rover wasn’t able to take a sample from one of the blue blobs, so for now we don’t have anything to study except the video. But we know where the little blue blobs are, so researchers hope to visit them again soon and learn more about them.

Next, let’s return to dry land and learn about some newly discovered snakes. In fact, we’re not just on dry land, we’re way up high in the Andes Mountains in South America, specifically in some remote villages in Ecuador.

A teacher named Diego Piñán moved to the town of El Chaco in 2013, and he started noticing dead snakes on the road that he didn’t recognize. He also realized that people were killing the snakes on purpose. A lot of people are afraid of snakes, so Piñán made sure to teach his students about them so they would learn that most snakes aren’t dangerous. He also kept the dead snakes he found and preserved them in alcohol so he could figure out later what species they were. But he never could figure it out.

Then a scientist named Alejandro Arteaga assembled a team to study the animals found in remote areas of the Andes Mountains. When they came to Piñán’s town, they were excited to see the snakes he’d preserved, because even the snake experts on the team didn’t recognize the snakes either, although they were pretty certain they belonged to a genus of snakes called Atractus.

The snakes were quite pretty, gray-brown above with a bright yellow pattern underneath. They were small and slender, completely harmless to humans and pets, and they lived underground most of the time. The team searched and discovered more of the snakes living in the area. Most Atractus snakes are shy and stay away from people, but because the town of El Chaco had grown a lot recently, the snakes had moved from their home in the forest into the local cemetery. That’s right, they were burrowing around among the crypts. Of course, the snakes don’t know they’re in a graveyard. They just know they’re in a quiet place where people don’t visit very often to disturb them.

The team eventually found three new species of snake in different towns, all three described in September 2022. One species was living in the cemetery, another was in a schoolyard, and another was living near a church.

Still. Graveyard snakes.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Episode 453: The Skeleton Coast

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It’s October, AKA Monster Month! Let’s learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast–which sounds spooky, but actually isn’t.

Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]:

Rüppell’s korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]:

Show transcript:

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

It’s October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we’re going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is.

The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It’s part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that’s mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It’s home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government’s establishment in 1993, it’s been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It’s also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy.

Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that’s hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don’t have a powerful engine.

The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren’t visible or haven’t been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes.

Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it’s mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that’s usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males.

The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies.

The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals’ numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals.

Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets. So many brown fur seals get caught in the debris and drown that a group of volunteers called Ocean Conservation Namibia go out almost every day to help untangle seals.

The Skeleton Coast doesn’t get any rain to speak of, or only trace amounts in any given year, but it does get thick sea fogs. Most of the plants along the coast are succulents and lichens that don’t need a lot of moisture. A lot of larger animals that hunt seals along the coast actually live farther inland, like hyenas and lions. The animals that live year-round on the coast are much smaller.

That includes the desert plated lizard, which is only found in parts of Namibia and Angola. It’s a slender but strong lizard that can grow over 6 inches long, or 16 cm, not counting its long tail. It’s mainly the color of sand, tan or orange and gray, or gray-white, or some other similar variation, with a white belly, and this is because it lives on sand dunes.

The sand dunes are covered with scrubby vegetation, so in the daytime the lizards come out and eat anything they can find among the plants or in the sand, from seeds and other plant materials to insects and other arthropods. If a potential predator approaches, the lizard will dive into the sand to hide. Its scales are smooth and its legs are short, which allows it to “swim” through sand efficiently and fast. The desert plated lizard lives in small colonies, and although it only lives in this one small part of Africa, it’s extremely common throughout its territory.

A lot of birds visit the skeleton coast—306 of them, in fact, including Rüppell’s korhaan, a species of bustard that only lives in Namibia. It’s a gray and brown bird with black and white markings, with a long neck and fairly long legs. Its body is chunky but its neck is very thin, which makes it look slightly weird but very cute. It mainly eats insects, especially termites, but it will also eat small animals like lizards when it can find them, and it also eats seeds and other plant material. It’s small for a bustard, because bustards are pretty big birds, with the largest species, the great bustard that lives in parts of Europe and Asia, standing over three feet tall, or about a meter. Rüppell’s korhaan is about a third of that size.

Let’s finish with another bird that’s a little more spooky, considering that it’s October. It’s the pearl-spotted owlet, a little owl that’s found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, including along the Skeleton Coast. It’s a very small owl, barely more than 8 inches long, or 21 cm. It’s brown with lots of white speckles and streaks, yellow eyes, and two black spots on the back of its head that look like MORE EYES. It shares this trait with some other species of owl, including the northern pygmy owl of western North America, and in fact the two owls belong to the same genus, so they’re closely related.

The pearl spotted owlet is active during the day, but it mostly hunts at night. Since it’s such a small owl, barely larger than a typical songbird, it eats lots of insects, but it will also eat other small birds, bats, lizards, and any other small animal it can catch.

It’s not a very spooky-looking owl, despite having eye spots on the back of its head, but it has a spooky call. Listen to this and be glad you’re not a little bat hearing this sound and wondering if you’re in danger:

[owl call]

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 450: Geckos and the Snow Leopard

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko:

The fluffy snow leopard:

Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 437: Updates 8 and the Nutria

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Thanks to Nicholas, Måns, Warblrwatchr, Llewelly, and Emerson this week, in our yearly updates episode!

Further reading:

An Early Cretaceous Tribosphenic Mammal and Metatherian Evolution

Guam’s invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey

Rhythmically trained sea lion returns for an encore — and performs as well as humans

Scientists Solve Mystery of Brown Giant Pandas

Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool

New name for one of the world’s rarest rhinoceroses

Antarctica’s only native insect’s unique survival mechanism

Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey

The nutria has really orange teeth:

Show transcript:

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

This week is our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about an animal suggested by Emerson. But first, we have some corrections!

Nicholas shared a paper with me that indicates that marsupials actually evolved in what is now Asia, with marsupial ancestors discovered in China. They spread into North America later. So I’ve been getting that wrong over many episodes, over several years.

Måns shared a correction from an older episode where I mentioned that humans can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding a baby. I’ve heard this all my life but it turns out it’s not true. It is true that a woman’s fertility cycle is suppressed after giving birth, but it’s not related to breastfeeding. Some women can become pregnant again only a few months after giving birth, while others can’t get pregnant again for a few years. It depends on the individual. That’s important, since the myth is so widespread that many women get pregnant by accident thinking they can’t since they’re still feeding a baby.

Warblrwatchr commented on the ultraviolet episode and mentioned that cats can see ultraviolet, which is useful to them because mouse urine glows in UV light.

Finally, Llewelly pointed out that in episode 416, I didn’t mention that fire ant venom isn’t delivered when the ant bites someone. The ant bites with its mandibles to hold on, then uses the stinger on its back end to sting repeatedly.

Now, let’s dive into some updates about animals we’ve talked about in past episodes. As usual, I don’t try to give an update on every single animal, because we’d be here all week if I did. I just chose interesting studies that caught my eye.

In episode 402, we talked about snakes that travel in unusual ways, like sidewinders. Even though I had a note to myself to talk about the brown tree snake in that episode, I completely forgot. The brown tree snake is native to parts of coastal Australia and many islands around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It’s not native to Guam, which is an island in the western Pacific, way far away from the brown tree snake’s home. But in the late 1940s, some brown tree snakes made their way to Guam in cargo ships and have become invasive since then.

The brown tree snake can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, and is nocturnal, aggressive, and venomous. It’s not typically a danger to adults, but its venom can be dangerous to children and pets. The government employs trained dogs to find the snakes so they can be removed, and this has worked so well that brown tree snake population is declining rapidly on the island. But that hasn’t stopped the snake from driving many native animals to extinction in the last 75 years, especially birds.

One of the things scientists did in Guam to try and protect the native birds was to place smooth poles around the island so birds could nest on top but snakes couldn’t climb up to eat the eggs and chicks. But before long, the snakes had figured out a way to climb the poles, a method never before documented in any snake.

To climb a pole, the snake wraps its body around it, with the head overlapping the tail. Then it sort of scoots itself up the pole with tiny motions of its spine, a slow, difficult process that takes a lot of energy. Tests of captured brown tree snakes afterwards showed that not all snakes are willing or able to climb poles this way. Scientists think the brown tree snake evolved this method of movement to climb smooth-trunked trees in its native habitat. They also suspect some other species of snake can do the same.

Way back in episode 23 we talked about musical animals, including how some species can recognize and react to a rhythmic beat while most can’t. Sea lions are really good at it, especially a sea lion named Ronan.

Ronan was rescued in 2009 when she was a young sea lion suffering from malnutrition, wandering down a highway in California. She was determined to be non-releasable after she recovered, so she’s been a member of the Pinniped Lab in the University of California – Santa Cruz ever since, where she participates in activities that help scientists study sea lions. The rhythm studies are only one of the things she does, and only occasionally. The scientists put on a metronome and she bobs her head to the beat while they film her in ultra-slow motion.

The latest study was published in May of 2025. Ronan is 16 years old now and in her prime, so it’s not surprising that she performed even better than her last tests when she was still quite young. The study determined that not only does Ronan hit the beat right on time, she’s actually better at it than a human a lot of the time. She hits the beat within 15 milliseconds. When you blink your eye, it takes 150 milliseconds. If only she had hands, she’d be the best drummer ever!

The greatest thing about this process is that Ronan enjoys it. She’s rewarded with fish after a training session, and if she doesn’t feel like doing an activity, she doesn’t have to.

Back in episode 220, we talked about the giant panda, especially the mysterious Qinling panda that’s brown and tan instead of black and white. A study published in March of 2024 looked into the genetics of this unusual coat color and determined that it was a natural genetic mutation that doesn’t make the animals unhealthy, meaning it probably isn’t a result of inbreeding.

We talk occasionally about tool use in animals, especially in birds like crows and parrots, and in primates like chimpanzees. But a study published in November of 2024 detailed an elephant in the Berlin Zoo that uses a water hose to shower.

You may not think that’s a big deal, but the elephant in question, named Mary, uses the hose the way a human would to shower off. She holds the hose with her trunk just behind the nozzle, then moves it around and shifts her body to make sure she gets water everywhere she wants. She has to sling the hose backwards to clean her back, and when researchers gave her a heavier hose that she couldn’t move around as easily, she didn’t bother with it but just used her own trunk to spray water on herself.

Even more interesting, another elephant, named Anchali, who doesn’t get along with Mary, will interfere with the hose while Mary is using it. She lifts part of the hose to kink it and stop the water from flowing. Sometimes she even steps on the hose to stop the water, something the elephants have been trained not to do since zookeepers use hoses to clean out the enclosures. Anchali only steps on a hose if Mary is using it.

This is the first time researchers have studied a water hose as tool use, but it makes sense for elephants to understand how to use a hose, since they have a built-in hose on their faces.

We talked about the rhinoceros in episode 346, and more recently in the narwhals and unicorns episode. A study published in March of 2025 suggested that the Javan rhino should be classified as a new species of rhino in its own genus. The Javan rhino is incredibly rare, with only about 60 individuals alive in the world, all of them living in the wild in one part of Java. The Javan rhino is also called the Sundaic rhinoceros, and it’s been considered a close relation of the Indian rhinoceros. It’s smaller than the Indian rhino and most Javan rhino females either don’t have a horn at all or only have a big bump on the nose instead of a real horn.

The Javan rhino is so rare that we don’t really know much about it. The new study determined that there are big enough differences between the Javan rhino and the Indian rhino, in their skeletons, skin, diet, behavior, and fossil remains, that they should be placed in separate genera. The proposed new name for the Javan rhino is Eurhinoceros sondaicus instead of Rhinoceros sondaicus.

The only insect native to Antarctica is the Antarctic midge, which we mentioned in episode 221 but haven’t really talked about. It’s a flightless insect that can grow up to 6 mm long, and it’s the only insect that lives year-round in Antarctica. It’s only been found on the peninsula on the northwestern side of the continent.

Every animal that lives in Antarctica is considered an extremophile, and this little midge has some remarkable adaptations to its harsh environment. Its body contains compounds that minimize the amount of ice that forms in its body when the temperature plunges. It’s so well adapted to cold weather that it actually can’t survive if the temperature gets much above freezing. It eats decaying vegetation, algae, microorganisms, and other tiny food in its larval stages, but doesn’t eat at all as an adult.

The midge spends most of its life as a larva, only metamorphosing into its adult form after two winters. During its first winter it enters a dormant phase called quiescence, but as soon as the weather warms, it can resume development. It enters another dormant phase called obligate diapause for its second winter, where it pupates as soon as the weather gets cold. When summer arrives, all the midges emerge as adults at the same time, which allows them to find mates and lay eggs before dying a few days later.

The female midge lays her eggs and deposits a jelly-like protein on top of them. The jelly acts as antifreeze and keeps the eggs from drying out, and when the eggs hatch, the babies can eat the jelly.

In episode 384, we talked about the Komodo dragon, and only a month or so after that, and right after the 2024 updates episode, a new study was released about Komodo dragon teeth. It turns out that the Komodo dragon has teeth that are tipped with iron, which helps keep them incredibly sharp but also strong. As if Komodo dragons weren’t already scary enough, now we know they have metal teeth!

Many animals incorporate iron in their teeth, especially rodents, which causes some animals to have orange or partially orange teeth. In the Komodo dragon, the iron is incorporated into the tooth’s enamel coating, but only on the tips of the teeth. Since Komodo dragons have serrated teeth, that’s a lot of very sharp points.

There’s no way currently to test fossilized teeth to see if they once contained iron, especially since the iron would most likely be deposited in the tooth coating, the way it is for animals living today, not in the tooth itself. But because the Komodo dragon has teeth that are very similar in many ways to the teeth of meat-eating dinosaurs, scientists think some dinosaurs may have had iron in their teeth too.

And that brings us to the nutria, an animal suggested by Emerson. Emerson likes the nutria because of its orange teeth, and hopefully you can guess why its teeth are orange.

The nutria is also called the coypu, and it’s a rodent native to South America. In Spanish the word nutria means otter, so in South America it’s almost exclusively called the coypu, and the name coypu is becoming more popular in other languages too. It’s been introduced to other parts of the world as a fur animal, and it has become invasive in parts of Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

The nutria is a semi-aquatic rodent that looks like a muskrat but is much bigger, up to two feet long, or 64 cm, not counting its tail. It also kind of looks like a beaver but is smaller. If you’re not sure which of these three animals you’re looking at, since they’re so similar, the easiest way to tell them apart is to look at their tails. The beaver has a famously flattened paddle-like tail, the muskrat’s tail is flattened side to side to act as a rudder, and the nutria’s tail is just plain old round. The nutria also has a white muzzle and chin, and magnificent white whiskers.

The nutria mostly eats water plants and is mostly active in the twilight. While it usually lives around slow-moving streams and shallow lakes, it will also tolerate saltwater wetlands. Wild nutrias are generally dark brown, but ones bred for their fur are often blond or even white.

The nutria digs large dens with the entrance usually underwater, but the nesting chamber inside is dry. It also digs for roots. This can cause a lot of damage to levees and riverbanks, which is why the nutria is so destructive as an invasive animal. It will also eat people’s gardens and commercial crops like rice and alfalfa.

One interesting thing about the nutria is that the female has teats that are high up on her sides, which allows her babies to nurse even when they’re all in the water.

The nutria’s big incisor teeth are bright orange, as we mentioned before. This is indeed because of the iron in the enamel that strengthens the teeth. Like other rodents, the nutria’s incisors grow throughout its life and are continually worn down as it chews tough plants. A nutria eats about 25% of its weight in plants every single day. That’s almost as much as me and pizza.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 434: The Real Life Dragon

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Thanks to Jaxon for suggesting this week’s topic, Coelurosauravus!

Further reading:

Coelurosauravus

New Research Reveals Secrets of First-Ever Gliding Reptile

The modern Draco lizard glides on “wings” made from extended rib bones:

Coelurosauravus glided on wings that were completely different from any other wings known [art from the first link above]:

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about an extinct animal suggested by Jaxon. It’s called Coelurosauravus and it lived around 255 million years ago in what is now Madagascar.

Coelurosauravus was a member of the Weigeltisauridae family, reptiles whose fossils have been found not just in Madagascar but in parts of Europe, and maybe even North America (although we’re not sure yet). They were gliding reptiles that probably lived in trees and ate insects and other small animals, sort of like modern gliding lizards. But while most gliding lizards are very small, Coelurosauravus grew over a foot long, or around 40 cm, and that’s nowhere near the weirdest thing about it.

To explain why Coelurosauravus was so very peculiar, we have to learn a little about other gliding reptiles. Back in episode 255 we learned about kuehneosaurids, and that’s a good place to start.

Kuehneosaurids lived around 225 million years ago in what is now England. This wasn’t all that long after Coelurosauravus lived and not that far away from where some of its relations lived, but the two weren’t related. Kuehneosaurus looked like a big lizard although this was before modern lizards evolved, but it was a reptile and it was even larger than Coelurosauravus. Kuehneosaurus grew about two feet long, or 70 cm, including a long tail, and probably lived in trees and ate insects.

Kuehneosaurus glided on sail-like structures on its sides that were made from extended ribs with skin stretched over them. Its wings weren’t all that big, although they were big enough that they could act as a parachute if the animal fell or jumped from a branch. Another gliding reptile, Kuehneosuchus, had wings that were much longer. In a study published in 2008, a team of scientists built models of kuehneosuchus and tested them in a wind tunnel used for aerospace engineering. It turned out to be quite stable in the air and could probably glide very well.

We don’t know a whole lot about the kuehneosaurids because we haven’t found very many fossils. We’re not even sure if the two species are closely related or not. We’re not even sure they’re not the same species. Individuals of both were uncovered in caves near Bristol in the 1950s, and some researchers speculate they were males and females of the same species. Despite the difference in wings, otherwise they’re extremely similar in a lot of ways.

Generally, researchers compare the kuehneosaurids to modern draco lizards, which we talked about in episode 237, even though they’re not related. Draco lizards are much smaller, only about 8 inches long including the tail, or 20 cm, and live throughout much of southeastern Asia. Many gliding animals, like the flying squirrel, have gliding membranes called patagia that stretch from the front legs to the back legs, but the draco lizard is different. It has greatly elongated ribs that it can extend like wings, and the skin between the ribs acts as a patagium. This skin is usually yellow or brown so that the lizard looks like a falling leaf when it’s gliding. Draco lizards can fold their wings down and extend them, which isn’t something the kuehneosaurids appear to have been able to do.

But now let’s return to Coelurosauravus. It too had wing-like structures on its sides that consisted of skin stretched over bony struts. But in this case, the bones weren’t elongated ribs.

Coelurosauravus had about 30 pairs of long, flexible bones that extended from the sides of its belly, and it could open and close its wings like draco lizards do. Scientists think the bones developed from osteoderms, which are bony structures that many animals have on their skin, that act as a sort of built-in armor. As far as we know, no other animal in the entire history of life on earth has developed what are basically wings from osteoderms.

Coelurosauravus had long, slender legs with sharp claws that it used to climb around in trees, and a long tail to help it keep its balance as it climbed. Its head was decorated with a bony frill that had spikes along the edges. The frill might have been brightly colored, a way to attract mates or intimidate potential predators, and it might also have been an attachment site for strong jaw muscles.

In other words, Coelurosauravus had four legs, two wings, and horns on its head. This little reptile was basically a dragon.

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

Thanks for listening!