Strange Animals Podcast

Further reading: Giant early whale Basilosaurus hunted the calves of other whales Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s look at some extinct whale ancestors this month, basilosaurids. We talked about the ancestors of whales in episode 72, about weird whales. After mosasaurs went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago...

Further reading: http://messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-equines.htm Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I stumbled across an interesting mystery animal recently and thought it would make a great topic for a Patreon episode. It’s supposed to be a hybrid animal, but as we’ll soon learn, it can’t possibly be what it’s said to be. The animal is called a jumar...

Further reading: Faceless Fish and the deep-sea voyages that found it Long-Lost ‘Faceless’ Fish Shows Up Near Australia Ipnops: The faceless cusk [photo taken from the second article linked above]: A tripod fish: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s a fish episode! These are also deep-sea fish, and you know how much I love deep-sea animals...

Further reading: https://elephantartgallery.com/blogs/meet Desmond Morris with his favorite Congo painting: Peter/Pierre Brassau and some of his paintings: The so-called donkey painting, and I described it wrong in the episode: Pockets at work: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the early days of the podcast I did an episode about animal musician...

Further reading: Is the Javan tiger Panthera tigris sondaica extant? DNA analysis of a recent hair sample The Sunda tiger [photo by Alfonsopazphoto – Own workAnimaisFotos, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16029853]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re going to learn about a mystery tiger this month, but first we ha...

Further reading: What gives bees their sweet tooth? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Right before I left on my trip to Belize a few months ago, my aunt Janice gave me a magazine to read on the plane, the Autumn 2021 copy of LivingBird. It’s about birds and birdwatching. I actually forgot to take it with me and it was in my car the whole time I was gone...

Further reading: https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html The black-naped pheasant-pigeon: Confuciusornis: Show transcript: We’re going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately. The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to th...

Further reading: Rare pterosaur fossil reveals crocodilian bite 76m years ago Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a type of pterosaur that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now Canada, and we’ll specifically learn about an individual young pterosaur that had a very bad day, a bad day that’s preserved in the fossil record. Pter...

The sewellel is a little rodent: The superflea is a big flea (left, compared to a regular flea, right): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a rodent you may never have heard of, unless you live where it does, and a parasite that makes that rodent its host. It’s not an ordinary parasite, but don’t worry, it’s not icky. You can continue to...

The horned gopher: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This time we’re going to learn about some mammals with weird horns. Specifically, weird nose horns. Nose horns are properly called rostral horns, but that’s not as funny. We’ll start with a family of extinct rodents called horned gophers, or more properly, mylagaulids. The horned gopher wasn’t a gophe...

I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the...

This week we’ll learn about a long-forgotten animal of folklore! Further reading: https://www.anomalist.com/ The Pictish Beast: A dragonesque brooch: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Picts were a population of Celtic people who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland between around the third and tenth centuries. They had their own...

Let’s learn about some of the oldest life ever discovered! Further reading: Microbiologists Find Living Microbes in 2-Billion-Year-Old Rock Chart of life extended by nearly 1.5 billion years Show transcript: Back in episode 168 we talked about the longest-lived organisms known, and finished the episode by discussing endoliths. I’ll quote from that episode as a refresher. An endolith isn’t a...

Further reading: Beavers Have Metal Teeth Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s find out about some animals that incorporate metal into their bodies in more than just trace amounts. We’ll start with the scaly-foot gastropod, a deep-sea snail. It lives around hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, about 1 and ¾ miles below the surface, or about 2800 m...

Is there life on Europa? We take a look at Greenland and Antarctica to find out more about life on Jupiter’s icy moon. Further reading: Life on Venus claim faces strongest challenge yet Stanford researchers’ explanation for formation of abundant features on Europa bodes well for search for extraterrestrial life  Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate S...

It’s Albert the Albanerpetontid! Further reading: Earliest example of a rapid-fire tongue found in ‘weird and wonderful’ extinct amphibians Amphibian skullllll: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a long-extinct amphibian that looked a lot like a reptile. It’s a family of animals called Albanerpetontidae. That’s a mouth...

Further reading: Identifying the beasts in Caesar’s forest Reindeer: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. After the glaciers retreated from Europe at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, forests grew wherever there was enough soil to support a tree. As these new forests spread, they joined forests that had survived the glaciations. By the...

This week let’s look at the work of a really astonishing number of spiders! Further reading: Megaweb! Some of the webs: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Baltimore, Maryland is a city in the northeastern United States, in North America, with a population of 2.8 million people. In 1993 a new wastewater treatment plant was built called the Back Rive...

DRAMA! Bird drama! Here are some further-reading links if you want to verify that I’m not vilifying anyone: Buff-breasted Buttonquail: An image claimed to be of this species revealed Buff-breasted Buttonquail: Smoke & Mirrors A review of specimens of Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii suggests serious concern for its conservation outlook A painted button quail: Show transcript: Wel...

This week let’s learn about some blue frogs! Further reading: Scientists make chance discovery of rare blue skin mutation in Kimberley magnificent tree frog White’s True-Blue Green Tree Frog Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. When most of us draw a frog, we reach for the green markers, because most frogs are green. That’s true of the magnificent tr...

Further reading: Parallels for cetacean trap feeding and tread-water feeding in the historical record across two millennia Haggling over the Hafgufa Many renditions of the hafgufa/aspidochelone: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the olden days, as much as 1700 years ago and probably more, up through the 14th century or so, various manuscripts ab...

Further reading: I Can Has Mutant Larvae? 200-Year-Old ‘Monster Larva’ Mystery Solved ‘Snakeworm’ mystery yields species new to science Hearkening back to the hazelworm Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. A few weeks ago when I was researching big eels, I remembered the mystery eel larva we talked about back in episode 49, and that led me down a fun rabbi...

It’s the annual discoveries episode! Thanks to Stephen and Aryeh for their corrections and suggestions this week! Further reading: Salinella Salve: The Vanishing Creature That Defied Science for Over a Century Three new species of the genus Scutiger Baeticoniscus carmonaensis sp. nov. a new Isopod found in an underground aqueduct from the Roman period located in Southwest Spain (Crustacea, I...

Thanks to Aila, Stella, George, Richard from NC, Emilia, Emerson, and Audie for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creature Feature: Snipe Eel How removing a dam could save North Carolina’s ‘lasagna lizard’ Why Has This North Carolina Town Embraced a Strange Salamander? Scentists search for DNA of an endangered salamander in Mexico City’s canals An X-ray of the slender snipe...

Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance’ The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it’s rude: The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail: The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://co...