300 episodes

A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!

Strange Animals Podcast Katherine Shaw

    • Science
    • 4.7 • 204 Ratings

A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!

    Episode 373: The Tasmanian Devil and the Thylacine

    Episode 373: The Tasmanian Devil and the Thylacine

    Thanks to Carson, Mia, Eli, and Pranav for their suggestions this week!



    Further reading:



    RNA for the first time recovered from an extinct species



    Study finds ongoing evolution in Tasmanian Devils' response to transmissible cancer



    Tasmanian devil research offers new insights for tackling cancer in humans



    The Tasmanian devil looks really cute but fights all the time [picture by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]:







    The Thylacine could opens its jaws verrrrrrry wide:







    Show transcript:

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

    This week we’re going to cover two animals that a lot of people have suggested. Carson and Mia both want to learn about the Tasmanian tiger, and Eli and Pranav both want to hear about the Tasmanian devil. We talked about the Tasmanian tiger, AKA the thylacine, in episode 1, and I thought we’d had a Tasmanian devil episode too but it turns out I was thinking of a March 2019 Patreon bonus episode. So it’s definitely time to learn about both!

    The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to New Guinea, mainland Australia, and the Australian island of Tasmania, and the last known individual died in captivity in 1936. But thylacine sightings have continued ever since it was declared extinct. It was a shy, nervous animal that didn’t do well in captivity, so if the animal survives in remote areas of Tasmania, it’s obviously keeping a low profile.

    The thylacine was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail. It was the size of a big dog, some two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It had a doglike head with rounded ears and could open its long jaws extremely wide. Some accounts say that it would sometimes hop instead of run when it needed to move faster, but this seems to be a myth. It was also a quiet animal, rarely making noise except while hunting, when it would give frequent double yips.

    A 2017 study discovered that the thylacine population split into two around 25,000 years ago, with the two groups living in eastern and western Australia. Around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them.

    Because the thylacine went extinct so recently and scientists have access to preserved specimens less than a hundred years old, and since the thylacine’s former habitat is still in place, it’s a good candidate for de-extinction. As a result, it’s been the subject of many genetic studies recently, to learn as much about it as possible. It’ll probably be quite a while before we have the technology to successfully clone a thylacine, but in the meantime people in Australia keep claiming to see thylacines in the wild. Maybe they really aren’t extinct.

    The Tasmanian devil is related to the thylacine. It’s about the size of a small to average dog, maybe a bulldog, which it resembles in some ways. It’s compact and muscular with a broad head, relatively short snout, and a big mouth with prominent lower fangs. It’s not related to canids at all, of course, and if you just glanced at a Tasmanian devil,

    • 9 min
    Episode 372: Mystery Bovids

    Episode 372: Mystery Bovids

    Thanks to Will and Måns for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about some mystery bovids, or cows and cow relations!



    Further reading:



    A Book of Creatures: Songòmby



    Kouprey: The Ultimate Mystery Mammal



    A musk ox (top) and a wild yak (bottom):







    A young kouprey bull from the 1930s:







    Sculpture of two grown kouprey bulls [photo by Christian Pirkl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73848355]:







    A banteng bull (with a cow behind him) [photo taken from this site]:







    A qilin/kilin/kirin looking backwards:







    The "purple" calf:







    The Milka purple cow:







    Show transcript:

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

    This week we’re going to learn about some mystery bovids, or cow relations, suggested by Will and Måns, whose name I am probably mispronouncing.

    We’ll start with a mystery about the musk ox, which is not otherwise a mysterious animal. Måns emailed about reading a children’s book about animals that had a picture of a musk ox in the part about the Gobi Desert. The problem is, the musk ox is native to the Arctic and was once found throughout Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. So the question is, was the book wrong or are there really musk oxen in the Gobi Desert?

    We’ll start by learning about the musk ox and the Gobi Desert. The musk ox can stand up to 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters. It has thick, dense, shaggy fur all over, a tiny tail only about four inches long, or 10 cm, and horns that curve down close to the sides of its head and then curve up again at the ends.

    The musk ox is well adapted to the cold, which isn’t a surprise since it evolved during the ice ages. Its ancestors lived alongside mammoths, woolly rhinos, and other Pleistocene megafauna. Like many cold-adapted animals, its fur consists of a thick undercoat that keeps it warm, and a much longer layer of fur that protects the softer undercoat. The undercoat is so soft and so good at keeping the animal warm in bitterly cold temperatures that people will sometimes keep musk oxen in order to gather the undercoat in spring when it starts to shed, to use for making clothing and blankets. But it’s definitely not a domesticated animal. It can be aggressive and extremely dangerous.

    A warm coat isn’t the musk ox’s only cold adaptation. The hemoglobin in its blood is able to function well even when it’s cold, which isn’t the case for most mammals. It lives in small herds that gather close together in really cold weather to share body heat, and if a predator threatens the herd, the adults will form a ring around the calves, their heads facing outward. Since a musk ox is huge, heavy, and can run surprisingly fast, plus it has horns, if a wolf or other predator is butted by a musk ox it might end up fatally injured.

    The main predator of the musk ox is the human, who hunted it almost to extinction by the early 20th century. It was completely extirpated in Alaska but was reintroduced there and in parts of Canada in the late 20th century. Similarly, it was reintroduced to parts of Siberia and even parts of northern Europe, although not all the European introductions were successful.

    So what about the Gobi Desert? It’s nowhere near the Arctic. Not all deserts are hot. A desert just has limited rainfall, and the Gobi is a cold desert. Parts of the Gobi are grasslands and parts are sandy or rocky, and it covers a huge expanse of land in central Asia,

    • 14 min
    Episode 371: The Peacock

    Episode 371: The Peacock

    Thanks to Ari for suggesting this week's episode, about the peacock!



    Further reading:



    Peacock tail feathers shake at resonance and hold eye-spots still during courtship displays



    Indian peafowls' crests are tuned to frequencies also used in social displays



    An ocellated turkey (not a peacock but related):







    An Indian peacock male:







    An Indian peahen with chicks [photo from this site]:







    Close-up of a male Indian peacock's crest [photo by Jatin Sindhu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49736186]:







    A male Indian peacock with train on display [photo by Thimindu Goonatillake from Colombo, Sri Lanka - Peacock Dance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19395087]:







    A green peacock [photo from this site]:







    The mysterious Congo peacock [photo by Terese Hart, taken from this site]:







    Show transcript:



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



    This week we’re going to talk about a beautiful bird that almost everyone has seen pictures of, and a lot of people might have seen in zoos and parks. It’s a suggestion by Ari, who wants to learn about the peacock!



    The name peacock is technically only used for the male bird, with the female called a peahen and the birds all together referred to as peafowl. Most people just say peacocks, though, because the male peacock has such a fabulous tail that it’s what people think of when they think of peafowl. I’m happy to report that baby peafowl are called peachicks.



    The peacock most people are familiar with is native to India, specifically called the Indian peafowl. It’s a surprisingly large bird, with a big male weighing more than 13 lbs, or 6 kg. Females are smaller. It’s the size of a wild turkey and in fact it’s related to the turkey, along with pheasants, partridges, and chickens. Back in episode 144 we talked about a bird called the ocellated turkey, a brightly colored turkey that lives in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is part of Mexico. The male’s tail feathers have the same type of colorful eyespots seen on a peacock’s tail.



    But the peacock’s tail is way bigger than any turkey’s tail. It’s called a train and most of the time it’s folded so that it’s not in the way. A big male can grow a train that’s much longer than the rest of his body, more than five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Most of the train’s elongated feathers end in a colorful eye-spot, around 200 of them in total. The eyespot pattern really does resemble a big eye, with a dark blue spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of blue-green and a bigger ring of bronze. The bronze color is surrounded by pale green and the rest of the feather is a darker green. As far as we know, the eyespots aren’t supposed to look like eyes the way some animal markings are. A leopard or other predator doesn’t attack the tail thinking it’s a peacock’s head. It’s just a pattern.



    For a long time scientists were divided as to what the peacock’s train was really used for. Not everyone thought it was for showing off for peahens. Some thought it was just for camouflage in the jungle. The main confusion was why the peacock would grow such a long, conspicuous train, which can be a hindrance to him in thick undergrowth and can attract the attention of predators.

    • 14 min
    Episode 370: Animals Discovered in 2023

    Episode 370: Animals Discovered in 2023

    Let's look at some of the most interesting animals discovered last year!



    Further reading:



    Newly-discovered ‘margarita snails’ from the Florida Keys are bright lemon-yellow



    Tiny spirits roam the corals of Japan—two new pygmy squids discovered







    Strange New Species of Aquifer-Dwelling Catfish Discovered in India







    Bizarre New Species of Catfish Discovered in South America







    Unicorn-like blind fish discovered in dark waters deep in Chinese cave







    New Species of Hornshark Discovered off Australia







    Cryptic New Bird Species Identified in Panama







    New Species of Forest Hedgehog Discovered in China







    New species of voiceless frog discovered in Tanzania







    The weird new spiny katydid:







    Show transcript:



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



    It’s time for our annual discoveries episode, where we learn about some animals discovered in the previous year! There are always lots more animals discovered than we have time to talk about, so I just choose the ones that interest me the most.



    That includes the cheerfullest of springtime-looking marine snails discovered in the Florida Keys. The Florida Keys are a group of tropical islands along a coral reef off the coast of Florida, which is in North America. A related snail was also discovered off the coast of Belize in Central America that looks so similar that at first the scientists thought they were the same species with slightly different coloration. A genetic study of the snails revealed that they were separate species. The one found in the Keys is a lemony yellow color while the one from Belize is more of a lime green.



    The snails have been placed into a new genus but belong to a group called worm snails. When a young worm snail finds a good spot to live, it sticks its shell to a rock or other surface and stays there for the rest of its life. Its shell isn’t shaped like an ordinary snail shell but instead grows long and sort of curved or curly. The snail spreads a thin layer of slime around it using two little tentacles, and the slime traps tiny pieces of food that float by.



    The new snails are small and while the snail’s body is brightly colored, its shell is drab and helps it blend in with the background. Scientists think that the colorful body may be a warning to potential predators, since its mucus contains toxins. It mainly lives on pieces of dead coral.



    Another invertebrate discovery last year came from Japan, where two new species of pygmy squid were found living in seagrass beds and coral reefs. Both are tiny, only 12 mm long, and are named after little forest spirits from folklore. Despite its small size, it can eat shrimp bigger than it is by grabbing it with its little bitty adorable arms. Both species have been seen before but never studied until now.

    • 16 min
    Episode 369: Animals and Ultraviolet Light

    Episode 369: Animals and Ultraviolet Light

    Sorry to my Patreon subscribers, since this is mostly a rerun episode from April 2019. It's a fun one, though!



    The teensy pumpkin toadlet [photo by Diogo B. Provete - http://calphotos.berkeley.edu, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6271494]:







    The electromagnetic spectrum. Look how tiny the visible light spectrum is on this scale! [By NASA - https://science.nasa.gov/ems/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97302056]:







    Show transcript:



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



    This was supposed to be the 2023 discoveries episode, but not only have I had a really busy week that’s kept me from finishing the research, I’m also coming down with a cold. My voice still sounds okay right now but considering how I feel, it’s not going to sound good for long, and I need to finish the March Patreon episode too! I decided to rerun a very old Patreon episode this week to allow me time to finish the March Patreon episode before my voice turns into an unintelligible croak. I did drop in some fresh audio to correct a mistake I made in the original episode and add some new information.



    This is one of my favorite Patreon episodes and I hope you like it too. It’s about animals that can see ultraviolet light.



    I was going to make this a frog news episode, but I started writing about a tiny frog from



    Brazil called the pumpkin toadlet and the episode veered off in a very interesting direction. But let’s start with that frog.



    It’s called the pumpkin toadlet because it’s an orangey-yellow color that is just about the same color as pureed pumpkin. It’s poisonous and lives in the forests of Brazil. During mating season, the pumpkin toadlet comes out during the day, walking around making little buzzing noises. Researchers assumed those were mating calls until they started studying how the pumpkin toadlet and its relations process sounds. It turns out that the pumpkin toadlet probably can’t even hear its own buzzing noise. But they did discover that the pumpkin toadlet fluoresces brightly under UV light.



    We’ve talked about this phenomenon before, back in the Patreon episode about animals that glow. Quite a lot of frogs turn out to fluoresce in ultraviolet light, which is a component of daylight. That explains why the pumpkin toadlet comes out during the day in mating season. It wants to be seen by potential mates. It’s actually the frog’s bones that fluoresce, but since it has very thin skin without dark pigment cells, the ultraviolet light can light up the bones.



    I wanted to make sure I gave everyone the correct information about ultraviolet light, so I started researching it…and that led me down this rabbit hole. What animals can see in ultraviolet light? Can any humans see ultraviolet light? What does it look like?



    Light is made up of waves of varying lengths. The retina at the back of your eyeball contains two types of cells, rods and cones, which are named for their shapes. Rods are for low-light vision and cones are for detail and color vision.



    Humans have more cones than rods because we’re diurnal animals, meaning we’re most active during the day. Animals that are mostly nocturnal have more rods than cones, which help them see in low light although they don’t see color as well or sometimes at all as a result.



    Most humans can see any color that’s a mixture of red, green, and blue, since we have three types of cone cells that react to wavelengths roughly equivalent to those three colors. Some people have what’s called red-green color blindness, which means either the person doesn’t have cones that sense the color red or cones that sense the color green. Various shades of green and red look alike for these people.

    • 13 min
    Episode 368: The Bison

    Episode 368: The Bison

    Thanks to Jason for suggesting this week's topic, the bison!



    Further reading:

    New research documents domestic cattle genetics in modern bison herds

    Higgs Bison: Mysterious Hybrid of Bison and Cattle Hidden in Ice Age Cave Art



    A cave painting of steppe bison and other animals:







    An American bison [photo by Kim Acker, taken from this site]:







    Some European bison [photo by Pryndak Vasyl, taken from this site]:







    The bison sound in this episode came from this site.



    Show transcript:

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

    This week we’re going to learn about the bison, a suggestion from Jason. There are two species of bison alive today, the American bison and the European bison. Both are sometimes called buffalo while the European bison is sometimes called the wisent. I’m mostly going to call it the wisent too in this episode so I only have to say the word bison 5,000 times instead of 10,000.

    Bison are herd animals that can congregate in huge numbers, but these big herds are made up of numerous smaller groups. The smaller groups are made up of a lead female, called a cow, who is usually older, other cows, and all their offspring, called calves. Males, called bulls, live in small bachelor groups. The American bison mostly eats grass while the European bison eats a wider selection of plants in addition to grass.

    The bison is a big animal with horns, a shaggy dark brown coat, and a humped shoulder. The American bison’s shoulder is especially humped, which allows for the attachment of strong neck muscles. This allows the animal to clear snow from the ground by swinging its head side to side. The European bison’s hump isn’t as pronounced and it carries its head higher. The bison looks slow and clumsy, but it can actually run up to 35 mph, or 55 km/hour, can swim well, and can jump obstacles that are 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters.

    The American bison can stand over six and a half feet high at the shoulder, or 2 meters, while the European bison stands almost 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters. This is massively huge! Bison are definitely ice age megafauna that once lived alongside mammoths and woolly rhinos, so we’re lucky they’re still around. Both species almost went extinct in recent times and were only saved by a coordinated effort by early conservationists.

    The American bison in particular has a sad story. Before European colonizers arrived, bison were widespread throughout North America. Bison live in herds that migrate sometimes long distances to find food, and many of the North American tribes were also migratory to follow the herds, because the bison was an important part of their diet and they also used its hide and other body parts to make items they needed. The colonizers knew that, and they knew that by killing off the bison, the people who depended on bison to live would starve to death. Since bison were also considered sacred, the emotional and societal impact of colonizers killing the animals was also considerable.

    In the 19th century, colonizers killed an estimated 50 million bison. A lot of them weren’t even used for anything. People would shoot as many bison as possible from trains and just leave the bodies to rot, and this practice was actually encouraged by the railroads, who advertised these “hunting” trips. The United States government also encouraged the mass killing of bison and even h...

    • 11 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
204 Ratings

204 Ratings

Lfive3814 ,

Good but…

I wish that you does not do the mistake the last minutes. Also, can you do a episode on The cheetah? I have not really learned about it much. Keep up the good work! (Can anyone agrees that she is smart?)

Izzy Niley ,

This. Is. An. Amazing. Podcast. I can’t with it!

Hi, I’m Izzy, can I just say that Kate’s voice is so soothing, like literally my daughter, Bela can and has accidentally slept while listening to her fricking voice, multiple times.🤣🤣🤣 Kate is so smart and funny as well. Bless you Kate and all who read this 😊😇👼🏼

cats bond ,

Leon

I love this podcast it’s the best I already know a lot about animals and I’m learning more and can you do the Vaquita it’s like a dolphin 🐬 🤘🌅🏝🌊🛳 and can you do more sea animals the ocean is like my happy place.

Top Podcasts In Science

Hidden Brain
Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Radiolab
WNYC Studios
Something You Should Know
Mike Carruthers | OmniCast Media | Cumulus Podcast Network
Ologies with Alie Ward
Alie Ward
StarTalk Radio
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science Vs
Spotify Studios

You Might Also Like

Relax With Animal Facts
Stefan Wolfe
Just the Zoo of Us
Ellen & Christian Weatherford
Nature Guys
Nature Guys
I Know Dino: The Big Dinosaur Podcast
Garret and Sabrina
Forever Ago
American Public Media
Throughline
NPR