Tag Archives: Hoan Kiem Turtle

Episode 207: The Dire Wolf!

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This week we’re on the cutting edge of science, learning about the brand new genetic study of dire wolves that rearranges everything we know about the dire wolf and other canids! Also, a bonus turtle update.

Further reading:

Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, Genetic Clues Reveal

An artist’s rendition of dire wolves and grey wolves fighting over a bison carcass (art by Mauricio Anton):

The pig-nosed face of the Hoan Kiem turtle, AKA Yangtze giant softshell turtle, AKA Swinhoe’s softshell turtle:

Show transcript:

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

You may have heard the news this past week about the new study about dire wolves. I thought it would make a great topic for an episode, and we’ll also have a quick update about a rare turtle that’s been in the news lately too.

Dire wolves show up pretty often in movies and TV shows and video games and books, because as far as anyone knew until very recently, the dire wolf was an extra big wolf that lived in North America during the Pleistocene until it went extinct around 13,000 years ago. Researchers assumed it was a close cousin of the modern grey wolf.

Well, in a brand new study published in Nature literally less than a week ago as this episode goes live, we now have results of a genetic study of dire wolf remains. The results give us surprising new information not just about the dire wolf, but about many other canids.

The study started in 2016, when an archaeologist, Angela Perri, who specializes in the history of human and animal interactions, wanted to learn more about the dire wolf. She went around the United States to visit university collections and museums with dire wolf remains, and took the samples she collected to geneticist Kieren Mitchell. Perri, Mitchell, and their team managed to sequence DNA from five dire wolves that lived between 50,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Then the team compared the dire wolf genome to those of other canids, including the grey wolf and coyote, two species of African wolf, two species of jackal, and the dhole, among others. To their surprise, the dire wolf’s closest relation wasn’t the grey wolf. It was the jackals, both from Africa, but even they weren’t very closely related.

It turns out that 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. At this point sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North America population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and eventually migrated into North America too.

By the time the gray wolf populated North America, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, they avoided each other and didn’t interbreed. We’ve talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at this point.

The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn’t have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals. Its head was larger in proportion than the grey wolf’s and it had massive teeth that were adapted to crush bigger bones.

The dire wolf lived throughout North America and even migrated into South America and back into east Asia. It preferred open lowlands and its most important prey animal was probably the horse, although it also ate ground sloths, camels, bison, and many others. It probably also scavenged dead animals and probably hunted as a pack.

Researchers think the dire wolf went extinct due to a combination of factors, including increased competition with grey wolves and maybe with humans, climate change, and the extinction of the megaherbivores that made up its diet. It will probably be reclassified into a different genus, Aenocyon, instead of staying in its current genus, Canis.

Before this study, most researchers thought that the ancestor of North American canids evolved in Eurasia, but had already migrated into North America before developing into dire wolves, grey wolves, coyotes, and other canid species. But now the history of canids has changed a lot. From what we now know, pending further study, the dire wolf was the only canid in North America for millions of years. Grey wolves, coyotes, and their relations are relative newcomers. It’s an exciting time for scientists studying ice age megafauna. Hopefully we’ll learn more soon as more studies are conducted into the dire wolf’s history.

Next, let’s look briefly at a type of turtle that’s been in the news lately too. Swinhoe’s softshell turtle is considered the most endangered turtle in the world. In early 2019 there were only two individuals known, a male and a female, but they had never bred despite being kept together in captivity. Then the female died in April of that year. No females meant no eggs, no baby turtles, no more Swinhoe’s softshell turtle. The species would be extinct.

But in October of 2020, researchers found a female Swinhoe’s softshell turtle in the wild! Not only that, they spotted what they think is a male turtle in the same lake, and found evidence of what may possibly be a third turtle nearby.

Swinhoe’s softshell turtle is also known as the Yangtze giant softshell turtle and used to be found in many lakes and rivers in Asia. Unfortunately, people killed it for its meat and dug up its eggs to eat, and pollution and habitat loss also killed off many of the turtles. This is the same turtle we talked about in episode 68, the Hoan Kiem turtle of Vietnam. It’s probably the largest freshwater turtle in the world, and the largest one ever measured weighed 546 lbs, or 247.5 kg. It can grow over three feet long, or 100 cm.

The newly discovered wild turtles are being monitored carefully to make sure they’re healthy, their environment is clean and safe, and to see if the female lays eggs this spring. The female was captured briefly, just long enough to take blood samples and verify that she was healthy. Then they released her back into the lake. Fingers crossed that she hatches some baby turtles soon!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or just tell a friend. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 068: The Dingiso and the Hoan Kiem Turtle

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It’s time to look at two more supposedly mysterious, supposedly identified animals off those “Ten Cryptozoological Animals That Have Been FOUND Please Click Please Click” articles.

First is the dingiso, or bondegezou, which is just about as adorable as an animal can get:

Next is the Hoan Kiem Turtle:

Dat FACE

Show transcript:

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

This week we’re revisiting those “top ten cryptozoological animals found to be real!” clickbait articles that pop up online sometimes. In episode 24 we looked at two animals frequently found on those lists, so let’s examine two more today.

We’ll start in Papua New Guinea, a country that gets mentioned a lot on this podcast. I was curious, so I looked it up and now I’ve learned some geography that I desperately needed to know. Papua New Guinea is a country in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. Only Greenland is a bigger island than New Guinea, so we’re not talking a dinky little islet like the ones where cartoon shipwreck survivors end up. New Guinea has a huge mountain range, rainforests, wetlands, savannahs, coral reefs, and pretty much everything else an animal could want. More species live on New Guinea than in all of Australia. More species live on New Guinea than in all of the United States. More species live on New Guinea than in Australia and the United States combined. So it’s not surprising that new species are found there all the time.

People live on the island too, of course, and have for at least 40,000 years, probably much longer. People have lived on the island for so long, in fact, that something like 1,000 different languages are spoken there among the various tribes. The first animal we’re going to learn about today was known to the Moni tribe long before any scientists got wind of it.

The Moni people live in the remote mountainous rainforests of Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t find much information about the Moni except through Christian missionary sites, so as far as I can tell their culture was never studied before it started being influenced by outside groups. But one thing we do know is that the Moni are familiar with a black and white animal called the dingiso, or bondegezou, which holds the spirit of an ancestor. When one is encountered, it will sit up, whistle, and raise a paw in greeting.

No one outside of the Moni tribe paid any attention to this story until the 1980s, when someone sent a photograph of a dingiso to Tim Flannery, an Australian zoologist. He recognized it as a young tree kangaroo, but not one he was familiar with. In May of 1994 he led a wildlife survey expedition in the area and was able to examine a dead dingiso for himself. Sure enough, it was new to science.

The dingiso’s fur is black with white underparts and white markings on the face. Its fur is long and thick to keep it warm in the mountains, since it lives in high elevations just below the tree line. It’s about two and a half feet long, or 75 cm, not counting its tail, which doubles its length. Its face looks something like a bear’s.

Most of the information we have about the dingiso is based on what we know about other tree kangaroos, so may or may not be completely accurate. Females probably give birth to one baby at a time, which stays in its mother’s pouch while it grows. It eats leaves and fruit and lives both in trees and on the ground, although the Moni report that it spends most of its time on the ground.

The dingiso was formally described in 1995. In 2009, a BBC documentary spent eleven days searching for a dingiso with Moni tribesmen as their guides, and finally found and filmed one.

Naturally, the Moni don’t harm the dingiso, since you don’t hurt your ancestors. That has probably saved it from extinction, since the dingiso reproduces slowly and is a docile, harmless animal. Other tribes don’t have the same restriction, though, and hunt the dingiso for food. That and habitat loss due to mining and farming mean the dingiso is endangered. So little is known about it, and so few have ever been seen by scientists, that it could go extinct before we know much more about it than that it exists. But conservation organizations are working to protect it and other animals in New Guinea.

Oh, the whistling and waving activity the Moni describe is probably a threat display. But I like the Moni’s explanation better.

Our next cryptid supposedly identified is the Hoan Kiem Turtle from Vietnam. Specifically, it’s from the Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. According to the story, in the early 15th century emperor Lê Lợi, a great hero who led Vietnam to independence from China, had a magical sword called Heaven’s Will. Depending on which version of the story you hear, the sword was either given to him by a god called the Dragon King, given to him by the Golden Turtle God, or was found in the lake by a fisherman and given to the emperor. One day not long after Vietnam had successfully won independence, the emperor was boating on the lake when a turtle surfaced, grabbed the sword, and disappeared with it into the lake. In other stories, the turtle surfaced and asked for the sword, and the emperor realized it was the Golden Turtle God. Hoan Kiem Lake means “Lake of the Returned Sword.”

The lake isn’t deep, only six and a half feet, or 2 m, at its deepest, and it only covers around 30 acres in the middle of a very large city. There doesn’t seem to be a metric equivalent of acre, but if hectares mean anything to you, 30 acres is a little over 12 hectares.

Softshelled turtles of enormous size have been known in the lake for a long time, specifically the Yangtze giant softshell turtle. It’s the biggest freshwater turtle known, and can measure over six feet long, or almost 2 meters. It lives in rivers and lakes in Vietnam and China and eats pretty much anything, from plants to frogs, fish, crustaceans, and snails. Its nostrils look like a tiny pig’s snout. It’s a shy turtle that doesn’t surface very often, and it’s also extremely rare, almost extinct. There may only be three or four specimens left in the world. Captive breeding has not been successful so far.

So why is the Hoan Kiem Turtle considered a cryptid? Why is it on those identified cryptid lists? Two reasons.

First of all, until its death in January of 2016, there was one in the Hoan Kiem Lake, and rumor had it that this was the same individual that had taken the emperor’s sword back in 1428. Turtles can live for a long time, but probably not for 600 years. But no one knew there was a turtle remaining in the lake after the last one was killed in 1967, not until 1998 when someone caught it on video. The turtle was captured in 2011 for treatment of some injuries, possibly caused by the lake’s pollution, then released, and lived for another five years before it was found dead in the lake.

Second, there’s some controversy regarding whether the Hoan Kiem Turtle is actually a Yangtze giant softshell turtle or a different species. Most researchers think it’s the same species. A few Vietnamese biologists think it’s not, but the DNA studies they cite to back up their claims haven’t been published formally and may not have been conducted correctly.

So while there are mysteries associated with the turtle, it’s not really accurate to call it a cryptid that’s been identified. But that doesn’t mean it’s not really interesting. I hope researchers find more of them in the wild that can be relocated to a safe area where they can breed successfully.

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!