Episode 070: Mystery Birds

This week we’ll learn about birds that are mysterious in one way or another. If you need more bird knowledge, check out the awesome Casual Birder Podcast, especially this week’s episode with a guest spot by me about indigo buntings!

Lots of pictures for this one, hoo boy.

The Nechisar nightjar wing. It’s all we’ve got:

Junkin’s warbler, a mystery bird whose identity was solved by SCIENCE:

The lovely blue-eyed ground dove:

The two tapestries depicting a mystery bird:

Close-ups of the mystery bird from the tapestries:

A black grouse, that may have inspired the tapestry birds:

A wandering albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any living bird known and will CURSE YOU:

The bee hummingbird, smallest living bird known, will only give tiny curses if it’s really mad:

An olive-backed sunbird:

A hermit hawkmoth, not even kidding that this thing looks and acts like a hummingbird:

The cahow, or Bermuda petrel:

Show transcript:

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

On the same day this episode is released, the Casual Birder Podcast is releasing an episode about finches with a contribution from me. If you haven’t tried the Casual Birder Podcast, it’s a great show about birds and birding that I highly recommend. It’s 100% family friendly, the host’s voice is pleasant and calming, and it’s often funny and always interesting. I’ve got a link in the show notes, so head on over and try the finch episode, where you can hear me dropping some knowledge about the indigo bunting. And for any new listeners who came here from the Casual Birder Podcast, welcome! We’ve got a great episode this week about birds that are associated with a mystery in one way or another.

We’ll start in Ethiopia, specifically the Nechisar National Park in the Great Rift Valley. In 1990, a team of researchers was surveying a remote section of grassland in the park to see what animals lived there. One of the things they found was a dead bird, not in the field but on a dirt road, where it had been killed by a car. It was a type of nightjar, but the bird experts associated with the survey didn’t recognize it. The problem was, though, that the bird was pretty mangled and rotten. Only one wing was intact, so they took that wing back with them to the Natural History Museum in London and described a new species of nightjar from it. It’s called the Nechisar Nightjar, described in 1995 and named Caprimulgus solala. ‘Solala’ means “only a wing.”

But no one who knows about birds has ever conclusively seen a living Nechisar Nightjar: not an ornithologist or zoologist, not a bird watcher, not a local with more than casual knowledge of birds, no one. In 2009 a group of birders visited the park specifically to search for the nightjar, and caught a brief video of one flying away. But nightjars are night birds, so the video was shot at night with one of the birders holding a light, and as a result it’s not exactly great video quality. So while conservationists hold out hope that the bird isn’t actually super-rare, just lives in a hard to reach area, we still don’t know for sure.

At least we have the wing so we know the Nechisar nightjar actually exists. The wing has dark brown feathers with a pale wing panel. The birders who might have seen the nightjar in 2009 said its body was reddish-brown and it had white tail corners. Another bird, called the double-banded pheasant, is known only from a single feather found in 1871. We don’t even know where the feather came from, since it was found in a shipment of feathers sent to London to be used as hat decorations. Researchers today think it is probably just an aberrant feather taken from the well-known great argus pheasant, which lives in Borneo, Sumatra, and other islands in southeast Asia.

Next we’ll visit New York state and a mystery warbler whose identity was solved by science. In 2006, bird bander David Junkin caught a warbler in his mist net that he and his wife Sandy couldn’t identify. It had an olive green back, was bright yellow underneath, and had a gray head with a white throat and bright white eye ring, almost spectacles. The Junkins had to let the bird go, and it became known as Junkin’s warbler informally as birders and ornithologists tried to figure out what the bird was from the pictures the Junkins posted online. Then, fortunately, the following year the same individual bird blundered into the Junkin’s mist net. This time they plucked two of its tail feathers and sent them for DNA testing at Cornell. It turns out that the mystery warbler was a hybrid of a male mourning warbler and a female Kentucky warbler.

Various types of warblers do interbreed fairly frequently, and some hybrids have been mistakenly named as species of their own in the past. As if warblers weren’t already ridiculously hard to identify. Researchers think that in the case of Junkin’s warbler, its mother may have ended up outside of her usual summer range after migrating, found no Kentucky warbler males to pair with, and so took a closely-related male mourning warbler as a mate. Sometimes you have to settle, you know? At least their kid was pretty darn adorable.

When a rare bird vanishes, after years with no sightings, conservationists have to declare it extinct. But sometimes a bird thought extinct turns out to not be extinct at all. These are sometimes known as Lazarus species.

It happened with the blue-eyed ground dove, a pretty but modest dove that once lived throughout South America. It was declared critically endangered and probably extinct and hadn’t been seen in almost 75 years when, in June of 2015, ornithologist Rafael Bessa heard a call that he knew wasn’t the ruddy ground-dove common in Brazil. He recorded the call and managed to get some photographs of the dove he heard. Sure enough, it was a blue-eyed ground dove, not extinct after all.

Of course, exciting as this is, the doves aren’t out of danger. Their habitat is threatened and they only survive in a few small, widely-separated pockets of wilderness. But conservation efforts are in place now that we know the dove is still around. It’s a lovely bird, chestnut with dark blue spots on its wings and matching dark blue eyes. This is what a blue-eyed ground dove sounds like:

[dove call]

Now let’s fly to Paris, where I am visiting this August and I’m very excited. In this case, our bird is depicted in two 500-year-old tapestries at the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages, part of a series collectively called “The Lady and the Unicorn.” The tapestries show a lot of animals and birds, including our mystery bird. It’s black with a white breast and white markings on the underwings, a long tail with a lyre-shaped fork at the end, and large feet. But no one’s sure what kind of bird it is.

The best guess is that it may be a depiction of a black grouse, rendered by artists who had never actually seen one of the birds. The black grouse is a large game bird common throughout parts of western Europe and Asia. The male is black with white wing bars and undertail coverts, and red wattles. The tail is long and lyre-shaped, and when the wings are open, they show white underneath. But even if the bird in the tapestries is a black grouse, it’s still a mystery why the artist included the bird in the tapestries instead of a more well-known bird or a completely fanciful one.

Next up is a bird that’s not a mystery so much as mysterious. It has an entire epic poem written about it, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in the early 19th century.

The wandering albatross and the closely related southern royal albatross have the largest wingspan of any bird living today, 11 ½ feet across, or 3.5 meters. Both are mostly white as adults, with black markings on the wings and pinkish bills and legs. They look like gigantic seagulls.

The albatross has such an amazing wingspan, and is such an efficient flyer, that it can fly for weeks without stopping, covering more than 6,000 miles during that time, or 10,000 km, and use barely more energy than if it had stayed at home and napped. It eats fish, squid, and other small sea creatures, and will dive for food or just grab it out of the water as the bird skims near the surface. The albatross will pretty much eat anything it can find, including carrion, and it can gorge itself with as much as 25% of its own body weight in food. But when it’s that full, it’s too heavy to fly, so it may float on the water’s surface for a few hours while it digests. Its digestive system is as acidic as a vulture’s so it can digest its food quickly.

Pairs mate for life, can live over sixty years, and produce one chick every two years, gathering in colonies on a few remote islands to nest. It mostly lives in the southern hemisphere below the Antarctic, around South America and Australia. Distance means nothing to the albatross.

The albatross frequently follows ships around, especially fishing boats that might throw fish guts and heads overboard. Some sailors believed the albatross was a bird of good omen or contained the soul of a dead sailor, so if you killed one you’d be cursed. That’s what the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is all about. Other sailors believed that if you killed an albatross, you could use its hollow wing bones to make pipe stems, so they did, and presumably they were cursed for the rest of their lives but they also had nifty pipe stems so I guess it’s a trade off.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner frankly is a terrible poem. I was an English major; you can trust my judgment. It has some good lines, though, and you probably know some of them even if you’ve never read the poem. It’s where “As idle as a painted ship / upon a painted ocean” comes from, and “Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.” In the poem, a sailor kills an albatross. He doesn’t say why. When the ship is immediately becalmed, the other sailors, who blame the first sailor for killing the lucky bird, hang the dead albatross around the bird-killer’s neck. If you’ve ever heard of someone having an albatross around their neck, that’s where it comes from, and it means something bad from their past is still affecting them.

From the bird with the biggest known wingspan, let’s examine a tiny, tiny bird next. This is a genuine mystery bird from Sumatra. In the late 1950s, Otto and Nina Irrgang were living in Sumatra and one day spotted a hummingbird only 1.5 inches long, or 3.8 cm. That’s even smaller than the smallest bird known, the bee hummingbird, which lives in Cuba and nearby islands and is no more than 2.4 inches long, or 6.1 cm. The Irrgangs saw the bird at close range when it hovered no more than a foot away. They said it was brown underneath with a striped yellow back.

But Sumatra is an Indonesian island in southeast Asia, and true hummingbirds live only in the Americas, from Alaska and Canada all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and in the Caribbean, which are islands in the Atlantic between North and South America. There are birds in Sumatra that resemble hummingbirds and fill the same ecological niche, called sunbirds. Sunbirds also live in Africa, Australia, and parts of Asia. They’re tiny, although on average a little larger than hummingbirds, eat nectar and occasionally small insects, and males often have jewel-like iridescent feathers. But they can’t hover for very long and usually perch while they gather nectar from flowers. While their bills are long and slender, they are more curved than hummingbirds’ needle-like bills.

Eighteen species of sunbird and its close relative, the spiderhunters, live in Sumatra. But none have a striped yellow back with brown belly as described by the Irrgangs, and all are much larger than the reported length of 1.5 inches. The couples’ son, Mike Irrgang, has reported that his parents may have not included the bird’s tail in their estimated measurement, and that he thinks it was the same size as a “bee bird.” It’s not clear what he means by bee bird. There are birds called bee-eaters throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa that eat bees, but they’re much larger than sunbirds. He probably meant the bee hummingbird.

But there is another possibility. While the Irrgangs were adamant that they saw a bird, not an insect, there is a moth that might fit the description. It’s called the hermit hummingbird hawkmoth and it lives on Sumatra, as well as many other parts of Asia. It eats nectar and is most active at dawn and dusk, and it hovers like a hummingbird. Its body is mostly gray and brown, with yellow bands on the hind wings and the abdomen. It can grow almost two inches long, or 5 cm, with a wingspan a bit wider than its body is long.

In other words, it’s a moth that acts and in some respects looks like a hummingbird, and is just a shade smaller than the world’s smallest hummingbird, and its color and markings roughly match what the Irrgangs report. Other hummingbird hawk moths live throughout Europe and Asia, and are sometimes mistaken for birds. In North America we have hummingbird moths that look and act similar, and I have seen them in my garden in the evenings and mistaken them for hummingbirds. Sometimes I see an actual hummingbird and mistake it for a bee at first, incidentally, because it just doesn’t seem possible that a bird could be so small.

Then again, Sumatra is home to many, many birds and animals that are rare, threatened, and possibly have gone extinct since the 1950s without ever being officially studied and described. It’s possible there was once a tiny sunbird that resembled a hummingbird even more than the sunbirds and hawkmoths of Sumatra we know about. If so, let’s hope that one day, some lucky birder or ornithologist discovers it alive and well.

Finally, let’s finish with another seabird. The Bermuda petrel, also called the cahow, was a grey-brown bird that nested on various small islands in Bermuda. The Spanish visited the islands in the early 16th century, and while they didn’t settle there, they killed and ate as many cahows as they could catch along with their eggs. They also turned pigs loose on the islands so they’d have food waiting for them whenever they came back wanting bacon. Before then, approximately half a million cahows lived on the islands, but what the sailors and their rats didn’t eat, the pigs did.

The British colonized some of these islands in 1612, which were uninhabited by humans—for good reason, it turned out. The colonists kept dying of starvation. In 1614, rats ate up what little food the colonists had, so the colony evacuated to Cooper’s Island to get away from the rats and hopefully find something edible. There they found the cahow, which had moved to Cooper’s Island and a few nearby small islands to get away from the pigs. By 1620 the colonists had eaten them all. Every single bird. That was the end of the cahow…except that it wasn’t.

In 1951 Louis S. Mowbray, son of the Bermuda Aquarium director of the same name, got a few of his friends together to survey the rocky islets of the area. They were looking specifically for cahows, since reports of dead birds and even occasional live ones still trickled in. Mowbray’s father had even been given a live one which he kept as a pet, so Mowbray knew it was living somewhere.

Sure enough, they found it on four tiny islets. So how did it survive for over 300 years without anyone finding and eating them?

The cahow, it turns out, nests in burrows and a young bird stays in its burrow until it’s old enough to fly. Then, like the albatross, it soars for thousands of miles without landing anywhere but on the water’s surface for the first few years of its life, until it returns to Bermuda in November to nest. It lays one egg a year and mates for life. It arrives at night, courts its mate at night, and digs burrows in sheltered, hidden areas.

One of the people who helped Mowbray find the cahow was David Wingate, who at the time was just a kid. He later attended Cornell University, and after he graduated with a degree in zoology, he returned to Bermuda in 1958 and started his life’s work: saving the cahow and its environment.

He moved to Nonsuch Island, which had been more or less destroyed by colonists and their animals over the centuries. It’s only 14 acres in size, or 5.7 hectares, and is close to Cooper’s Island. Wingate dug up invasive plants, killed invasive animals, and planted native trees and shrubs. He even dug burrows for cahows that had special entrances to keep out the white-tailed tropicbird, which kills cahow chicks. He fought to keep developers from moving onto the island to build homes, fought the military that wanted to use the island for chemical testing. And finally, Nonsuch Island was declared a wildlife sanctuary.

The cahow’s population has grown from only 18 nesting pairs in 1951 to 105 in 2013. It is now the national bird of Bermuda. Wingate retired in 2000, but the conservation work he started continues on Nonsuch Island and other islands too. So if anyone tells you that one person can’t make a difference in the world, just tell them about how David Wingate saved Nonsuch Island, the cahow, and hundreds of other bird, animal, and plant species native to Bermuda. You can do anything if you’re willing to work hard enough.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 065: Animals that eat ants

We’re not looking at just any old insectivores in this episode, we’re looking at the big three of ant-eating mammals: the giant anteater, the aardvark, and the pangolin!

A giant anteater and baby:

Teeny anteater mouth alert! Also long tongue:

An aardvark walking with style:

An aardvark. Look at that tongue! And those claws!

An Indian pangolin. Please do not eat:

A pangolin ball. Please do not kick:

Save the Pangolins organization

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about the anteater, the aardvark, and the pangolin, all of them specialized eaters of ants. Are they related? How do we tell them apart?

The anteater is a South and Central American animal related to sloths and, more distantly, armadillos. The aardvark is an African animal related to several rodent-like animals including the golden mole, which is not a mole, and the elephant shrew, which is neither an elephant nor a shrew. Although, as it happens, the elephant shrew is actually related to the elephant. So is the aardvark, although these connections are pretty darn distant. The pangolin is an Asian and African animal that’s not very closely related to anything.

Let’s start with the giant anteater.

The giant anteater can grow over seven feet long if you include the tail, or more than 2 meters. It’s brown and gray with markings that look like go-faster stripes. Its head is small and elongated. You know how a cartoon character can cram its head into a bottle and its head stays bottle-shaped? It kind of looks like the giant anteater did that. Its snout is shaped like a tube, with nostrils and a tiny mouth at the end. It can’t open its jaws very far. It has a short upright mane along its spine all the way down its back, which blends with its bushy tail. Its tail is so awesomely furry that when an anteater sleeps, it covers its body with its tail like a blanket.

Anteaters eat ants, although they also love termites and will eat other small insects and insect larvae. The giant anteater uses its massive front claws to dig into anthills. Then it flicks its tongue really fast, catching insects with a combination of tiny hooklets on the tongue and sticky saliva. An anteater’s tongue is over two feet long, or 60 cm, so long that when the anteater isn’t actually eating, the tongue rolls up at the back of its skull. The base of its tongue is attached not to its throat but to its sternum, also called the breastbone.

A feeding anteater eats as many insects as it can catch in a minute or two, then moves on to find a new anthill. It does this to avoid as many stings and bites as possible. To conserve energy, the anteater’s body temperature is low to start with and drops when the animal is asleep.

The anteater doesn’t have teeth. It crushes insects against the top of its mouth before swallowing them, and its stomach acts like a bird’s crop. The anteater may deliberately eat sand or grit the way birds do to help pulverize the insects it’s eaten. Its eyesight isn’t very good so it hunts mostly by scent.

The giant anteater knuckle-walks on its forepaws because its front claws are so big. When it feels threatened, it will rear up on its hind legs and spread its forelegs so it can slash with its claws. Anteaters can kill jaguars and other predators, including humans. Occasionally anteaters will fight over territory, especially males. Sometimes during a fight, one anteater will climb on the other one and ride it around, which probably really annoys the anteater that’s being ridden.

The female anteater has one baby at a time, which rides on its mother’s back until it’s big enough to keep up with her on its own. Its markings blend with its mother’s so predators don’t notice it.

So that’s the giant anteater. Now let’s look at the aardvark.

The aardvark is about the same size as the anteater and also eats ants, termites, and other insects. It has a long head, but unlike the anteater, it does have teeth. The incisors and canines it’s born with fall out when it’s an adult, and it never regrows them, but it does retain its cheek teeth. The teeth are small and grow constantly throughout the aardvark’s life, since they wear down quickly due to the lack of enamel.

The aardvark isn’t super furry like the anteater. Its body is shaped something like a pig with a long tail, and it has sparse hair and long ears, whereas the giant anteater has small ears. It’s mostly nocturnal and sleeps during the day in its burrow, where it’s cooler. While it doesn’t have huge claws on its forefeet, it does have tough hoof-like nails that it uses to break apart termite nests and dig burrows. Its skin is thick and it can run and dig quickly to escape predators. It can also swim well.

The aardvark has a good sense of smell and hearing, but its eyesight isn’t all that great. Its snout is more piglike than the anteater’s, with large nostrils protected by hair. Its tongue isn’t as long as the anteater’s, only about a foot long, or 30 cm.

In addition to ants and termites, the aardvark eats one other thing, a fruit called the aardvark cucumber. It’s an actual cucumber, a round fruit about the size of a small child’s fist, but the fruit grows underground. It has a water-resistant skin that keeps it from rotting while it waits for months for an aardvark to dig it up and eat it. The aardvark is the only animal that spreads the aardvark cucumber’s seeds. Researchers think the reason aardvarks have teeth at all is to eat these cucumbers, and that it eats the cucumbers because of their high water content. The seeds travel through the aardvark’s digestive system, and since the aardvark buries its poop like a cat, the cucumber seeds are all ready to sprout.

Female aardvarks have one baby at a time, which stays in the burrow until it’s old enough to follow its mother around. The aardvark ranges widely while it searches for insects, and if it encounters a predator it may dig a burrow to hide in. It can dig a burrow the length of its body in only about five minutes. Sometimes it will dig a temporary burrow to rest in. Empty aardvark burrows make great homes for other animals, from warthogs to various bird species. Even a type of bat roosts in old aardvark burrows.

So that’s the aardvark. Now let’s learn about the pangolin.

At first glance, the pangolin looks nothing like its ant-eating friends from other lands. It’s a mammal, but it’s covered in scales except for its belly and face. Sometimes it’s called the scaly anteater, in fact. Its sharp-edged, overlapping scales are made of keratin. When it’s threatened, it rolls up in a ball with its tail over its face.

The pangolin’s body shape is very similar to the giant anteater’s and the aardvark’s. There are a number of species in three genera of the family Manidae, but we’ll look at just one today, the Indian pangolin. It lives in India and surrounding areas and is about four feet long, or 120 cm, including the tail. It has a humped back like an aardvark, small ears like a giant anteater, and like both those animals its legs are relatively short. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It’s nocturnal and lives in burrows, and it uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. Like the others, it has poor vision but a good sense of smell.

It’s mostly solitary and gives birth to one baby at a time, or rarely twins. The baby rides on its mother’s tail, and if she has to roll up to protect herself, she holds her baby against her belly and rolls up around it. Newborn pangolins have soft scales.

There used to be an enormous species of pangolin in Asia, whose remains have been found in Java, India, and other places. The bones date to around 45,000 years ago but we don’t have enough remains to get a good idea of when the giant Asian pangolin actually went extinct. It was probably around eight feet long including the tail, or almost 2.5 meters. People native to an island called Rintja in Indonesia tell stories about the veo, a scaly animal ten feet long, or three meters, that sounds exactly like a giant pangolin. So it’s possible that these giant pangolins didn’t die out until humans encountered them.

Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat them. In some countries, like Vietnam and China, pangolin meat is an extremely expensive delicacy, which means poachers can get a lot of money for them. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don’t do well in captivity so it’s hard for zoos to help them.

Pangolins just walk to trundle around eating ants. Why are people so mean?

I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Save Pangolins organization if you want to contribute. All sales of cute pangolin merch from their store also goes toward helping stop pangolin poaching and smuggling.

Scientists used to think that anteaters, aardvarks, and pangolins were closely related since they share so many similarities. Instead, they show convergent evolution, where they inhabit a similar ecological niche and therefore evolve to look similar. You know what the pangolin is most closely related to? Carnivores, including cats and dogs and bears.

So it’s probably safe to assume at this point that if you want to eat mostly ants and termites, you need a long thin snout, a super-long sticky tongue, and big claws for digging. Personally, I would rather have pizza.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 059: The Onza and the Yemish

This week we’re going to learn about some more big cats, especially the mysterious onza of Mexico and the yemish of Patagonia.

And you should totally check out the charming podcast Cool Facts about Animals.

A jaguar:

A jaguarundi:

A puma, not dead:

The Rodriguez onza, dead:

A giant otter:

Further reading:

The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker

Monsters of Patagonia by Austin Whittall

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a couple of mystery cats that you might not have heard of, and learn about a few non-mystery animals along the way.

There are several cats native to Mexico. We’ve talked about the puma recently, in episode 52. It’s the same cat that’s also called the cougar or mountain lion, and it lives throughout most of the Americas. It’s tawny or brownish in color with few markings beyond dark and white areas on the face, and sometimes faint tail rings and mottled spots on the legs.

The jaguar is a spotted cat related to lions, tigers, leopards, and other big cats. It lives throughout much of Central and South America, and in North America as far north as Mexico, and was once common in the southwestern United States too but was hunted to extinction there. It prefers tropical forests and swamps, likes to swim, and is relatively stocky with a shorter tail than its relatives. Its background color is tawny or brownish with a white belly, and its spots, called rosettes, are darker. But melanistic jaguars aren’t especially uncommon. They look all black at first glance, but their spots are visible up close. Oh, and a big shout-out to the charming podcast Cool Facts About Animals who did a show about jaguars recently. I definitely recommend it, especially if you’ve got younger kids who love animals.

In 2011, a hunter and his daughter in Arizona took pictures of a spotted cat treed by their dogs, and alerted wildlife officials. The officials studied the photos and said yes, that’s a jaguar. Since then, he’s been monitored by trail cam and conservationists working in the Santa Rita Mountains. Since jaguars have unique spot patterns, we know it’s the same cat, a male that local elementary school kids have named El Jefe. Officials think El Jefe moved to Arizona from a nearby jaguar sanctuary in Mexico, and for years he was the only known jaguar in the United States. In late 2017, a second male jaguar was caught on camera in southern Arizona. Researchers hope that more jaguars will move into the area, which was part of their original range.

Pumas and jaguars are the two biggest cats found in Mexico. But there is a third big cat, a mystery big cat. The onza has been reported in Mexico for centuries. It’s supposed to look like a puma but more lightly built with longer legs and possibly darker fur or dark markings, especially striping on the legs.

The first problem is the name onza. The term is applied to a lot of different big cats in Mexico and other Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. For instance, in Brazil the word onça means jaguar, and in fact the jaguar’s scientific name is Pathera onca. The related English word ounce was once the name of the lynx and is now sometimes used for the snow leopard, Panthera uncia. So it’s possible that old reports of onzas just refer to pumas or jaguars, or one of the many other cats that live in the area, such as the jaguarundi.

The jaguarundi sometimes lives in Mexico as far north as southern Texas, although it’s much more common in South and Central America. It’s black or brownish-grey, which is called the grey phase, or red-brown or tawny, called the red phase. In the past the two phases were thought to be separate species. Adult jaguarundis don’t usually have any markings, but cubs have spots on their bellies. That is adorable. It’s closely related to the puma but is smaller, not much bigger than a domestic cat, and unlike most cats it’s diurnal instead of nocturnal, which means it’s mostly active during the day.

The jaguarundi has a flattish head, more like an otter than a cat. A gray phase jaguarundi may be the animal referred to in the writings of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who in the early 16th century wrote about a lion that resembled a wolf in Montezuma’s menagerie, in 1519. It also happens to be called an onza in some parts of Mexico.

Some animals labeled onzas have been killed and examined. On January 1, 1986 a big cat killed in Sinaloa State in Mexico, called the Rodriguez onza, was examined by a team of experts, including Stephen O’Brien, an expert in feline molecular genetics. They reported that the animal’s DNA was indistinguishable from that of a puma. But it definitely didn’t look like an ordinary puma. I have a picture of it in the show notes. It was long-bodied and slender with dark markings. So it’s possible that stories of onzas arose from sightings of pumas with this sort of coat color variation, or it’s possible there is a remote population of pumas with a leggier build than ordinary pumas, and every so often one wanders out where it’s seen or killed. Pumas can show considerable variance in appearance, so it wouldn’t be that unusual for an occasional individual to be born that’s longer legged than most and that also has more or darker markings than usual.

Then again, who knows? There might be a subspecies of puma or a completely different species of cat out there. If so, hopefully we’ll find out more about it soon so it can be protected and studied.

Jaguarundis make a lot of different vocalizations. Here’s one. It sounds more like a bird than a cat, but I promise you, that’s a jaguarundi.

[cat sound]

Way back in episode 22 I touched on the yemish, or Patagonian water tiger. I think it’s time to revisit it in more detail. Look, I have a fantastic book called Monsters of Patagonia so you’re going to be hearing about Patagonia on this podcast for a long, long time.

The iemisch, or hyminche, or lemisch, or some other variation, is often called a water tiger but linked not with a feline at all, but with a ground sloth. This is entirely the fault of a single man, Florentino Ameghino.

Ameghino lived in the late 19th century and died in 1911. He was from Argentina, born to Italian immigrants, and is still highly regarded as a paleontologist, anthropologist, zoologist, and naturalist, from back in the days when you could specialize in lots of disciplines and still do tons of field work. He has an actual crater on the moon named after him. You don’t get a moon crater unless you’re pretty awesome. But Ameghino had at least one bee in his bonnet, and it involved giant ground sloths like megatherium. He was convinced they were still alive in the remote areas of South America, especially Patagonia.

In an 1898 paper he wrote about the yemish in Patagonia, which he said was a “Mysterious four legged massive beast, of a terrible and invulnerable appearance, whose body cannot be penetrated by missiles or burning branches. They call it Iemisch or ‘water tiger’ and mentioning its name terrorizes them; when interrogated and asked for details, they become grim, drop their heads, turn mute or evade answering.”

I got this quote from the Monsters of Patagonia book, of course. You can find a link in the show notes if you want to order your own copy of the book. It’s a fun read, but I should point out that I do a lot of fact-checking before I include information from the book because there are some inaccuracies and fringey theories. Also, it has no index.

Ameghino said his brother Carlos, who was also a paleontologist, had sent him a piece of hide reputedly from a yemish, which he had gotten from a Tehuelche hunter. The hide had tiny bones embedded in it, called osteoderms, which are a feature of giant ground sloths. Ameghino claimed that the yemish was a giant ground sloth, which he named Neomylodon.

Mylodon, as opposed to Ameghino’s Neomylodon, was a 10 foot long, or 3 meter, ground sloth that did indeed have osteoderms embedded in its thick hide. It had long, sharp claws and ate plants, probably dug burrows, and lived throughout Patagonia and probably most of South America. The important thing here is that mylodon remains, including dung as well as dead animals, have been found in caves in Patagonia, and the remains look so fresh that the discoverers thought they were only a few years old. It turns out that they’re all about 10,000 years old, but were preserved by cold, dry conditions in the caves.

So the piece of hide was probably really from a giant ground sloth, but not one that had been alive recently. Most researchers think that the sloths of Patagonia were already extinct when the area was first settled by humans, but discoveries of what looked like recently dead animals with fearsome claws and a hide that couldn’t be pierced with arrows might very well have contributed to stories of local monsters.

But that’s beside the point, because once you get past Ameghino’s obsession with the yemish being a real live giant ground sloth, it’s clear it’s something completely un-slothlike. The exact term yemish isn’t known from any language in Patagonia, but it might be a corruption of hymché, a water monster, or yem’chen, which means water tiger in the Aonikenk language. An even closer match from the same language means sea wolf and is pronounced ee-m’cheen [iü’mchün]. Other languages in the area call the elephant seal yabich, which also sounds similar to yemish. In other words, it’s pretty clear that the yemish is a water animal of some sort.

The sea wolf is what we call a sea lion, a type of huge seal. Sea lions and elephant seals sometimes come up rivers and into freshwater lakes, which may account for some of the numerous lake monster legends in Patagonia. As for the hymché, it may have a natural explanation too that is nevertheless just as mysterious as just calling it a monster.

French naturalist André Tournouer explored Patagonia in 1900, and at one point while following a stream, he and his expedition saw what their guide called a hymché. It was the size of a large puma but with dark fur, rounded head, no visible ears, and pale hair around the eyes. It sank under the water when Tournouer shot at it, and later they found some catlike tracks in the sand along the bank.

From the description, it’s possible that the hymché was a spectacled bear. We learned about it in episode 42. It lives in the Andes Mountains of South America but was formerly much more widespread, and is usually black with lighter markings around the eyes that give it its name. Its ears are small and its head is more rounded than other bears. While it spends most of its time in the treetops, it actually does swim quite well. But as far as we know, spectacled bears don’t live in Patagonia.

So, back to the yemish. According to Ameghino’s 1898 paper, he said the Tehuelche referred to it as the water tiger. Since there is no local word for tiger in South America, since tigers live in Asia, this is probably a translation of the local word for puma. The jaguar did formerly live in Patagonia but was hunted to extinction there over a century ago. The yemish supposedly spent much of its time in the river and dragged horses and other animals into the water when they came down to drink. Its feet were flat, its ears tiny, it had big claws and fangs, and its toes were webbed for swimming. It had shorter legs than a puma but was bigger than one.

This sounds like one specific animal that does live in Patagonia, and it’s not a tiger or any kind of feline at all. It may be an otter. Flat feet with claws and webbed toes? Check. Tiny ears and scary teeth? Check. Longer than a puma but with much shorter legs? Check. Otters don’t kill animals as big as horses, of course, but this could be an exaggeration. Otters will scavenge on freshly dead animals, so the story of a mule that fell off a precipice onto a river bank, and was discovered dead and half-eaten the next morning with strange paw prints all around it, fits with an otter family having an unexpected feast delivered to their doorstep.

Not only that, but some tribes do call otters “river tigers.” Stories of monstrous otter-like animals are common throughout much of South America, not just Patagonia, and are frequently translated as “river tiger.” In Monsters of Patagonia, Whittall wonders why some tribes have two names for the otter in that case, an ordinary name and a name denoting a monster. It’s possible the monster version of the otter either refers to a folkloric beast, an animal like a sea lion that was once seen far from its ordinary home, or two kinds of otter in the area, one bigger and more ferocious than the other.

The southern river otter lives in Patagonia, both in rivers and along the seashore. It’s not especially big, maybe four feet long including the tail, or 1.2 meters. But the rare marine otter also lives along the western and southern coasts of Patagonia. Its scientific name, Lontra felina, means “otter cat, and in Spanish it’s often called gato marino, or sea cat. But the marine otter is small, typically smaller than the river otter and at the very most, around five feet long or 1.5 meters.

But if you remember episode 37, about the dobhar-chu, you may remember the giant otter. It lives in South America north of Patagonia and is now endangered, with only around 5,000 animals left in the wild after being hunted extensively for its fur for decades. It’s protected now, although loss of habitat and poaching are still big problems. It grows to around 6 feet long now, or 1.8 meters, but when it was more common some big males could grow over eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. If in the past an occasional giant otter—twice the length of an ordinary otter—strayed into the rivers of Patagonia, it would definitely be seen as a monster.

Whittall rejects the idea that the yemish is an otter, although he doesn’t mention the giant otter. He also rejects the jaguarondi as the yemish since it’s much too small, although it does like to swim and fish and, as mentioned earlier, it does look remarkably like an otter in many ways. He suggests the yemish might be an unknown giant aquatic rodent, citing as proof the existence of a cow-sized rodent that once lived in Patagonia during the ice age. I’m not convinced. Nothing about the yemish sounds like a rodent. It does sound like an otter, possibly a known otter, possibly a now extinct otter—or, maybe, a giant version of the jaguarondi, also now extinct. But maybe not.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 058: Mystery Cattle

Join us this week to learn about the aurochs, the gaur, some mystery cattle of Patagonia, a farting monster cow, and a ghost cow that turned out to be not so ghostly!

The aurochs:

An aurochs skull:

A gaur. Holy cow (heh) those things are enormous!

A heck cow:

The bonnacon, famous for stink. I love how this one looks awfully embarrassed:

Show transcript:

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

We’re going to learn about some unusual cattle this week. You may not think cows are very interesting, but I think I can change your mind.

We’ll start with the aurochs, also sometimes called the urus. It was the wild ancestor of domestic cattle and also ancestor of the European bison. The European bison is still around and is sometimes called the wisent, but the aurochs is extinct.

The aurochs was a type of Ice Age megafauna. A big bull aurochs could stand almost six feet tall at the shoulder, or 180 cm, and some researchers estimate it could weigh as much as 3,300 lbs, or 1500 kg. Both cows and bulls grew horns. In shape the aurochs looked roughly like modern cattle, but the legs were longer, it was overall more muscular, and cows had small udders that weren’t especially visible. From cave paintings of aurochs, we know that calves were born reddish-brown with a lighter muzzle, but as they grew older, the bull calves became either dark brown or black, with a white stripe along the spine called an eel stripe.

The aurochs was strong, fast, and could be very dangerous. Bulls sometimes killed each other when fighting, and they were famously ferocious when hunted.

Sometime between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE—and BCE just means “before common era” and takes the place of the old term “before Christ” to make history a little more inclusive—a group of scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. This is the book that makes up the Christian Old Testament. The scholars were known as the Seventy, and they had to make a lot of decisions during their translation. In the case of the re’em, they mistranslated it as monokeros, which in English is unicorn. They didn’t know what the re’em was because it was already extinct in many parts of its former range. If you’ve guessed that it was the aurochs, pat yourself on the back.

The aurochs had started to go extinct in various places due to overhunting and habitat loss as early as the fifth century BCE. As it became rarer, only nobility were allowed to hunt it. But it was a tough animal that had once been common throughout much of Eurasia and the middle east, and even north Africa. It hung on for millennia, but by 1564, only 38 aurochs remained, all of them in one herd in Poland. The last one died in 1627 of natural causes.

If you listened to episode 47, about strange horses, you may remember the heck horse that was bred in the 1920s to look like the extinct wild horse. There’s also a heck cow bred by the same brothers, Heinz and Lutz Heck. Heck cattle resemble aurochs in many respects, although it’s still a domestic breed and not a perfect match. More recent projects to breed cattle that are as similar as possible to aurochs include ongoing genetic de-extinction attempts as well as more refined back-breeding projects than the heck cattle breeding.

There are a number of wild relatives of cattle, known as bovids overall and bovines for their closest relatives. Water buffalo, yak, gaur, bison, and many others are all bovids, and many of those species have been domesticated too. Some antelopes are also considered bovids.

The largest living bovid is the gaur, also called the Indian bison. It’s a wild cow native to southeast Asia, although it’s threatened due to habitat loss and overhunting. It’s protected these days, but poaching is still a problem. A big bull can grow over seven feet high at the shoulder, or 220 cm, and if you count the muscular hump just behind the shoulder, it’s even taller. It’s an incredibly heavy, massive animal in addition to being tall. Only elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes are heavier. It lives in forests and eats leaves, flowers, fruit, some types of grass and clover, and the bark of some trees.

Now let’s talk about some mystery cattle in one of my favorite places, Patagonia, which is the southern section of South America.

In the early 16th century, our old friend Antonio Pigafetta sailed around the world with Magellan and wrote a detailed account of the voyage once he returned to Spain in 1522. Pigafetta reported that the natives of Patagonia told him about devils with two horns and long hair, that breathed fire and also farted fire. These interesting fire details aren’t reported by anyone else, so it’s possible that Pigafetta added them to make the story better. He also would have been familiar with the bonnacon, an animal found in bestiaries at the time and written about by Pliny the Elder. I have learned that PLY-nee is an acceptable alternate pronunciation of his name, although it’s too late for me. They both sound wrong now.

The bonnacon was described as a bull with a long mane like a horse and horns that curled backwards. Because its horns couldn’t be used for defense, it was supposed to run away from danger and fart so prodigiously that the fumes would set fire to everything nearby, and poop would be scattered across three acres. Medieval bestiaries played this for laughs, with pretty epic illustrations, but people also believed it. It’s possible that Pigafetta thought the Patagons were describing the bonnacon. It’s also likely, incidentally, that the bonnacon was a type of buffalo or bison, many of which have small curved horns. Many hoofed animals will void their bowels when stampeding away from predators, so this could be the start of the story.

But while the farts of flame seem to be Pigafetta’s invention, it is definitely the case that many Patagonian tribes have stories of horned animals and spirits that seem remarkably bovine. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a man named Lucas Bridges collected many traditional stories of the people in Tierra del Fuego, which is at the very tip of Patagonia and which is remote even now, and was certainly remote a century ago. He reported that the Selk’nam people told stories about Hachai, a horned man with white fur and red stripes who acted as a fierce and powerful protective spirit along with his two sisters. Bridges witnessed a pantomime of Hachai that was a remarkable imitation of cow-like behavior. But the man performing it had never even seen a cow. Because here’s the thing: there is no known bovid native to South America. Tierra del Fuego doesn’t even have deer.

The Selk’nam were a nomadic people who hunted throughout southern Patagonia until the late 19th century, when British settlers moved in to raise sheep. The Selk’nam didn’t understand that the sheep belonged to anyone. They considered the sheep fair game, literally. In retaliation, the sheep ranchers paid armed militia to kill the Selk’nam—all of them. Lucas Bridges was one of the few who tried to help them by allowing them to live on his land without interference. But by the turn of the 20th century only a handful of Selk’nam survived. They are all gone now and all we have left are stories and traditions collected by anthropologists and missionaries.

Oh man.

So if the Selk’nam had never seen the cattle introduced by the Spanish, and there are no native bovids in Patagonia, how did they imitate cattle so perfectly? Bridges wasn’t the only one to remark on this. In 1833, in southern Chile, a man of the Chono tribe visited a ship and while there, he saw two powder-horns. He put them to his head and bellowed like a bull. Moreover, while in much of South America the local native languages borrow the word for cattle from Spanish, native Patagonian languages have their own words for cattle.

There are two theories. The first has to do with a shipwreck. In 1540 a ship belonging to the Bishop of Plasencia’s fleet sank in the Strait of Magellan. It carried livestock, and we know that some sheep survived. A 1557 expedition reported sheep in the area, and in 1741 some natives brought three freshly killed sheep to the leader of another expedition. It’s entirely possible that some cattle survived long enough to make an impression on the local population, and many stories of horned water monsters have been collected in Patagonia. But if we take Pigafetta’s report of the fire-farting horned spirit as inspired by cattle sightings, the shipwreck happened a few decades too late.

The other theory posits that there was once a bovid that lived in Patagonia. There are a few small hints that this may have been the case. A 1586 Spanish document refers to a buffalo-like animal with “horns with their tips curved backwards which this witness guesses must be buffalo and that they say that the males are black and the females white and that they have soft wool.” In 1598 explorer Oliver van Noort reported animals like stags and buffalo at Puerto Deseado. The stags were guanaco, which are related to llamas, but we don’t know what his buffalo might have been.

But we have no fossil remains. Bovids originated in Eurasia and entered North America relatively late, and as far as researchers can tell none ever made it as far as South America. None ever made it farther south than Mexico, in fact, until domestic cattle were brought to South America by the Spanish. By the mid-1500s cattle had been introduced into the Pampas, a vast prairie north of Patagonia, and feral herds may have made their way to Patagonia by the end of the century.

The Spanish cattle were tough and adaptable, and a small population still lives wild in the Andes. They have adapted to life in forests and to bitterly cold weather, including growing long fur in winter. And their horns are often described as resembling the horns of the aurochs. And with that, we have come full circle.

But we’re not done yet, because I’ve got a cow mystery that you’re going to just love. You know how one of the most frustrating things about cryptozoology is that no one gets good photographs of mystery animals? Well, listen to this story.

There’s a town in central New Jersey called Griggstown, and the Griggstown Cow was a legend told in the area. On foggy nights or rainy days, it was said, a solitary hunter or hiker might see a ghost cow in the mist near a canal outside of town. Occasionally someone would take a picture of the ghost cow, but the photos were all blurry, and no tracks or manure were ever found. The legend persisted for thirty years until November 23, 2002, when someone called the canal park office to report that the Griggstown Cow was stuck in a muddy ravine near the canal.

And sure enough, it was. It was a real live Holstein bull that had been living wild for decades after the area dairy farms closed, but he was old now and wasn’t strong enough to get out of the ditch. Rescuers managed to hoist him out and he was left lying on the grass to recover. But after two days he still hadn’t managed to stand, so the park brought in a veterinarian to examine him. Unfortunately it turned out he was in such poor condition that the vet euthanized him so he wouldn’t suffer, and he was buried in the park.

It’s a sad ending, but a thirty-year-old cow has lived a good long life. And if the Griggstown ghost cow can turn out to be a real animal, maybe other cryptids are real animals too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 056: Strange Snakes

This week we’re going to learn about some strange snakes. Snakes in the air! Snakes in the water! Snakes on a pla–NO I am not going there

Thanks to sirfinnhayes and Mackin for the topic suggestions! Mackin is host of the podcast Species, which you should listen to.

A golden tree snake:

A snake flying, or rather gliding with style:

Northern water snake (left) and water moccasin (right). Note the head and neck differences:

The yellow sea snake (Hydrophis spiralis):

Belcher’s sea snake. Have I mentioned how much I love stripey animals? I do love them, I do:

Horned viper. Do not step:

The Vietnamese longnosed snake. I TOOK THESE PHOTOS MYSELF AT HELSINKI ZOO!

The spiny bush viper. I’m sorry, all other snakes, this one is now my favorite:

A rattlesnake showing off its rattle:

The spider-tailed horned viper:

LOOKIT THAT SPIDER TAIL:

Tsuchinoko real:

Okay that is just way too many pictures.

Show Transcript:

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

This week we’re going to find out about some strange snakes. This is a request from two different people, sirfinnhayes and Macken of the podcast Species. Sirfinnhayes is also the person who corrected my incomplete information on the definition of a subspecies, so thank you! Podbean still won’t let me reply to comments, but at least I can see who sent them now. If you don’t already listen to the Species podcast, I highly recommend it. It’s new, family friendly, and really interesting. The first episode of Species I listened to was about flying snakes, and I was already wondering if I could sneak in an episode of my own about flying snakes or if that would be really obvious and not cool, when the host, Macken, contacted me and said I ought to do an episode on flying snakes. Now I don’t have to feel guilty for copying!

So let’s start with flying snakes. You may be picturing Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake god of the Aztecs. But flesh and blood flying snakes, as opposed to divine ones, don’t have wings or feathers. The god did lend his name to one of the biggest flying reptiles ever known, by the way, and even though Quetzalcoatlus isn’t a snake, I have to tell you about it. It was a type of pterosaur that lived around 68 million years ago, and its wingspan was almost 40 feet, or 12 meters. It could probably fly extremely fast and far, but spent most of its time hunting small dinosaurs and other animals on land like a monster stork.

We’re not three minutes into this episode and I’m already off topic. Back to flying snakes.

Flying snakes don’t really fly, they glide, but they’re very good at it. There are five species of flying snake, all from India and the Indonesian archipelago. The longest is the golden tree snake that can grow four feet long, or a little over 1.2 meters. All flying snakes are venomous, but their venom is weak and not dangerous to humans. Besides, you’re not likely to encounter a flying snake since they spend most of their time far up in the rainforest tree canopy chasing small animals.

So how does such a slender snake glide? When a flying snake drops off a branch to glide to another, it flattens its body, actually pushing its ribs apart to make a broader surface to catch the air. As Macken describes it, when gliding, its body somewhat resembles the shape of a long, thin Frisbee. It wriggles as it glides, pointing its head in the direction it wants to go. It can even change direction midair if necessary.

If some snakes can fly, surely some snakes can swim, right? Definitely! Water snakes are actually pretty common. When I was a kid, everyone panicked whenever they saw a snake in the lake or a creek where we were always playing. We thought all water snakes were venomous water moccasins, but as I found out much later, water moccasins don’t even live in East Tennessee. Most freshwater snakes are harmless, but people kill them anyway out of fear.

The Northern water snake is common throughout much of eastern and central North America, for instance. It can grow more than four feet long, or about 135 cm, and varies in color from brown or reddish to gray or black. Sometimes it has a darker pattern, banding or splotches, and its belly is usually lighter in color. It resembles a water moccasin in many ways but it’s completely harmless to humans unless cornered, in which case it can give a bad bite but not a venomous one. It will also poop all over you if you try to pick it up. It eats small fish, frogs, leeches, crawdads, salamanders, and other small animals.

The easiest way to tell a Northern water snake from a water moccasin is the head and neck. A water moccasin hasd a broad, roughly arrow-shaped head with a much thinner neck just behind it. A Northern water snake has a head that’s barely wider than its neck.

The water moccasin is a type of pit viper, the only species of pit viper that spends time in the water, in fact. It lives in the American South and can grow as long as six feet, or 180 cm, although most are much shorter. It’s a bulky snake with a broad, blunt head, and in color and markings it usually resembles the Northern water snake. When it feels threatened, it will raise its head and gape its jaws wide, showing the white tissue inside its mouth as a warning. Keep in mind that like all snakes, it really doesn’t want to bite you. It needs to save its venom for the frogs, birds, rats and mice, and other snakes it eats. It just wants you to go away and not scare it.

Young water moccasins have a yellowish or greenish tail tip. The snake will lie perfectly still in shallow water, twitching its tail. When a frog or lizard or some other animal comes to investigate that worm moving around in the water, the snake strikes.

Freshwater snakes spend at least part of their time on land every day. Sea snakes are another thing. Some species of sea snake can’t even move on land. If they’re washed up, they’re as helpless as a fish. And they’re almost all venomous.

All species of true sea snakes have a tail that’s flattened at the end like a paddle to help it swim better, and its nostrils are on the top of its snout so it can breathe without raising its head out of the water. When it’s underwater, the nostrils close automatically. It has to breathe air, but its left lung is enormously large, almost the full length of its body, which allows it to stay underwater for over an hour at a time. It also has a special gland under the tongue that filters extra salt from its blood, and every time the snake flicks its tongue, it releases some of the salt back into the ocean. In fact, sea snakes in general are so well adapted to living in the ocean for a formerly terrestrial animal that only whales are better adapted.

As an example, let’s learn about the yellow sea snake, because it can grow nine feet long, or 2.75 meters, the longest of all the sea snakes. It lives in shallow, warm water in the Indian Ocean and is yellow or yellow-green in color with narrow black bands all down its body. It’s really pretty. It gives birth to live babies who are fully developed and able to swim as soon as they’re born. Young snakes have a black head with a U-shaped yellow marking.

The yellow sea snake eats fish and eels that live among coral reefs and sea grasses. Its venom is fast-acting and not only kills its prey, it starts breaking down the prey’s tissues so that the snake can digest it faster. Occasionally a diver or fisher gets bitten, but most of the time the snake doesn’t inject venom when it bites a human.

The faint-banded sea snake, also called Belcher’s sea snake, also rarely injects venom into humans, and rarely bites humans at all. It even has the reputation as being kind of a friendly snake. At one time its venom was thought to be the most potent of any snake’s, but that honor actually belongs to three different snakes. The reef shallows sea snake is one. The others are the inland taipan, which is a land snake that lives in Australia, and the Eastern brown snake, which also lives in Australia as well as in southern New Guinea. Pretty much if you’re in Australia, don’t bother any snakes if you can possibly help it. Not that you need me to tell you that.

A lot of snakes have interesting facial decorations. The horned viper has a pointed horn over each eye that sticks almost straight up. It’s not really a horn, of course, but a modified scale. It lives in the desert in parts of the Middle East and northern Africa, is roughly the color of sand, and grows not quite three feet max, or 85 cm. Other snakes have nose horns, including the nose-horned viper, the rhinoceros viper, and many others. No one’s sure why some snakes have these decorations, but the best hypothesis is that they’re for display. In some species only the males have decorations, or the decorations are larger than in females; but in other species, females have larger or more decorations. One thing we do know, the horns are not used for fighting other snakes. They look sharp, but they’re actually relatively soft and flexible.

The spiny bush viper goes the extra step and has pointy spines all over its body that make it look bristly. It lives in central Africa and eats frogs, lizards, and small mammals. It’s not a big snake, not much more than two feet long, or around 60 cm, although males are usually a few inches longer than females. It’s typically yellowish in color with large dark eyes and black markings. It mostly stays in the trees and sometimes suns itself on top of big flowers, which is THE best thing I have heard all week.

The rattlesnake lives throughout North and South America, and just like in the cartoons, it has a rattle at the tip of its tail that it shakes to scare away potential predators. The rattle is made of keratin. Each segment of the rattle is hollow and vibrates against the rattles above and below it when the snake vibrates its tail. A rattlesnake has special muscles in the tail used just for this, and the muscles are incredibly fast. A snake can vibrate its tail as much as 50 times per second. Baby rattlesnakes only have a little button at the tip of their tail, but each time the snake sheds its skin, it grows a new segment of its rattle.

This is what a rattlesnake’s tail vibration sounds like.

[rattlesnake sound]

Both the Eastern and Western diamondback rattlesnakes can grow about eight feet long, or almost 2.5 meters. Other rattlesnake species are smaller.

The rattlesnake isn’t the only snake species with an interesting tail. The spider-tailed horned viper not only has horns above its eyes, the tip of its tail actually resembles a spider. Those of you who were already not real happy about a snake episode probably just threw your phone down in horror right about now. Sorry about that. The very tip of the snake’s tail ends in a little bulb like a spider’s round body, and the scales in front of it are elongated like a spider’s legs. It’s not just coincidence, either. The spider-tailed horned viper eats birds that eat spiders. Like a young water moccasin twitching its tail-tip like a worm, the spider-tailed horned viper twitches its tail around like a spider. When a bird comes close to grab the spider, chomp!

The spider-tailed horned viper, and I legit will never get tired of saying that, was discovered in 1968 but only recognized as a new species in 2006. It lives in western Iran but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet.

If people in the area had told stories about a snake with a tail that looked like a spider, probably no one would have believed it, but there it is. So what about actual mystery snakes?

In Croatia there are stories of a snake called the poskok, which is gray to reddish-brown in color, two or three feet long, or 60 to 90 cm, slender, aggressive, and venomous. But its real claim to fame is its ability to jump farther and higher than it is long.

Snakes can jump by making a striking motion and lunging forward, but while some snakes may actually leave the ground that way, notably the jumping viper, a small snake from Central America, no snake can jump very high.

If you search online for the poskok, you’ll get a lot of hits about the nose-horned viper. It spends at least part of the time in trees and shrubs hunting birds. If someone saw a nose-horned viper leaping after a bird, they might think it had jumped from the ground instead of a branch. But the poskok isn’t described as having a horn on its nose. Another suggestion for the poskok’s identity is one of various species of whip snake, which are slender, aggressive snakes that can move very fast, although they’re not venomous.

The tsuchinoko of Japan is supposed to be a short but wide-bodied snake with horns above its eyes, a broad head with sensory pits, and a thinner neck. Its pronounced dorsal ridge makes it seem somewhat triangular in shape instead of rounded like most snakes. It’s also said to be able to jump long distances. Some cryptozoologists suggest it might either be an unknown species of pit viper or a rare mutant individual of a known pit viper species. Stories of tsuchinoko sightings go back centuries, although more recent accounts describe it as a more ordinary-looking snake with a big bulge in its middle as though it has just swallowed something that it hasn’t digested yet. In 2017, a Tumblr post inspired a meme about the tsuchinoko. It’s a picture of three cats staring at a fat lizard with the legs photoshopped out and the caption “tsuchinoko real,” which I’m sure you can agree is meme GOLD.

Many cultures around the world believe some snakes have a magical stone in their heads that can cure poison or heal wounds. There are similar beliefs about toad-stones. In India some people believe some cobras have a glowing brown stone in their hood that heals snake bites, while in Sri Lanka it’s said that rarely, a cobra has a beautiful precious gem inside its belly that it pukes up and hides before it eats, then swallows again later. The ancient Celts believed that an adder-stone neutralized poison. But the adder-stone, it turns out, was just a fossilized sea urchin, while other snake stones were either semi-precious stones like agates with the value jacked up with a tall tale, or gastroliths.

And finally, to wrap things around to where we started, many cultures incorporate flying or winged snakes in various aspects of religion or folklore, but sometimes people report seeing snakes with wings flying overhead. These are probably all misidentifications of known animals since no snake has ever been found, alive or fossilized, with appendages that could be described as wings. Old newspaper accounts of flying snakes are probably all hoaxes. But new species of snake are discovered all the time. You wouldn’t think there’s anything big to be discovered in England, for instance, but a new species of snake was discovered there in 2017. It’s called the barred grass snake, although it actually spends a lot of its time hunting frogs and other amphibians in water. And it’s not small—it grows three feet long, or over a meter. So if a three-foot adder can hide in a country full of naturalists, maybe a snake with wings can hide in plain sight too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 055: Lungfish and the Buru

Let’s learn about the LUNGFISH, which deserves capital letters because they’re fascinating and this episode took so flipping long to research! Mysteries abound!

The lovely marbled lungfish from Africa:

The South American lungfish:

The Australian lungfish CHECK OUT THOSE GAMS:

Another Australian lungfish:

Further Reading:

The Hunt for the Buru by Ralph Izzard

Show Transcript:

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

This week’s episode is about the lungfish, and I’m going in depth about some mystery lungfish later in the episode. So don’t give up on me if you think freshwater fish are boring.

Lungfish are unusual since they are fish but have lungs and can breathe air. Some fish species can get by for a short time gulping air into a modified swim bladder when water is oxygen poor, but the lungfish has real actual lungs that are more mammal-like than anything found in other fish. The ancestors of lungfish, which developed during the Devonian period nearly 400 million years ago, may have been the ancestors of modern amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is still a controversial finding, but a 2017 molecular phylogenetic study identified lungfish as the closest living relatives of land animals.

Africa has four species of lungfish, from the smallest, the gilled African lungfish that only grows around 17 inches long, or about 44 cm, to the largest, the marbled lungfish, which can grow more than six and a half feet long, or two meters. They all resemble eels, with long bodies and four thin, almost thread-like fins. They mostly eat crustaceans, molluscs, and insect larvae. The adults have small gills but breathe air through their lungs exclusively.

The South American lungfish is in a separate family from the African lungfishes, but it’s very similar in most respects. It can grow over four feet long, or 125 cm, and looks like an eel at first glance. Its fins are thread-like and not very long, and while it has small gills, they’re nonfunctional in adults. It mostly eats snails and shrimp, and like the African lungfishes, its teeth are fused into tooth plates that crush the shells of its prey easily.

Baby South American and African lungfish have external gills like newts but look more like tadpoles. After a couple of months they develop the ability to breathe air.

The African and South American lungfishes live in swamps and shallow river basins, and during the dry season, the water of their homes may dry up completely. At the onset of the dry season, the lungfish burrows a foot or two deep into the mud, or 30 to 60 centimeters, and lines the burrow with mucus to keep its body from drying out. Then it curls up in the bottom of the hole and lowers its metabolism, and stays there for months until the rains return and soak its dried mud home. This is called aestivation, and it’s related to hibernation except that it usually happens in warm weather instead of cold.

The Australian lungfish, also called the Queensland lungfish, lives in Australia and retains many features that are considered primitive compared to other lungfish species. It’s so different from the other lungfish species it’s even in a different order. Let’s learn about just how different it is and why that’s important.

In 1869 a farmer visiting the Sydney Museum asked why there were no specimens displayed of a big olive-green fish from some nearby rivers. The curator, Gerard Krefft, had no idea what the guy was talking about. No problem, the guy said, or probably no worries, he’d just get his cousin to send the museum a few. Not long after, a barrel full of salted greenish fish that looked like big fat eels arrived and Krefft set about examining them.

When he saw the teeth, he practically fainted. He’d seen those teeth before—in fossils several hundred million years old. No one even knew what fish those teeth came from. And here they were again in fish that had been pulled from a local river only days before.

The Australian lungfish doesn’t have ordinary teeth, it has four tooth plates or combs that resemble regular teeth that have fused together. Its skull is also very different from all other fish, possibly because of its feeding style. It crushes its prey with its tooth combs, so its skull has to be able to withstand a lot of pressure from the force of its own bite. Other lungfish species share this trait to some degree, but with modifications that appear more recent.

The Australian lungfish lives in slow-moving rivers and deep ponds and hunts using electroreception. Larger ones mostly eat snails and crustaceans, while smaller ones also eat insect larvae and occasionally small fish. It can grow up to about five feet long, or 150 cm. Its body is covered with large overlapping scales, and its four fins look more like flippers or paddles. Its tail comes to a single rounded point. In short, it looks superficially like a coelacanth, which is not a big surprise because it’s related to the coelacanth. While the Australian lungfish doesn’t actually get out of the water and walk on its fins, it does stand on them and sometimes walks around on them underwater.

Unlike the other lungfishes, the Australian lungfish has only a single lung instead of a pair. Most of the time it breathes through its gills, but at night when it’s active, or during spawning season or other times when it needs more oxygen, it surfaces periodically to breathe. When it does so, it makes a distinctive gasping sound. During droughts when its pond or river grows shallow, an Australian lungfish can survive when other fish can’t. As long as its gills remain moist, it can survive by breathing air through its lung. But unlike other lungfish, it doesn’t aestivate in mud.

The Australian lungfish hasn’t changed appreciably for the last 100 million years. The only real change it exhibits from its ancestors 300 million years ago is that it’s not as big, since they grew some 13 feet long, or 4 meters. Lungfish used to be widespread fish that lived in freshwater back when the world’s continents were smushed together in one supercontinent called Pangaea, some 335 million years ago. When Pangaea began to break up into smaller continents about 175 million years ago, various species of lungfish remained in different parts of the world. Now we’ve only got six species left…maybe.

A lot of mysterious eel-like fish or fish-like lizard stories might refer to lungfish. Some of the mystery animals are probably extinct, whatever they were, but some might still be around. All known lungfish were only discovered by science within the last 150 years or so, and it’s quite possible more are lurking quietly in remote swamps and rivers.

That brings me to a mystery that may or may not have anything to do with the lungfish. Occasionally when I’m researching a topic for an episode, I come across something interesting that doesn’t really belong in that episode but which isn’t enough on its own for a full episode. I sometimes spin those into bonus episodes for our Patreon subscribers. That happened recently with our Brantevik eel episode, where some blue river eels took me down a research rabbit hole that had nothing to do with eels. But a mystery animal I only covered in passing in that bonus episode suddenly has new meaning for this one.

The mystery animal is the indus worm, sometimes called the scolex. We don’t know what it was, if anything. It might have been a fable that got repeated and exaggerated over the centuries. It might have been something more akin to disinformation. It might have been both.

We have the story from multiple ancient sources, back to Ctesius’s original account in the fourth century BCE. The story goes that the river Indus, which flows through modern-day China, India, and Pakistan, contained a white worm of enormous size. It was supposed to be around 7 cubits long, or 10 ½ feet, or just over three meters, but it was so big around that a ten-year-old could barely encircle it with their arms, and that’s a straight-up quote from Ctesius only not in ancient Greek. In other words, it was a big fat eel-like creature over ten feet long, white in color. Moreover, it had weird teeth. Ctesias didn’t mention the teeth, but a few hundred years later Aelian said that it had two teeth, square and about eighteen inches long, or 45 cm, which it used to catch and crush animals that it caught at night.

This is an interesting detail that points to an animal with teeth something like a lungfish. But the indus worm was also supposed to drag animals into the water when they came to the edge to drink, which sounds like a crocodile—but the ancient Greeks were familiar with crocodiles and this clearly wasn’t one. The word crocodile comes directly from Greek, in fact. But there’s one more important detail about the indus worm that changes everything.

The indus worm was supposed to be useless except for the oil it produced. Now, all animal fat produces flammable oil, but it has to be rendered first. The indus worm was full of just plain oil. According to the ancient accounts, after an indus worm was killed—not an easy thing to do, apparently, as it required dozens of men with spears and clubs to subdue—it was hung up over a vessel, and the oil allowed to drip into the vessel from the body for a full month. One indus worm would produce about 2 ½ quarts, or almost five liters of oil. The oil was so flammable that only the king of India was allowed to own it, and he used it to level cities. Not only that, but the flame it produced couldn’t be put out unless it was smothered with mud.

This sounds like a petroleum-based flame. It might even refer to Greek fire, a deadly weapon of the ancient world. We don’t know what Greek fire was made of, but it wasn’t an animal-based oil. It could be that rulers who knew the secret of producing unquenchable flame obfuscated the knowledge by telling people the oil came from a vicious animal only found in one distant river. If so, it’s possible that the indus worm wasn’t based on a real animal at all.

I can just hear the conversation that started it all. “Hey, where do you get that oil that sticks to people and burns them up even after they jump in the water?” “Oh, um, it’s really hard to get. Yeah, totally hard. You know those little white worms that sometimes get in figs? Picture one of those that’s like, ten feet long, and it only lives in one river in India…”

Anyway, we have no way of knowing whether the indus worm was a real animal. It actually sounds kind of plausible, though, especially if you assume some of the stories are either exaggerated or confused with other animals. The Indus is a really long river with a lot of unique animal species. It’s possible there was once a lungfish that grew ten feet long and had flattened tooth plates like those of South American and African lungfishes.

Then again, there is another possibility. The rare Indus river dolphin grows to about eight and a half feet long, or 2 ½ meters. I’m probably going to do an entire episode on freshwater dolphins eventually so I won’t go into too much detail about it today, but while young dolphins have pointed teeth, when the dolphin matures its teeth develop into square, flat disks. But the dolphin isn’t white, it’s brown, and no one could look at a dolphin and call it a worm.

But there are other reports of mystery fish in Asia that may be lungfish. This is where I had to stop research for this episode until I ordered, received, and read a book called The Hunt for the Buru by Ralph Izzard. If in doubt, go back to the primary sources whenever possible. Izzard was a foreign correspondent for the London Daily Mail, and in 1948 he and a photographer accompanied explorer Charles Stonor on an expedition to find what they thought might be a living dinosaur or some other reptile. But while many cryptozoologists today think the buru might be a type of monitor lizard, zoologist Karl Shuker suggests the details given in the book sound more like a type of lungfish.

Accounts of the buru were collected in an anthropological study of the Apa Tani tribe in 1945 and ’46. The Apa Tani live in a large valley in northeastern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and were an insular people who at the time rarely traveled away from their valley. They’re characterized in The Hunt for the Buru as intelligent and practical, but not especially creative. They have no system of reading or writing, produce no art, and are efficient and knowledgeable rice farmers. The relevant parts of the study are reproduced in The Hunt for the Buru, and I’m happy to report that this was a genuine scholarly study, not a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs asking leading questions. The buru information was only collected incidentally as part of the tribe’s history and traditions, but I suspect mostly because the anthropologists found it interesting. A quick look online for more modern information about the Apa Tani point to them being really nice people. They have a festival celebrating friendship every spring that lasts an entire month. These days they’re much more mainstream but still continue their traditional practices of farming.

According to the Apa Tani, their ancestors migrated to the valley along two rivers, and accounts of their migration match up with actual places with a high degree of accuracy even though the migration took place many centuries ago. In other words, these are people with a detailed oral history, and that’s important when we come to their accounts of the buru.

When they reached the valley, it was largely flooded with a swamp and lake. In the lake was an animal they called the buru. It wasn’t an aggressive animal. It lived in deep water but occasionally came to the surface, stuck its head above water, and made a noise translated as a hoarse bellow. Occasionally a buru would nose through the mud in shallower water, and frequently waved its head from side to side. It didn’t eat fish and was described as living on mud. It was about 4 meters long, or a bit over 13 feet, and was dark blue blotched with white, with a white belly. I’ll go into more details of its appearance in a few minutes.

The Apa Tani drained much of the swamp and lake to create more farmland for rice paddies, and on four occasions, a buru was trapped in a pool of deeper water. The Apa Tani killed the burus trapped this way and buried their bodies, and the location of the buried burus are still known. The Apa Tani reported that there were no more burus in the valley.

In 1947, Charles Stonor was traveling near the Apa Tani’s valley and asked a member of a different tribe if he’d ever heard of the buru. Stonor apparently was both a trained zoologist and had at least some background in anthropology, according to Izzard. To Stonor’s surprise, the man said he not only knew about the buru, but said it lived in a swamp not too far away, called Rilo. Naturally Stonor decided to visit, and when he spoke to the nearby villagers, they said the buru did indeed live in the swamp.

Stonor recorded their accounts of the animal. It lives underwater and only comes to the surface briefly—“every now and again they come up above the surface. When one of them comes up there is a great disturbance and splashing, and the beast comes straight up out of the water, stays for a few moments only, and then disappears down again.” The buru were described as black and white, with a head as large as a bison’s but with a longer snout, and with a pair of small backwards-pointing horns. The buru was only seen in summer, when the swamp floods and becomes a lake. But no one in the Rilo village had ever seen a buru up close.

In early 1948 Izzard heard about the buru from a friend, and approached Stonor to ask if he wanted to undertake a small expedition to look for it. Stonor agreed, and in April 1948 the expedition headed out on the search.

They… didn’t find any burus. Spoiler alert: after months of careful daily watches of the swamp, they decided the buru had possibly once lived in the valley, but was now extinct, and since it had never been an animal the villagers paid much attention to, no one had realized it was gone. This sounds absurd until you realize that the village had only been settled about a decade before. Many trees had been felled, which increased erosion so that the swamp had silted up considerably and was no longer very deep even at full flood. It’s possible that the burus had died due to these changing conditions, especially if they hadn’t been very numerous to start with.

The expedition returned to civilization only to find that rumors of the buru hunt had leaked, and the papers were full of reports of a 90-foot “dinotherium” sighted in the jungle.

I find it interesting that Izzard rejected the idea that the buru was a lungfish, because, he writes, “no known fish would expose itself above water, for no practical purpose, for such a length of time.” Presumably Izzard didn’t realize that lungfish actually use their lungs to breathe air, and that they must surface briefly to do so.

So was the buru reported in the Rilo swamp the same buru that had once lived in the Apa Tani valley? Probably not. Izzard notes that while the two valleys are relatively close to each other, he does point out that they were completely separated by a ridge of mountains. Even if both burus were the same kind of animal, they were probably different subspecies at the very least considering how long the two populations must have been separated.

Let’s return to the Apa Tani buru, since the reports gathered from the mid-1940s anthropological study are clear and detailed compared to the Rilo buru reports.

The Apa Tani buru had limbs, but while some reports called them short legs that somewhat resembled mole forelegs with claws used for digging, one old man stubbornly refused to describe them as legs. The anthropologists found this confusing because they assumed he was talking about a reptile. I’ll quote from the relevant sections of the report. The old man was named Tamar.

“ ‘The buru was long: it had a long tail with flanges on the sides: they lay along it when resting, but were pushed out sideways when the beast was moving: it could twist its tail round and catch anything with it.’ The flanges were demonstrated by holding a piece of paper against a stick. We use the word ‘flange’ for want of a better expression. Tamar described them as pieces fastened on the sides of the tail. …

Q What sort of legs did it have?

A ‘It had no legs: the body was like a snake.’ Tamar then described and demonstrated that the tail flanges were grouped in two pairs, were about 50 cm long, and were as thick as a man’s arm: he added they were used in burrowing. We got the impression that he was trying to convey the meaning that they were appendages, but not limbs in the true sense of the word.”

I wonder if he was trying to explain, through an interpreter, something he himself probably didn’t fully understand, lobed fins. The Australian lungfish’s lobed fins do look like stubby legs with a frill around them that could be taken to be claws.

Tamar also described the buru as a snake-like creature. He said its head was like a snake’s with a long snout and that it had three hard plates on its head that helped it burrow into the mud. And like the other reports, he said it ate mud, not fish or animals.

This sounds a lot like a lungfish, which eats crustaceans and snails it digs out of the mud. Admittedly Tamar also said it had a forked tongue, which is not a lungfish trait. Many cryptozoologists think this forked tongue points to a type of monitor lizard, but while some monitor lizard species do spend a lot of time in the water, notably the widespread Asian monitor lizard, the buru is described as being exclusively aquatic. Monitor lizards also are very lizardy, with large, strong legs. And monitor lizards don’t stay in the mud when a swamp dries up.

To me, all this paints a picture of a large lungfish, blue and white in color, with lobed fins like an Australian lungfish and probably working gills as well as a lung or pair of lungs. It may have aestivated in the mud like African and South American lungfish during the dry season, and during the rainy season when it was spawning, it might have needed to breathe at the surface like the Australian lungfish to give it more oxygen than its gills could manage on their own.

Hopefully someone’s out there looking for burus in other remote swamps of Asia. I can’t do it myself. I’m busy.

There are brief anecdotal reports of possible new species of lungfish in Asia, Africa, and South America, although with very little to go on. But I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if someone discovered another lungfish species in a hard-to-reach swamp one of these days. Those 400-million-year-old fish are survivors.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 048: Out of Place Animals

Happy New Year! Let’s learn about a few animals that have shown up in places where they just shouldn’t be. How did they get there, and why? Sometimes we know, sometimes it remains a mystery.

Some of Pablo Escobar’s hippos:

King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur who was discovered almost frozen to death in London:

A little alligator captured in a koi pond. In Maryland. Which is not where gators live:

A monk parakeet eating pizza in Brooklyn, because of course it is:

How did these beavers get into a Devon river? They’re not telling:

Show transcript:

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

Happy new year! Let’s ring in the new year with some out-of-place animals. Sometimes an animal shows up in a place where it just shouldn’t be, and while the animal itself isn’t a mystery, how it got there is. In this episode we’ll chase down the solutions to a few of these mysteries, and ponder a few others we can’t solve.

We’ll start with some hippos that aren’t hanging out in Africa where they belong, but are living in Columbia, South America. In this case, we do know what happened. Back in the 1980s, a guy named Pablo Escobar had a private zoo that contained four hippos, along with other animals. Escobar was not a nice person. He was a drug lord who grew obscenely rich from selling cocaine and killing anyone who didn’t agree with him. In 1993 the police raided his estate and Escobar was killed in a shoot-out. The government took over the estate and turned it into a park, and most of the animals were given to zoos. But the hippos stayed. The estate had a lake that they lived in, and they weren’t hurting anything.

But after a few decades, the four hippos turned into forty. The hippos have expanded their range from the park to neighboring rivers. Sometimes a hippo wanders into a neighboring town or ranch. Hippos can be dangerous—in fact, they’re the most dangerous animal in Africa, killing more people than any other animal. But the locals like the hippos. At this point the government is torn between needing to keep the people and environment safe from these out-of-place animals, and preserving animals that everyone agrees are really awesome. In 2010 the government started a program to castrate the males, which will stop the population from growing, although castrating a wild hippo is not easy so the program is not necessarily going to work.

This is what a hippo sounds like:

[hippo sound]

In December 2011, someone found an unusual animal in London, a ring-tailed lemur. Even if you don’t know what it is, you know what it is. The vets who treated the animal named him King Julien after the character from the movie Madagascar. Lemurs are primates, only found in the island country of Madagascar, so what was one doing in London on a below-freezing day? Poor King Julien almost died of hypothermia and dehydration.

King Julien was very tame, so had probably been someone’s pet. People are allowed to own lemurs in England, but only with a special license. Ring-tailed lemurs are popular exotic pets, and part of the reason they’re endangered in the wild is because they’re frequently captured for sale on the black market. I tried to find out what had happened to King Julien, without luck, but hopefully he recovered fully and now lives in a zoo or wildlife sanctuary where he can be properly cared for and can hang out with other lemurs.

This is what a ring-tailed lemur sounds like:

[ring-tailed lemur sound]

Unfortunately for many animals kept as exotic pets, once the people who buy them realize owning an alligator, for instance, is not as fun as it sounds, the animals are often just dumped outside to fend for themselves. The kind of person who would buy an exotic animal in the first place is probably not the kind of person who bothers to learn how to take care of it.

Back in the mid-20th century, if you took a vacation to Florida and went into a souvenir shop, you could buy a live baby alligator for a few bucks. Baby alligators are cute, like big lizards. But they grow fast, they eat a lot, they make a mess, and they often get sick because they’re not properly taken care of. I like to think I know a fair amount about animals, but I wouldn’t know how to take care of a baby alligator. And if it was 1950 and I couldn’t just look that information up online, or find it in the local library, I’d probably not do a very good job.

Now I know you’ve heard about sewer alligators. The story goes that back in the days when baby alligators were cheap pets, people would bring them home as souvenirs, realize very soon that they didn’t actually want an alligator as a pet, and would flush them down the toilet to get rid of them. Some of the flushed baby alligators survived, and grew up in the safety and relative warmth of the New York City sewers, eating rats. Every so often a maintenance worker would get the shock of shining a flashlight down a sewer tunnel and seeing the reflection of alligator eyes. In the stories, the gators were always enormous.

So did this ever happen? Did alligators ever really live in the sewers of New York or any other city? Alligators have actually been found in sewers, although it’s not known if they were survivors of being flushed or if they were released aboveground and found their way to the nearest water through storm drains. In 2010 a two-foot-long, or 60-centimeter, baby alligator was found in the sewer in New York City. In 1984 a Nile crocodile was captured in the Paris sewers. But a sewer is not a good habitat for any living thing, especially not a reptile. Any alligators found in sewers haven’t been there long—they wouldn’t survive long, and they certainly couldn’t breed in a cold, lightless environment.

But alligators don’t just turn up in sewers. They’re forever being found in people’s ponds, and not in Florida or surrounding areas like you’d think. As just one of many possible examples, in 2015 a guy in Maryland, in the northeastern United States, found a three foot, or .9 meter, alligator in his koi pond. Probably he did not have any koi left by the time police officers caught the gator and relocated it to a local zoo.

This is what an American alligator sounds like:

[alligator sound]

It’s not too unusual to find a bird somewhere outside of its natural range. While migrating birds have amazing skills at navigating long distances, sometimes a bird is blown off course by a storm, or joins a flock of closely related birds that then fly somewhere other than its usual migration route. But sometimes the presence of out-of-place birds aren’t so easy to figure out.

For instance, the Brooklyn parrots. Brooklyn is part of New York City, not a particularly welcoming place for tropical birds. But there’s a population of wild parrots called monk parakeets, or Quaker parrots, that have been living in the city for over 50 years. And no one’s sure where they came from.

The monk parakeet is from Argentina. It’s smallish, around 11 inches long or 29 cm, with a 19 inch wingspan, or 48 cm. It’s a cheerful bright green in color with pale gray forehead and breast, and some blue on the wings. It eats plants of all kinds and builds elaborate multi-family nests called apartments by weaving twigs together.

It’s also been a popular pet for a long time. It learns to mimic speech easily, is intelligent and hardy, and lives 15 to 20 years, or even longer. But because so many feral populations have developed in North America and Australia, some areas no longer allow monk parakeets as pets at all.

The Brooklyn parrots are probably escaped birds from pet stores and especially from shipping crates full of birds imported from Argentina. Thousands of the parrots were sold as pets in the United States during the 60s and 70s. The first report of parrots living in New York City comes from December 1970, when an article about them appeared in the New York Times. Since then, the origin of the parrots has achieved urban legend status, with unsubstantiated stories of heroic releases of captive birds from sinking cargo ships, a mass release of captive birds from an abandoned aviary, and so forth. In the mid-2000s, a poaching ring trapped birds to sell on the black market, but the ring was busted and the birds freed.

Populations of monk parakeets also live in Chicago, Austin TX, Brussels, Belgium, and many other cities. Because their droppings don’t harm statues and other structures the way pigeon droppings do, and studies of urban birds reveal that they aren’t a threat to native species, many cities have stopped trying to exterminate the birds. Their large nests do frequently have to be removed from power transformers.

This is what a monk parakeet sounds like:

[monk parakeet sound]

I always think of beavers as a North American animal, but the Eurasian beaver is native to—you guessed it—Europe and Asia. But like the North American beaver, the Eurasian beaver was almost driven to extinction by humans, who wanted its fur and a substance called castoreum that is still used in perfumes and cigarettes. Castoreum is produced by the beaver to scent mark their territory, and a beaver’s castor sacs is found right next to the anal glands. Another reason to quit smoking!

So by 1900, the Eurasian beaver was almost extinct throughout its range. Only a few small populations remained. In England, Scotland, and Wales it went extinct completely by the 16th century. But after conservation efforts throughout Europe and Asia, beavers have started to be reintroduced into their historic ranges. The first official reintroduction of beavers into Scotland occurred in 2009 and the animals are doing well.

In 2013, people in Devon, England started seeing beavers along the River Otter. The next year they had babies. No one had any idea where the beavers had come from—Devon is too far from Scotland for the Scottish beavers to have migrated there naturally, and anyway the Scottish beavers are closely monitored. If three had gone missing, the researchers in charge of them would know.

It led to a lot of controversy in Devon, to say the least. Fishers and farmers worried that the beavers would mess up the river, carry diseases, and in general cause havoc. And since the beavers hadn’t been officially introduced, no one knew whether these were even the right kind of beaver for England and if they were healthy. But locals liked having beavers around—they are really cute animals, after all. When the government agency Natural England announced it would capture the beavers and put them in a zoo, locals protested so strenuously that the plan was changed. Instead, the beavers were captured, examined by veterinarians to make sure they were Eurasian beavers and disease free, and rereleased. This happened in 2015. The beavers were healthy, they were the right species, and they were returned to the river. Still, no one one knows how they got there.

Beavers are actually good for fish and the local environment. Beaver ponds create winter habitat for many types of fish, and beaver dams don’t stop fish like salmon that migrate upriver to spawn. The presence of beaver dams helps reduce flooding, improves water quality, and creates cover for lots of fish and animals. And while some people believe beavers spread the giardia parasite, which causes a bacterial infection sometimes called beaver fever, giardia is actually mostly spread by humans and our domesticated animals, especially dogs. Giardiasis causes nasty diarrhea and other intestinal distress that can go on for weeks, and it’s why you don’t ever drink water that hasn’t been treated in some way.

The beavers in Devon are doing well and have spread into neighboring waterways. They got in the news again a little over a year ago, in October of 2016, when a rich guy decided he didn’t like them. Sir Benjamin Slade, who has a great name but who is clearly a prime jerk, posted a reward of 1,000 pounds to anyone who would kill the beavers who’d moved onto his estate, because he didn’t like that they were felling some of his trees. Dude, you are rich. Hire somebody to plant more trees for you. Besides, beavers have brought tourists to Devon who hope to catch a glimpse of the animals, which helps the local economy, Mr. Slade, if that IS your real name.

Anyway, this is what a beaver sounds like:

[beaver sound]

There are so many out-of-place animal reports that there’s no way to cover more than a few in one episode, so I’ll definitely revisit the topic. Until then, keep an eye out for anything unusual walking through your back yard.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 042: Mystery Bears

This week we’re going to learn about bears, including a bunch of m y s t e r y  b e a r s!

Hi! I am a panda bear!

A polar bear:

A spectacled bear:

A baby spectacled bear OMG LOOK AT THAT BABY:

The giant short-faced bear was indeed giant:

Further reading:

Shuker Nature

Show transcript:

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

I’m in the mood for a bona fide mystery animal, and I bet you are too. So this week let’s learn about some mystery bears.

There are eight species of bears alive today that we know of: brown, polar, spectacled, sloth, sun, Asian and American black bears, and the giant panda. The other ones you may have heard of, like grizzlies, are subspecies of those eight. For a long time pandas were not considered bears at all, but more closely related to raccoons. These days they’re definitely in the bear box, but they’ve evolved in a completely different direction from other bears for some 19 million years, which is why they’re so different.

Before we get into the mysteries, let’s talk about just how different pandas are from other bears. As you probably know, the panda eats bamboo almost exclusively, unlike all other bears which are either omnivorous or, in the case of the polar bear, carnivorous. To survive on bamboo, the panda has evolved a lot of unusual adaptations. The front paws, for instance, have five toes just like all bears, and also a thumb. The thumb is actually a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves.

Bamboo is not very nutritious. It’s certainly low in protein, especially considering that while the panda eats almost nothing but bamboo, it still has the digestive system of a carnivore. Special microbes in the panda’s intestines help break down the bamboo so the panda can digest it, but it takes a lot of bamboo to provide the energy a panda needs. A panda eats 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo leaves, stems, and shoots every day, or 9-14 kg, which means it also poops a whole lot. Seriously, it poops something like 40 times a day. And it still doesn’t have a lot of energy. It mostly just sits around eating and pooping. But while the panda just chews leaves all the time, it still has bear fangs and it will eat meat and eggs when it can. Researchers think that the panda only became exclusively a bamboo eater about two million years ago.

The panda lives in the mountains of China in only a few places. It used to also live in the lowlands but farming and other development drove it into more remote areas. There are about 50 pandas in captivity these days and somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 pandas in the wild, with the population finally increasing after laws protecting pandas from poaching started to be enforced.

The people of China knew about the panda for centuries, although they were considered rare and elusive even in the olden days, but it wasn’t until 1869 that anyone from outside of China had a clue that gigantic roly-poly black and white bamboo-eating six-toed bears were real. Seriously, would you believe that? In 1869 a French missionary and naturalist bought a dead panda from some hunters, dissected it to study, and sent the skin to a zoologist friend in Paris.

So it’s possible that there are other mystery bears out there, known to the locals who don’t realize their bears are special, just waiting to be spotted by someone who knows a thing or two about bears.

In 1920 a Swedish scientist named Sten Bergman was shown the pelt of a bear by locals during an expedition to the Kamchatka Peninsula. That’s in the very eastern part of Russia on the Pacific coast and is sparsely populated. It’s mountainous with a cluster of active volcanos and it’s well known for the brown bears that live in the area. The Kamchatka brown bears are among the largest brown bear subspecies in the world, almost the size of the closely related Kodiak brown bear. When it stands on its hind legs it can be almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It’s mostly harmless to humans. Mostly. It hardly ever kills people. Just, you know, occasionally. The Kamchatka brown bears have long brown fur, sometimes pale brown but usually a sort of medium brown. They’re certainly not black. But the pelt that Dr. Bergman was shown was jet black and had short fur. But it was definitely a bear pelt, and the pelt was definitely enormous—much larger than a brown bear pelt. Bergman also saw a huge skull supposedly from one of the black bears, and a paw print 15” long and 10” wide, or 38 cm by 25 ½ cm.

Unfortunately none of the giant black bears have turned up since, living or dead. It’s possible that the bear was an unusually large brown bear with anomalous fur. Brown bears do have considerable variability in both the color and length of their fur, so it’s not out of the question that occasionally a brown bear is born that is actually black. It’s also possible that this black bear is actually a different species of bear, but that it’s either gone extinct or is extremely rare and only lives in far remote areas of Siberia these days.

But the Kamchatka Peninsula has another mystery bear for us to ponder. In 1987 a hunter named Rodion Sivolobov bought a giant white bear skin from locals. It looked like a big polar bear pelt, but the locals assured him it was from a very specific, very rare type of local bear.

They called it the irkuiem and described it as large but with a relatively small head, relatively short hind legs, and an unusual method of running. It supposedly runs in a sort of rocking motion, bringing both hind legs up to the forelegs, then throwing the forelegs forward together to start a new stride–more like a rabbit’s bounding run than a bear’s typical gait.

Sivolobov sent samples of the pelt to various zoologists in Russia, but they said there wasn’t much they could determine without a skull. But with DNA testing so much more advanced these days, it would be REALLY NICE if Sivolobov would get right on that and get his white bear pelt tested. If it really exists and if he’s not scared he was sold a marked-up polar bear skin with a tall tale.

The polar bear lives in the Arctic and is so closely related to the brown bear that the two species occasionally crossbreed when their range overlaps. Technically polar bears are marine mammals since they hunt seals on sea ice and spend a lot of time in the water. Sometimes a polar bear will drift for long distances on a piece of sea ice, or may swim for days, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean.

Polar bear feet are huge, around 12 inches wide or 30 cm, which helps keep the bear from sinking in the snow since its weight is more widely distributed on broad paws. Think snowshoes. Broad feet also helps it swim faster. The paw pads are bumpy so it’s less likely to slip on ice, and the claws are short and strong for digging in snow and ice. The polar bear stays warm because its body is heavily insulated with fat, plus its fur is thick with a soft undercoat that insulates so well that polar bears really are virtually invisible to heat-sensing radar. Male polar bears grow long fur on their forelegs, apparently because lady polar bears find that attractive. Unlike most other bears, polar bears don’t hibernate.

Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German naturalist who took part in explorations of Kamchatka Peninsula and other areas. He’s the guy that Steller’s sea-cow is named after and one day it’s getting its own episode. Anyway, in 1751 Steller wrote a book called, in English, Beasts of the Sea, and in it he mentions a report of a white sea-bear. He didn’t see it himself, but here’s his account, which I’ve taken from Karl Shuker’s excellent blog ShukerNature. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Here’s the quote:

“Report, as I gather from the account of the people, has declared that the sea-bear, as it is called by the Rutheni and other people is different. They say it is an amphibious sea beast very like a bear, but very fierce, both on land and in the water. They told likewise, that in the year 1736 it had overturned a boat and torn two men to pieces; that they were very much alarmed when they heard the sound of its voice, which was like the growl of a bear, and that they fled from their chase of the otter and seals on the sea and hastened back to land. They say that it is covered with white fur; that it lives near the Kuril Islands, and is more numerous toward Japan; that here it is seldom seen. I myself do not know how far to believe this report, for no one has ever seen one, either slain or cast up dead upon the shore.”

Shuker suggests that this report may actually be of a fur seal, which is found in the area and has sometimes been called a sea-bear. Then again, fur seals aren’t white. They’re gray or brown and would appear darker in the water.

The Kuril Islands are a string of 56 volcanic islands that stretch between the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan to the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula, a distance of about 810 miles, or 1300 km. Some of the largest islands are inhabited by brown bears, but it’s far from the Arctic. Polar bears get overheated easily in warmer areas, so a population of polar bears—or even a stray one—is unlikely that far south.

There are also stories of pure white bears in the forests of Hubei province in China. It’s always possible this is a garbled account of the panda, but maybe not.

In 1864, Inuit hunters supposedly killed a huge bear with yellowish fur. Naturalist Roderick McFarlane acquired the skin and skull and sent them to the Smithsonian, which promptly lost them. That’s the story, anyway. In fact, the Smithsonian did misplace the skin and skull for a while, but zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam found and examined them. He decided it was a new species of bear due to the skull’s odd shape and the light tan color of the fur.

Older polar bears do tend to have yellowish fur so maybe that’s all this bear was. But it might have been something else. As I mentioned earlier, polar bears and various subspecies of brown bear do sometimes crossbreed and produce fertile young. It’s rare, but it happens occasionally both in the wild and in captivity. The resulting babies show traits of both polar bears and brown bears, and tend to be pale brown or tan in color with darker brown paws. Then again, there’s a MonsterQuest episode that I haven’t actually seen where a paleontologist examines the McFarlane skull and states it’s just that of a young female brown bear.

For having only eight species, bears are remarkably widespread and vary considerably in diet and appearance. The sloth bear mostly eats insects, for instance. It lives in India and has shaggy black fur with a pale muzzle and white claws, big floppy ears, and a white V-shaped mark on the chest. It lacks upper incisors, which helps it slurp up insects.

Sloth bears are actually pretty darn awesome. Males often help raise the cubs and mothers carry their babies around on their backs. The sloth bear doesn’t hibernate, probably because it doesn’t really get cold where it lives.

The spectacled bear lives in South America. It’s the last close relative of the giant short-faced bear that went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The spectacled bear is mostly black, although some individuals may appear brown or reddish, and most but not all have lighter markings on the face and chest. Its head is much less bearlike than other bears, with a rounded face and short snout. It mostly eats plants and lives in the Andes Mountains and surrounding areas. It spends a lot of time in trees, and will even build a little platform in a tree to sleep on or store food on.

And you know what? Paddington Bear is modeled on the spectacled bear.

The spectacled bear is not especially scary. Its relative, the giant short-faced bear, was another story. It lived in North America, especially in California, and its remains have been found in the La Brea tar pits. But it also lived as far south as Mississippi. And it was huge. It was simply enormous. It stood up to 6 feet at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and twice that when standing on its hind legs. One website I read pointed out that regulation height for a basketball rim is ten feet, which means a giant short-faced bear could dunk the ball every time without doing anything more strenuous than standing up. It was probably an omnivore like most modern bears, but we have mastodon bones that show tooth marks from the short-faced bear.

Naturally, as with just about any extinct animal, people keep hoping they’re not really extinct and occasionally someone reports seeing a giant short-faced bear. Some cryptozoologists speculate that the Kamchatka Peninsula mystery bears may actually be short-faced bears, but since short-faced bear fossils have only been found in North America, it’s probably not likely that there would be any living in Russia. Besides, the short-faced bear would have looked very different from the brown bear, probably shaped more like a colossal spectacled bear. Locals would definitely notice the difference. Moreover, it’s not likely to live in the same area that already has a population of brown bears, since both animals would then be competing for the same resources.

Personally, while the giant short-faced bear is awesome to imagine, I’m perfectly happy with it not wandering around in the forests. Because I like to hike. And I worry enough about the relatively small and harmless American black bear as it is.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 036: Patagonian giants, Yowie, and Bunyip (Bigfoot part 2)

Part two of the Bigfoot episode sort of got away from me. We start with giants of Patagonia and end up, inexplicably, with seals in Australia. But it’s a fun ride along the way, where we learn about real giants in Patagonia, folkloric giants in Patagonia, the Yowie of Australia, and the Bunyip of Australia. And Southern elephant seals.

Some map giants:

Yowie candy, because it’s getting close to Halloween:

A drawing of the bunyip geoglyph:

A map showing where the geoglyph was located. Old maps are neat:

The southern elephant seal. Look at that magnificent snoot!

Further reading:

Monsters of Patagonia by Austin Whittall

What to make of the Yowie?” By Darren Naish

“Buckley’s Bunyip” by Paul Michael Donovan, in The Journal of Cryptozoology, Vol. 4 (Dec 2016)

Further listening:

The Folklore Podcast December 15 2016 episode “Bunyip: Devil of the Riverbed

Show transcript:

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

We’re one week closer to Halloween and deep in monster lore. Last week we learned about the Yeti. This week we’re going to learn about bigfoot-type legends from other parts of the world—specifically, Patagonia and Australia.

Patagonia isn’t a country but a region at the southern tip of South America. Part of it is in Chile, part in Argentina. It includes the Andes Mountains, and the southern end is only 600 miles from Antarctica. People have lived in the area for at least 13,000 years and there are many different indigenous cultures still living there today.

Much of South America was originally populated by the little-known Clovis People, who migrated into the Americas from Asia once the glaciers retreated from Alaska. The Clovis People are supposed to have arrived around 13,000 years ago, but archaeologists have dated some non-Clovis sites in both North and South America to much earlier than that. One theory is that an earlier human migration reached South America by sea from the South Pacific, although this is controversial. DNA studies of First Nations people suggest that there may have been an earlier migration from Asia into North America, possibly 20,000 years ago, before the Clovis People arrived.

The first Europeans to visit Patagonia were Magellan and his crew on their voyage around the world. They spent the winter in Patagonia in 1520, and Magellan is the one who named the area. Specifically, he named its people Patagons, and reported that they were giants.

Antonio Pigafetta was one of only 18 survivors of the expedition. When he got home, he wrote about his adventures. He described the Patagons as nine to twelve feet tall, or 2 and three-quarters to over 3 and a half meters tall.

Soon everyone in Europe knew Patagonia was the land of giants. Maps of the region included illustrations of bearded men nearly twice as tall as the explorers greeting them. It would be easy to dismiss the accounts of giants as inventions to sell a few books, except that other explorers were reporting the same thing.

A priest from a Spanish expedition reported that in 1525 he saw native men who were 13 spans tall, or 9 feet, or 2.75 meters. In 1577 Sir Francis Drake visited Patagonia, and later his chaplain reported seeing giants 5 cubits tall, or 7 ½ feet, or 2.3 meters. In 1579 another Spanish expedition started a short-lived settlement in the Strait of Magellan, which ended up being renamed Port Famine, and maybe they wouldn’t have starved if they hadn’t started off by killing one of the giant locals. According to the expedition leader, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, it took ten men to capture the native. Only one settler survived the bitter winters and lack of provisions. He was rescued by an Englishman, Sir Thomas Cavendish, who didn’t see any giants but did see footprints he reported as 18” long, or almost 46 centimeters.

The reports of giants continued, in 1591, 1599, 1614, 1641, and so on well into the 18th century. In 1615 two men dug up some stone cairns and underneath found human skeletons they said were ten or eleven feet long, or a bit over 3 meters. In 1642 Dutch admiral Henry Brewer reported more 18” footsteps in Tierra del Fuego.

All this sounds definitive. But other expeditions didn’t report seeing giants, including those from 1535, 1540, a land exploration from 1557 to 1559, 1618, another land expedition from 1623 to 1624, 1670, and so on. Tellingly, after a 1741 shipwreck on the southern Chilean coast, a survivor, John Bulkeley, claimed he encountered gigantic men in the area—but Thomas Pascoe, a member of the same fleet, disagreed. He said the people in the area were average-sized—and, incidentally, not wild cannibals as Bulkeley claimed. Pascoe called them “harmless, civil, and inoffensive.”

So what’s going on? Are all these people, hundreds of sailors, soldiers, priests, and even naturalists, from different eras and nations, all liars?

In 1767, Captain Samuel Wallis, apparently fed up with the conflicting reports about giants, sailed to Patagonia with a measuring rod. There he measured some very tall people, for sure, but not giants. The tallest man he measured was 6 feet 7 inches, or 2.01 meters, with several others only an inch or two shorter. But, he reported, most were between 5 feet 10 inches and six feet tall, or 1.78 to 1.83 meters. And their feet, he mentioned, were quite small.

Several subsequent European measuring expeditions revealed the same proportions among the Tehuelche, a large and varied group of nomadic people who lived throughout Patagonia. The Tehuelche were among the tallest people in the world. Since the average height of a northern European in the 16th century was 5’ 6” or 1.67 meters, and the average height of a southern European was only 5 feet or 1.5 meters, a group of people whose average height was 6’1” or 1.86 meters would seem like giants. The rest was likely due to exaggeration.

The Tehuelche were almost completely destroyed in the late 19th century, and those who survived warfare and introduced diseases were mostly absorbed into other groups. Only about 6,000 Tehuelche remain scattered across South America.

But were the Tehuelche the only so-called giants in Patagonia? Various Europeans reported another group called the Tiremenen or the Caucauhue, who were not just tall, but stout and muscular mountain people last seen around the 1700s. They were supposedly bigger than the Tehuelche, warlike and dangerous. According to various stories, the Tehuelche finally killed the last of them after a fierce battle. Survivors of the battle took refuge in a cave, where the Tehuelche lit fires and asphyxiated them with thick smoke.

So far, all these giants are people, not furry Bigfoots. But there are plenty of stories from various indigenous groups of wild men and monsters in Patagonia, especially in the forests and mountains. According to the Alakuf, the Mwono was a snow man that lived among the glaciers and high mountains and left tracks in the snow. Over a thousand miles north, or 2,000 km, the Mapuche told a similar story. The Carcancho were hairy solitary men who lived in the mountains. They could stand almost 7 feet tall, or over 2 meters, and left large footprints in the snow. The Mapuche also believed that a giant with fiery red hair and beard, called a Trauko, lived along the Collón Curá River.

While the Mapuche people have lived in what is now Chile and Argentina for some 2500 years, they differ genetically from other indigenous peoples of Patagonia. When they moved into Patagonia, they conquered and absorbed many other tribes, and it’s possible many of their stories of the olden days come from those tribes. They say that giant animals once lived in the area but that their ancestors killed most of them, along with the evil giants that once lived there too. It’s hard not to speculate that the giant animals were megafauna like giant ground sloths. But all the people who migrated to the Americas were humans—no Neandertals or other of our relations made it there as far as we know—and until humans arrived, there were no members of the ape family in the Americas.

So what about other primates? Researchers aren’t sure how monkeys made it to South America, but they’ve been there for some 37 million years. They lived first in the Amazon basin and spread slowly throughout South and Central America. But there are no species of monkey in Patagonia and there hasn’t been for millions of years. The few species of monkey that had spread into Patagonia had already gone extinct long before our first human ancestor started walking upright, so it’s not likely that the first human settlers of Patagonia encountered monkeys. Of course, you never know what fossils might come to light in the future, and there are scattered stories about tribes of men with tails in Patagonia.

In his marvelous book The Monsters of Patagonia, author Austin Whittall suggests that the Patagonian wild man legends, as well as other story elements, may be connected to Australian Aboriginal legends. If the original settlers of Patagonia did arrive by sea from Austronesia, which is by no means established, they would have adapted their stories to their new home. Whittall also suggests that one story in particular may be related to Homo erectus, our direct human ancestor who probably went extinct when humans began competing with them for resources. The ancestors of the Australian Aborigines probably did encounter Homo erectus. Maybe that was the source of the Yowie legend.

I probably don’t need to point out that this is fringey, fringey stuff. But it’s fun to think about.

The Yowie in Australian Aboriginal lore is a man-like monster that’s seven or even as much as 12 feet tall, or around 2 to 3 and a half meters. It has big feet, although some stories say its feet are backwards so people tracking it are actually going the wrong way. Sometimes the Yowie is said to have long white hair. Modern interpretations of the Yowie are a lot like the Sasquatch, with brown or reddish hair all over and arms that hang to its knees.

Many older accounts by European settlers refer to this creature by various other names, including wood devil, Australian gorilla, and Yahoo. I don’t know if Yahoo was an attempt at pronouncing an unfamiliar Aboriginal word or if 19th century pop culture was still drawing on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In Swift’s story, yahoos are brutish but human-like creatures much despised by the narrator, who prefers the company of the intelligent horses that treat the yahoos as servants. Oh, the satire was subtle back in 1726.

These days, the Yowie is as firmly entrenched in Australian culture as Sasquatch is in North American culture. Yowies sell chocolates and toys, appear in cartoons, and like Sasquatch hunters, Yowie hunters run around in the Australian bush and make plaster casts of big footprints.

Let me tell you something important about plaster. It’s a terrible way to make casts of footprints or anything else. Not only does it produce tiny ridges along its edges as it dries, which have been interpreted as dermal ridges of bigfoot feet, it also generates heat as it dries, which has the potential to alter the prints it’s supposed to be faithfully representing. These days, field scientists use dental stone or latex to take casts. Plaster is cheap and readily available, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best.

Anyway, the earliest colonial reports of the Yowie are from around the early 19th century. European settlers sometimes treated the Yowie as a real animal that had yet to be discovered, sometimes as an amusing Aboriginal superstition. Reported Yowie sightings were relatively uncommon until the 1970s. At that point, cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy, whom I disparaged in episode 32 for being secretive about his findings and data, started showing up in the Australian media with big plaster casts of what he claimed were Yowie tracks.

The problem with the Yowie is that Australia, even less so than Patagonia, has never been home to any animal that stands upright the way humans do. Most of Australia’s large mammals are marsupials so they aren’t even remotely related to apes.

It’s possible that the Aboriginal tales of the Yowie are old, old memories of Homo erectus or other human relatives, as I suggested about the Patagonian wild men. But it’s also possible that the Yowie is a monster of human imagination. Cultures from around the world have stories of big people and little people who sometimes help, sometimes cause mischief, or are sometimes just plain menacing. It seems to be a human trait to people the landscape with giants and dwarves.

The more research I do about any cryptid, as opposed to animals we know exist or used to exist, the more I realize cryptozoology is actually about people. It’s the study not so much of unknown animals, it’s the study of how humans interact with the unknown. Sometimes I’m disappointed when I trace a fascinating story back to its primary source and discover it’s not as mysterious as later versions of the event make it out to be. But sometimes I come across something so purely human that I don’t even care that the mystery has evaporated.

So let me tell you about the Bunyip. This is another Australian monster, one that sometimes gets confused with the Yowie in popular culture, or sometimes gets lumped in with lake monsters. I learned about this from an article by Paul Michael Donovan in the 2016 Journal of Cryptozoology, called “Buckley’s Bunyip.” Shortly after I read the article, I happened to listen to the “Bunyip: Devil of the Riverbed” episode of the Folklore Podcast. That episode was an interview with none other than Paul Michael Donovan about the same material his article covered, so if you want more information, check the show notes for a link to that episode.

The bunyip is supposed to be a monster that attacks and eats people who come too near the waterholes or lagoons where it lives. Descriptions vary, but it’s sometimes said to be gray and covered with feathers, with a peculiar two-tone bellow that it uses to warn people away. By about the 1850s the word bunyip had been adopted into Australian English as a term meaning something like humbug or poser.

There was an Aboriginal sacred site near Ararat, Victoria where the outline of a bunyip was carved into the ground and the turf removed from within the figure. Every year the local indigenous people would gather to re-carve the figure so it wouldn’t become overgrown, because it symbolized an important event. At that spot, two brothers had been attacked by a bunyip. It killed one of the men and the other speared the bunyip and killed it. When he brought his family and others back to retrieve his brother’s body, they traced around the bunyip.

The bunyip carving is long gone, since eventually the last Aborigine who was part of the ritual died sometime in the 1850s and the site was fenced off for cattle grazing. But we have a drawing of the geoglyph from 1867. A copy of it is in the show notes. It’s generally taken to be a two-legged sea serpent type monster with a small head and a relatively short, thick tail. Some people think it represents a bird like an emu.

But if you turn it around, with the small head being the end of a tail, and the blunt tail being a head, suddenly it makes sense. It’s the shape of a seal.

The Southern elephant seal lives around the Antarctic, but it is a rare visitor to Australia. It’s also enormous, twice the size of a walrus, six or seven times heavier than a Polar bear. The males can grow over 20 feet long, or over six meters, while females are typically about half that length. The male also has an inflatable proboscis with which it makes horrible roaring sounds. This is a clip of what it sounds like, although these calls are from Northern elephant seals, which are much smaller than Southern elephant seals. Still pretty darn big, though.

[seals honking]

The elephant seal is also an aggressive carnivore. If an elephant seal strayed inland up a river or stream, which does sometimes happen, the Aboriginal people of the area would definitely take notice of the monster.

So the bunyip is, in the end, a true monster. And the bunyip’s story is a deeply human one. A man’s brother died. His family mourned, and commemorated the event with a carving that withstood who knows how many years. Oh, and the carving’s size? It was about eight meters long. That’s 26 feet.

I’m not entirely sure how I ended up talking about seals when we started out talking about giants of Patagonia. But hey, the southern elephant seal lives in Patagonia too.

I could easily do two or three more episodes about bigfoots around the world, but I’m ready for something else. Next week we’ll learn about a four-footed monster from Ireland, a Halloween story if I ever heard one since it starts with a gravestone.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 022: Megatherium

Episode 22 is all about megatherium, the giant extinct ground sloth–and a little bit about glyptodon, the giant extinct…thing.

Megatherium vs trees was basically no contest. Giant ground sloth FTW!

Giant sloth big, yeah yeah yeah, it’s not small, no no no

Glyptodon. Like a giant armadillo that can’t roll up and doesn’t need to.

Show transcript:

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

For this week’s episode, let’s learn about some Ice Age megafauna! But first, a quick note about my schedule. I’ll talk more about this in a few weeks, but in August I’m going to be in Helsinki, Finland for WorldCon 75. I don’t have the final schedule yet, but I am going to be on a panel about podcasting. If you’re going to WorldCon too, or if you’ll be in Helsinki the week of the convention or the week after, let me know so we can meet up! I’ll also be in Oslo, Norway for part of the day on August 7. I got a cheap flight to Helsinki because it has an 11-hour layover in Oslo, but to me that’s a bonus. Oslo has birds! Birds I’ve never seen before! So if you’re going to be in Oslo on August 7 and you’d like to meet me for a birding trip and/or lunch, definitely let me know! And don’t worry, I’ll schedule episodes ahead of time so you can continue to learn about strange animals even while I’m gone.

Now, on to the megafauna. Until about five million years ago, South America was a big island continent the way Australia is today. As a result, many of the animals that evolved there at the time don’t look anything like animals in other parts of the world.

The various species of giant ground sloth, such as Megatherium and Eremotherium, were South American mammals that lived from around 30 million years ago until only about 10,000 years ago—but we’ll come back to that in a minute. Those two species were huge—as big as African elephants. It was 20 feet long and stood more than 12 feet high on its hind legs. They liked woodlands and grasslands and ate plants.

Megatherium had huge curved claws on its forefeet just like modern sloths, four claws that were a foot long each, and we know it walked on the sides of its paws as a result because we have some fossilized tracks. A ground sloth could walk on its hind legs, at least for short distances, and when feeding it spent a lot of its time reared up on its hind legs, helped to balance by its thick tail. It could reach branches some 20 feet off the ground that way. It hooked the branches down with its claws to eat the leaves.

Around 5 million years ago, South America became connected to North America by the Central American Isthmus, which is volcanic in origin. Over the millennia, peaking around 3 million years ago, North American animals migrated south, and South American animals migrated north, called the Great American interchange. A lot of South American megafauna went extinct with the increased competition for resources, but nothing bothered the giant ground sloths. One medium-sized species, named Megalonyx by Thomas Jefferson, spread throughout North America as far north as Alaska. It was “only” about 10 feet long and weighed some 800 pounds, with three claws on its forefeet.

The North American sloths died out first, around 11,000 years ago. It didn’t take long for most of the South American sloths to go extinct too, a little over 10,000 years ago. And yes, that was the same time that humans were spreading deeper into the Americas. It’s not a coincidence, although climate change after the last big ice age probably played a part too. Ground sloths had thick skin reinforced with osteoderms, knobs of bone tissue that grow in the skin like armor, so killing one would have been a lot of work for our ancestors, and was undoubtedly dangerous too.

But a whole lot of islands make up the Carribean, and giant sloths lived on some of those islands. Many had developed in isolation long enough that they’re now considered separate species from the mainland sloths. And many of the island sloths persisted for thousands of years after their gigantic mainland cousins were long dead.

The island sloths were much smaller than Megatherium. Megalocnus only weighed about 200 pounds—a big sloth, but nothing like the five tons that Megatherium could weigh. But Megalocnus survived until some 6,000 years ago in Cuba and maybe much more recently. Another Cuban sloth lived another thousand years after that. A small ground sloth called Neocnus survived on Hispanolia until only about 4,500 years ago.

You may have heard recently about a lot of huge tunnels in Brazil. Until recently, people assumed they were natural caves. It wasn’t until the 2000s that geologists started investigating the tunnels and immediately saw that they weren’t natural at all. They were burrows, many with claw marks on the walls as though just dug, thousands of them scattered across Brazil and a few other parts of South America. Some are tall enough to stand up inside comfortably. One paleoburrow in the Amazon is a network that adds up to around 2,000 feet of tunnels, six feet tall and almost that wide. It was probably used by generations of animals, enlarged and extended as new adults dug their own burrows.

The burrows were probably dug by giant sloths. No one is sure why. Giant sloths had no predators until humans moved into the area. But it’s also possible that some or most of the burrows were dug by the extinct ancestors of armadillos, glyptodon.

The glyptodonts are related to both the giant ground sloths and modern-day armadillos. Glyptodon and its two related species, Panochthus and Doedicurus, lived in the same areas where the giant burrows have been discovered. And modern armadillos are good burrowers. But Glyptodon had even less reason to need burrows than giant ground sloths did. It was an enormous animal, 11 feet long and five feet high, weighing over two tons, with a massive domed carapace like a tortoise shell, made of rows of osteoderms. It also had osteoderms that protected its head like a cap, and rings of bony plates on the end of its thick tail that made it into a club-like weapon. Even its jaws contained osteoderm ridges, which helped grind up the plants it ate, although it also had huge grooved teeth.

In other words, glyptodon was a walking tank. Nothing much ate them until humans showed up. A full-grown glyptodon was a bonanza for humans if they could kill it. Not only did it provide a whole lot of meat, its shell could be used as shelter. Clean it out good first. At least one human burial has been found in a glyptodon shell.

Considering how amazing glyptodonts are, you’d think they’d be more well known and better studied. There’s still a whole lot we don’t know about them, including how many species there actually were and how recently they died out. There aren’t even very many reported sightings of living ones, which tends to happen with just about any extinct animal.

Giant ground sloths, on the other hand, do get reported every so often, and there are hints that giant ground sloths might have lived until much more recently than ten or eleven thousand years ago. Megatherium remains found in caves sometimes seem suspiciously fresh, although so far radiocarbon dating hasn’t given us any surprises. In 1740 the Portuguese historian Lozano mentioned an animal that sounds a little like a ground sloth, which was supposedly called the su by locals.

Some cryptozoologists believe that a legendary South American monster, the mapinguari, may have been inspired by megatherium. The mapinguari is supposed to be nine feet tall and smelly, with feet that face backwards, an extra mouth in its belly, skin that deflects arrows, and sometimes it’s said to have only one eye in the middle of its forehead. It also eats meat. That sounds a little on the far-fetched side to me, and a lot of cryptozoologists group the mapinguari with bigfoot type monsters.

There is another monster story from Patagonia that sounds a lot more sloth-like on the surface. The yemisch is supposed to be a cow-sized animal that sleeps in burrows it digs with its huge claws. It can’t be killed because arrows bounce off its hide. In fact, yemisch is supposed to mean “the one covered in little stones.”

That sounds promising, but the story comes exclusively from a man called Florentino Ameghino, who was convinced that a smaller giant ground sloth named mylodon still lived in Patagonia. The first mention anywhere of the Yemisch comes from Ameghino’s 1898 paper about mylodon, where he said the Tehuelche of Patagonia referred to it as the water tiger. It was semi-aquatic, spending much of its time in the river. It was said to drag horses into the water with its huge claws. Its feet were flat, its ears tiny, it had huge claws and fangs, and its toes were webbed for swimming. It was bigger than a puma but with shorter legs.

This doesn’t sound like a ground sloth, which were not carnivores despite their big claws. In 1900 a French naturalist, Andrew Tournouer, spotted an animal in a stream that looked a lot like Ameghino’s description of the Yemisch. Tournouer said it was definitely not a ground sloth; his guide said it was called a Hymche.

The water tiger Ameghino describes is well known in Patagonian native lore, but not under the name Yemisch. It’s possible Ameghino mangled the word Hymche. Whatever the water tiger is, though, it’s definitely not a giant ground sloth and I’m going to save it for a future episode if I can dig up more about it.

There was an aquatic giant ground sloth once, though, Thalassocnus. It grew to around five or six feet long and lived off the Pacific coast of South America, where it ate seaweed and other marine plants. Fossils document how it adapted to marine life over the generations. The earliest Thalassocnus fossils are of semi-aquatic animals that grazed in shallow water. Fossils from more recent species show increasing adaptations to deeper water, including increased weight of the skeleton to help it stay underwater instead of bobbing up to the surface. It died out around two and a half million years ago, after the Isthmus of Panama formed, probably because the new land mass caused the water temperature to cool and many of the ocean plants in its habitat went extinct.

Whether or not any giant ground sloths are still alive in the remote parts of South America, I think we can all agree that they’re not going to eat anyone. So if you see one, don’t shoot it unless it’s with a camera.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us and get awesome rewards.

Thanks for listening!