Strange Animals Podcast

By: Katherine Shaw
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  • Summary

  • A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!
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Biological Sciences Natural History
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Episodes
  • Episode 405: Anteaters and the Capelobo

    Episode 405: Anteaters and the Capelobo
    Nov 4 2024
    Thanks to Molly and Mila for suggesting the anteater and its relations this week! Further reading: How anteaters lost their teeth The giant anteater has a long tongue and a little mouth, and adorable babies: The giant anteater has a weird skull [photos by Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72183871]: The tamandua is like a mini giant anteater that can climb trees: The silky anteater looks like a weird teddy bear [photo by Quinten Questel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30287945]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to talk about some unusual mammals, suggested by Molly and Mila. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for almost two years and now we’re finally going to learn about it! It’s the anteater and its close relations, including a creepy anteater cryptid that would have fit in just fine during monster month. A lot of animals are called anteaters because they eat ants, but the anteaters we’re talking about today belong to the suborder Vermilingua, meaning “worm tongue.” That’s because they all have long, sticky tongues that they use to lick up ants, termites, and other insects. Anteaters are native to Central and South America and are closely related to sloths, and more distantly related to armadillos. The sloth and anteater share a common ancestor who lived around 60 million years ago, a little animal that mainly ate worms and insect larvae and probably lived in burrows. Because its food was soft and didn’t need a lot of chewing, when a mutation cropped up that caused its teeth to be weak, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t using its teeth anyway. When the first anteaters evolved from this ancestral species, they didn’t need teeth either, and gradually they lost their teeth entirely. Modern anteaters have no teeth at all. Sloths also evolved from this weak-toothed ancestor, and sloths eat plants. Plants need a lot of chewing, and most animals that eat plants have really strong teeth, but sloths retained the genetics for weak teeth. They don’t even have an enamel coating on their teeth, and instead of grinding molars, their teeth are basically soft little pegs. Luckily for the sloth, the little peg teeth do continue to grow throughout its life, so it never wears its teeth down so far it can’t chew. Anteaters, sloths, and their distant relation the armadillo all share the same type of vision from their shared ancestor too. They can’t see colors at all but have good vision in low light, which is why scientists think they all evolved from an animal that spent most of its time underground hunting for worms. Anteaters have strong claws that allow them to dig into termite and ant nests, and armadillos spend a lot of time in burrows they dig. We don’t actually know what the common ancestor of these related animals looked like because we haven’t found any fossils of it yet. In the past, scientists thought that pangolins and aardvarks were related to anteaters because they all have similar adaptations to a similar diet, but that’s just another example of convergent evolution. We talked about pangolins and aardvarks back in episode 65, as well as the giant anteater. The giant anteater is the one most people know about. It earns the name giant because it can grow almost eight feet long, or 2 1/2 meters, if you include the tail. Its fur is brown and cream with a distinctive black stripe from its chest to its back that scientists used to think acted as camouflage. Because the black fur is outlined with white, making it stand out, scientists now think it’s used as a warning to potential predators, because the giant anteater can be dangerous. If it feels threatened, it will rear up on its hind legs, using its long tail as a prop, to slash at a predator. Its claws are so big that it knuckle-walks on its for...
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    11 mins
  • Episode 404: The Kraken and Chessie

    Episode 404: The Kraken and Chessie
    Oct 28 2024
    Thanks to Ezra and Leo for suggesting these two sea monsters this week! Happy Halloween! Further reading: Legend of Chessie alive, well in Maryland Here be sea monsters: We have met Chessie and...is it us? Not actually a kraken, probably: Not actually Chessie but an atmospheric photo of a toy brontosaurus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Just a few days remain in October, so this is our Halloween episode and the end of monster month for another year! We had so many great suggestions for Halloween episodes that I couldn’t get to them all, but I might just sprinkle some in throughout the other months too. We have two great monsters to talk about this week, suggested by Ezra and Leo, the kraken and Chessie the sea serpent. First, as always on our Halloween episode, we have a few housekeeping details. If anyone wants a sticker, feel free to email me and I’ll send you one, or more than one if you like. That offer is good all the time, not just now. I don’t have any new stickers printed but I do have lots of the little ones with the logo and the little ones with the capybara. I also don’t have any new books out this year, but you can still buy the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book if you like. I am actually working on another book about mystery animals, tentatively titled Small Mysteries since it’s going to be all about mysteries surrounding small animals like frogs and invertebrates that often get overlooked. I’m hoping to have it ready to publish in early 2026 or so. I don’t know that I’ll do another Kickstarter for it since that was a lot of work, and I just finished a Kickstarter for more enamel pins and just can’t even think about the stress of doing another crowdfunding campaign anytime soon. Also, I hate to keep asking listeners for money. Anyway, one of the things I don’t like about Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie is that I didn’t cite my sources properly, so for the Small Mysteries book I’m being very careful to have footnotes on pretty much every page so that anyone who wants to double-check my information can do so easily. But all that is in the future. Let’s celebrate Halloween now with a couple of sea monsters! We’ll start with Ezra’s suggestion, the kraken. It’s a creature of folklore that has gotten confused with lots of other folklore monsters. We don’t know how old the original legend is, but the first mention of it in writing dates to 1700, when an Italian writer published a book about his travels to Scandinavia. One of the things he mentions is a giant fish with lots of horns and arms, which he called the “sciu-crak.” This seems to come from the Norwegian word meaning sea krake. “Krake” is related to the English word crooked, and it can refer to an old dead tree with crooked branches, or tree roots, or something with a hook on the end like a boat hook, or an anchor or drag, or various similar things related to hooks or multiple prongs. That has led to people naturally assuming that the kraken had many arms and was probably a giant squid, and that may be the case. But there’s another possibility, because in many old uses of the word krake, it means something weak or misshapen, like a rotten old dead tree. In the olden days in Norway, people thought that if you spoke about an animal by name, the spirit that protected that animal would hear you. Some historians think that whale-hunters referred to whales as krake so the whale’s protective spirit wouldn’t guess that they were planning a whale-hunt. Who would refer to a huge, strong animal like a whale as weak and crooked, after all? Whatever its origins, the kraken’s modern form is mainly due to a Danish bishop called Erik Pontoppidan. He wrote about the kraken in 1753, and embellished the story by saying the kraken could reach out of the ocean with its long arms to grab sailors or just pull an entire ship down into the water and sink it.
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    12 mins
  • Episode 403: Predator X

    Episode 403: Predator X
    Oct 21 2024
    Thanks to Eesa for suggesting this week's topic, the pliosaur Predator X! Further reading: Predator X / Pliosaurus funkei [you can find lots of interesting pictures here, some artwork and some skeletal diagrams] Kronosaurus had a big skull with big teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re one week closer to Halloween, and that means the monsters are getting more monster-y, at least in name, although I wouldn’t want to meet this one in person. It’s referred to as Predator X, and thanks to Eesa for suggesting it! Fortunately for everyone who likes to swim and boat in the ocean, Predator X has been extinct for around 145 million years. It’s a type of marine reptile called a pliosaur, Pliosaurus funkei, but there was nothing funky about it. It was huge, fast, and incredibly strong. Also, the funky part of the name comes from the couple who originally discovered the first specimen, who had the last name of Funke. We only have two Predator X specimens right now, both of them found in the same rock formation from a Norwegian island. The remains were first discovered in 2004 but the process of recovering them took many years. Because winters in Norway are very cold, the exposed rocks were subject to freezing temperatures that had broken a lot of the fossils into fragments, and some of the fossils crumbled into pieces as they dried out. All told, 20,000 pieces were recovered and painstakingly fit back together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle made of fossilized bones. Neither specimen is complete but we have enough bones that scientists can estimate the animal’s size when it was alive—and it was huge! It probably grew up to 39 feet long, or 12 meters, and some individuals would certainly have been bigger. Initial estimates were even longer, up to 50 feet, or over 15 meters, but that was before the specimens were fully studied. Like other pliosaurs, predator X had a short tail and big teeth in its long jaws. Its head was massive, around 7 feet long, or 2 meters, and its front flippers were probably about the same length. It had four flippers, and researchers think its front flippers did most of the work of swimming, with the rear flippers acting as a rudder, but it could probably use its back flippers for a little extra boost of speed when it needed to. But it was a strong, fast swimmer no matter what, probably as fast as a modern orca, and very maneuverable. It had to be, because it ate other marine reptiles like plesiosaurs that were themselves very fast swimmers. It undoubtedly also ate sea turtles and fish, and probably pretty much anything else it could catch. It didn’t eat whales because this was long, long before whales evolved. Predator X got its nickname from reporters back when the paleontologists thought it was 50 feet long. It didn’t have a name yet so it got called Predator X because that sounded impressive (and it is), but it isn’t the only giant pliosaur known. Kronosaurus was originally described in 1924 from fossils discovered in Australia, and current estimates of its size agree that it could probably grow to around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. This may be a low estimate, though, because the size of the biggest skull found might have been over 9 feet long, or 2.85 meters, although the skull isn’t complete so its full size is just an estimate. Pliosaurs do have big heads, but if Kronosaurus’s skull really is longer than predator X’s skull, it was probably a bigger animal overall. Kronosaurus’s fossils have only been found in an ancient inland sea that covered most of Queensland and Central Australia until about 100 million years ago. It was probably a relatively shallow, cold sea, and although it had all the marine animals you’d expect for the time, like sharks, ammonites, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, lungfish, sea turtles, and lots more, Kronosaurus was the apex predator. It was so big and deadly that a full-grown Kronosaurus didn’t have to worry ...
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    7 mins

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Always lovely

Strange Animals Podcast is always entertaining and informative, fantastic for families. Highly recommended for homeschooling, too.

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Interesting

I loved it very entertaining would recommend if you love animal and want to learn more.

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