Tag Archives: megatherium

Episode 357: When Scientists Ate Mammoth Meat

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:15 — 11.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

This week we’re going to talk about stories of scientists, explorers, and other modern people eating meat from long-dead extinct animals. Did it ever really happen?

Check out the great new podcast Herbarium of the Bizarre! I highly recommend it even though they don’t eat any mammoth meat.

Further reading:

Was frozen mammoth or giant ground sloth served for dinner at The Explorers Club?

Study Proves the Explorers Club Didn’t Really Eat Mammoth at 1950s New York Dinner

Company Serves World’s First ‘Mammoth’ Meatball, but Nobody Is Allowed to Eat It

Don’t eat me bro:

Blue Babe, a steppe bison mummy found in Alaska:

Show transcript:

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

We’ve talked about mammoths and other ice age megafauna plenty of times before, but this week we’re going to learn something specific and really weird about these animals, although it’s more accurate to say we’re going to learn how weird humans are.

You may have heard this story before, or something similar to this story. A group of scientists in Siberia or Alaska have unearthed a mammoth carcass that’s been frozen in permafrost for at least 25,000 years. It’s in such good shape that the meat looks as fresh as a fancy restaurant steak that’s ready to go on the grill. At the end of a long day of using pickaxes to dig the mammoth out of ground frozen as solid as rock, the scientists are so hungry that when someone suggests they actually grill some mammoth meat, they all think it’s a good idea. The meat turns out to taste as good as it looks. Everyone has a big steak dinner, even the camp dogs, and when the expedition ends they not only have a mammoth to put on display in their museum, they have a great story to tell about a meal no human has eaten for thousands of years.

You may even have come across an event that inspired this particular story. The incredibly well preserved 44,000 year old Berezovsky mammoth was discovered in Russia in 1900 and excavated in 1901, and it’s now on display in the Zoological Museum in Saint Petersburg. Rumors persisted for years that the expedition members ate some of the mammoth meat, but while we don’t know exactly what happened, definitely no one actually sat down to have a yummy meal of mammoth steak.

It turns out that the meat did look appetizing when thawed, but stank like old roadkill. The expedition erected a big tent over the dig site as they excavated the carcass, which was a slow process in 1901, and the smell became so bad that the expedition members had to take frequent breaks and leave the tent for fresh air.

Apparently the scientists got drunk one night and dared each other to try a bite of the meat, but even after they practically covered it in pepper to disguise the taste, no one could force any down. One man might have managed to eat a single bite, but reports vary. They fed the meat to the camp dogs instead, who were just fine. Dogs and wolves have short, fast digestive tracts and can tolerate eating foods that would make humans very sick.

But that’s not the only story of modern humans eating meat from frozen mammoth carcasses. It supposedly happened on January 13, 1951 at the Roosevelt Hotel’s grand ballroom in New York City. A group called the Explorers Club met for their annual fancy dinner that evening, and as always, the menu contained lots of exotic foods. The main course has gone down in history as being slices of mammoth meat from a 250,000-year-old carcass found in Alaska.

That’s where things get confusing, though, because supposedly the main course was megatherium meat found in Alaska. Megatherium was a giant ground sloth that hasn’t ever been found frozen in permafrost at all, certainly not in Alaska. It lived in South America. However, the Christian Science Monitor magazine thought megatherium was another word for mammoth and reported that the group was served mammoth meat.

Some of the Explorers Club members genuinely thought they were dining on megatherium. Some may have thought it was mammoth. The club’s press release just said “prehistoric meat,” which doesn’t sound very appetizing.

An Explorers Club member who couldn’t attend the dinner asked that his portion be saved for him in a bottle of formaldehyde that he provided. This was done, and the promoter himself, Wendell Phillips Dodge, better known as Mae West’s one-time film agent, filled out the supplied specimen card as “megatherium meat.” The club member put his bottled meat on display at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he worked.

There the bottle stayed until 2001, when it ended up at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 2014, a couple of Yale students ran DNA tests on the meat.

As you may have already guessed, the meat wasn’t from a mammoth or a giant ground sloth. It’s meat from the decidedly not extinct green sea turtle, although the green sea turtle is endangered and protected these days, so don’t eat it. Since green sea turtle soup was also served at the meal, it’s probable that the leftover turtle meat was called megatherium meat as a sort of joke. Dodge even published a statement after the dinner that he’d discovered how to turn green sea turtle into giant sloth meat. But by then the story of mammoth meat being served at the dinner had already passed into history.

But while we don’t know if anyone in modern times has eaten frozen mammoth meat, we do know for certain that a group of scientists did eat the meat of a mummified steppe bison that died around 36,000 years ago.

The bison was discovered in 1979 in Alaska and was nicknamed Blue Babe, both from the folktales of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyon and his pet, Babe the Blue Ox, and because the mummy was coated in crystals of vivianite, which turns blue when exposed to oxygen. Eventually Blue Babe was taxidermied and put on display in the University of Alaska Museum at Fairbanks.

At some point, the team in charge of the specimen decided to try some of its meat in a stew, which from all accounts turned out okay and didn’t make anyone sick. The scientists examined the meat carefully before deciding to cook and eat it, and decided that it was basically freezer-burned but not actually rotten.

Dale Guthrie was part of the Blue Babe excavation team. I’ll quote the relevant paragraph from page 29 of her booklet Blue Babe. The Bjorn Kjurten mentioned in the quote is the man who helped preserve the mummy, and he was also the guy who interviewed one of the Russian scientists who tried to eat mammoth meat with pepper.

“To celebrate Eirich’s work and the new Blue Babe, we decided to cook a bison stew. A marvelous bit of luck had brought Bjorn Kjurten to Fairbanks for guest lectures, and we invited other friends who were game enough to try the stew. Spring was underway. With a good burgundy to brave the rather muddy tone of the dish, we toasted the past and present in the long evening twilight, a taste of the Pleistocene with friends who shared and added to it with their talents and imagination. It was a special evening.”

Guthrie reported that the meat wasn’t very good, but that anything is edible if you use enough onions.

In March of 2023, a company that produces lab-grown meat for human consumption made a giant meatball grown from mammoth DNA. They displayed it as a way to advertise the possibilities of lab-grown meat, but because this particular meat hasn’t been tested to make sure it’s safe for people to eat, no one was allowed to eat it. But maybe in the future, you’ll be able to order a mammoth steak from your local restaurant. Let me know what it tastes like.

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

Thanks for listening!

Episode 059: The Onza and the Yemish

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:37 — 17.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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 022: Megatherium

Posted on by

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:34 — 12.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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 Carribbean, 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!