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by Katherine Shaw
A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!
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- 6 days ago11 min
Episode 502: Back to the Ocean
Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Life arose in the oceans and only much later spread to the land. But some land animals returned to the ocean and eventually became fully marine animals. That’s our topic this month, animals that returned to the sea. Vertebrates that evolved on land are called tetrapods, meaning four-footed. It applies even to animals like birds that have two legs and two wings, and snakes that have no legs, because all the ancestors of tetrapods had four legs. Returning to marine life as a tetrapod eventually results in an animal developing certain characteristics. Even animals like sea turtles become more streamlined, which helps the animal swim more easily, and arms and legs develop into flippers for the same reason. Sometimes limbs are lost completely, like the rear legs of cetaceans and sirenians, because they’re not needed. One interesting note is that as far as we know, all marine tetrapods still have to breathe air, which requires them to come to the surface of the water periodically. The ancestors of marine tetrapods probably all started out as partially aquatic and gradually became more and more at home in the water. That’s true even for animals as well adapted to marine life as whales. Some of the earliest whale ancestors were the ambulocetids, which probably looked sort of like a cross between a hippopotamus and a crocodile. Ambulocetid means “walking whale,” but there’s some evidence that it might have already evolved to be fully aquatic 49 million years ago. It had short legs that might not have been strong enough to support it out of water. It might have been covered with short fur like a seal but it might have had little to no fur, more like a hippopotamus. Either way, it had long toothy jaws, strong legs with webbed toes that it used to propel itself through the water, and a tail that probably resembled that of an otter. It grew about ten feet long, or 3 meters. Ambulocetids lived in shallow coastal areas where the land was swampy, and it may have spent part of its time in fresh water. It wouldn’t have looked or acted much like a whale to us, but it was already developing features now found only in whales. By around 41 million years ago, the basilosaurids and their close relations had evolved, and were definitely fully aquatic. Their nostrils had moved almost to the location of modern whales’ blowholes. Their forelegs were basically flippers with little fingers, their hind legs had almost disappeared, and they had tail flukes. They were also much bigger than their ancestors. Basilosaurus could grow up to 60 feet long, or 18 meters, and probably looked more like a gigantic eel than a modern whale. It was long and relatively thin, and may have mostly lived at the ocean’s surface instead of diving for food. Dakosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur despite its name, although it lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, about 145 million years ago. It was a crocodylomorph that grew up to about 16 feet long, or 5 meters, and looked kind of like a shark with legs—but also a lot like a crocodile wearing a shark costume. Its tail had a fin near the end that made it resemble a shark’s tail, and its legs were flipper-like but still obviously legs. It had a whole lot of big serrated teeth in a deep skull with strong jaws. Because its jaws and teeth were so strong, in fact, scientists think Dakosaurus probably ate other marine reptiles instead of just fish. While Dakosaurus was streamlined and well adapted to life in the ocean, we don’t know if it left the water to lay its eggs on land the way sea turtles still do or if it gave birth in the water. We don’t have any nest sites or young specimens one way or another. Other marine reptiles definitely gave birth in the water, including ichthyosaurs. Ichthyosaurs and their close relations were incredibly successful, first appearing in the fossil record around 250 million years ago and last appearing around 90 million years ago. Most ichthyosaurs grew around 6 and a half to 11 feet long, or 2 to 3.3 meters, depending on species, so while they were pretty big animals, they weren’t enormous. They would have been fast, though, and looked a lot like fish or dolphins, with four flippers, a dorsal fin, a long tail with fins, and a long thin rostrum with lots of little teeth. We know they gave birth to live young because we have fossils of female ichthyosaurs who died in the process of giving birth, with the baby’s tail outside of its mother but the rest of it still in the birth canal. We have other fossils of ichthyosaurs with partially developed young in what would have been the mother’s uterus. We also have lots of ichthyosaur coprolites that show us what it ate, since the coprolites fossilized with pieces of undigested food in them. This includes fish scales and squid beaks. Of course, if you want to talk a
- 1 weeks ago9 min
Episode 501: The Wee Waa Monster and Tupandactylus
Further reading: Pterosaur melanosomes support signalling functions for early feathers Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This month we have a small mystery from Australia, which as far as I can find is still unsolved. In 1950, a man named George Gray started hearing bellowing from the gum swamp near his house. His adult son, Ted, heard it too and reported it was loud enough to hear half a mile away, or about 800 meters. The bellowing sounded like a crocodile. The problem is, the Grays lived just outside of the small town of Wee Waa in New South Wales, Australia. Very, very rarely a saltwater crocodile wanders down the coast as far as New South Wales, but Wee Waa is a five or six hour drive inland. It’s not crocodile country. It gets cold in winter and it’s surrounded by farmland. Ted Gray found tracks in the swamp where a large animal had flattened tall grass, although the footprints didn’t have claw marks. He estimated that if the animal was a crocodile, it was only about 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, although he did note that none of the trails seemed to lead to the water. The bellowing mostly occurred in early morning and around sundown and continued for several months. Attempts to search the wetlands were unsuccessful, mostly because of heavy rain that spring and summer. The water was ordinarily no more than 3 feet deep, or about a meter [actually about 92 cm, got this wrong], but was much deeper that year. Hundreds of people came to listen to the bellowing, though, and one constable perched in a tree for most of a day hoping to shoot the animal. He never saw it. Seven years earlier, during World War II, an armored division of troops stayed in the area. The troops had been based in northwest Australia for a time and were supposed to have brought some baby crocodiles with them as mascots. The soldiers were told to kill the crocodiles, but newspapers in 1950 suggested they’d been released instead and that one had found its way to George Gray’s swamp. That doesn’t explain how it survived seven winters or why no one had seen or heard it until then. Then again, one man named Ross Tuckey claimed he’d seen a crocodile several years before about 20 miles away, or 32 kilometers. He’d first thought it was a goanna, which is a type of monitor lizard that lives in Australia. Some species of goanna can grow more than 8 feet long, or about 2.5 meters. When Tuckey’s dog rushed at the animal, it bowled the dog away with its tail and slid into a dammed stream. Tuckey watched it float in the water with only its nostrils visible. The Wee Waa monster was never identified. That’s all there is! I tried to find out more but if anyone ever found what animal was bellowing in George Gray’s swamp, the newspapers didn’t report about it. I actually only learned about this animal mystery when I was searching for something else, which is always a lot of fun. *** 115 million years ago a colony of strange flying animals lived in what is now northeastern Brazil in South America. It was a reptile that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but it wasn’t a dinosaur. It wasn’t a bird either. Its wingspan might have been as much as 13 feet across, or 4 meters, which was big for a pterosaur, which of course is what it was. Specifically, it’s Tupandactylus imperator [too-pan-DAK-tillus imper-AH-ter], and it is a complete weirdo. Tupandactylus was only described in 1997, but we have several really well preserved specimens, including nearly complete skulls. And it’s the skull that makes it so bizarre. Many pterosaurs had large crests that were probably brightly colored and probably used to attract mates, but Tupandactylus had what may be the largest crest ever found. It was just ridiculously large, nearly as big as its whole body, not counting its wings, of course. Tupandactylus’s skull is hard to describe. I’m going to do my best, but you might want to click through to the show notes and look at the picture. First, imagine a pelican’s bill. It’s long and has a pouch underneath. But in your mental picture, push that pouch forward so that it’s at the base of the lower jaw like a chin, and made of bone instead of soft tissue. Tupandactylus had a sort of
- 2 weeks ago9 min
NEW Episode 500: Crikey, it’s 500 episodes!
It’s our 500th episode! Wow! Thanks to Rosie, Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Crikey! Newly Discovered Snake Species Named After Steve Irwin Steve Irwin’s Treesnail A young Steve Irwin’s tree snail [photo taken from link above]: A marbled lungfish: A fennec, smallest and cutest of all foxes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a brand new episode, because it’s episode 500! Congratulations to me and to you too, listening to the 500th episode of a podcast! That doesn’t happen very often! Despite the big 5-0-0, I’m going to treat this like a regular episode. Thanks to Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, Remy and Julien, and Rosie for their suggestions this week! We’ll start with Dylan, Emily, and Michelle, who live in Australia. A while back now they got to visit the Australia Zoo, which is run by the Irwin family. Steve Irwin was a conservationist, science educator, and wildlife rehabilitator, also known as the Crocodile Hunter for his work relocating crocodiles who were endangering people, and vice versa. He died tragically young in 2006 but his wife and children continue his work. Michelle pointed out that Irwin has been honored by scientists who have named newly discovered animals for him, so let’s learn about a few of them! The most recent one is a type of wolf snake discovered on the Great Nicobar Island off the coast of India and described in 2025, Lycodon irwini. It’s mostly black in color with a slender body, and can grow as much as 47 inches long, or 119 cm. That’s almost four feet long! Luckily it’s non-venomous, plus it has only been found on that one island in evergreen forests, so you’re not likely to run across one by accident. It probably eats small animals like frogs, but we don’t know a whole lot about it yet. Back in 1990, Steve Irwin caught a strange turtle while fishing with his father, Bob, who was also a conservationist. Between them, the two men knew a whole lot about Australian wildlife but they didn’t know what the turtle was. They sent pictures to a turtle expert, who determined that yes, it was a species new to science. It was described in 1997 and named Irwin’s turtle, Elseya irwini. Irwin’s turtle has a black and yellow carapace and lives in the lower part of the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. The female also has a light-colored head and other pale spots on the body. Like some other turtles, it can absorb oxygen from the water through its cloaca, which is often referred to as its butt. A chamber at the end of the cloaca contains structures that act like gills and absorb oxygen. This allows it to stay underwater longer, and in fact it can’t survive in water that doesn’t contain enough oxygen. As a result, Irwin’s turtle is endangered due to habitat loss, especially from pollution and the damming of its river home. It used to be common but its numbers are in decline. The Australia Zoo started a captive breeding program to help conserve the species, and in 2023 they succeeded in hatching the very first Irwin’s turtle babies ever bred in captivity. The last one is my favorite, a land snail named after Steve Irwin. It was described as a new species in 2009, only a few years after Irwin died, and was named Crikey steveirwini. It’s the only species in the genus Crikey. It only lives in high altitudes in the tropical rainforests of northeastern Queensland. It’s rare and not much is known about it, because it’s so hard to find and so small. It has a cone-shaped shell that’s striped with spiral bands of brown, yellow-brown, and white, and it only grows 15 mm long at most. <p class="west
- 3 weeks ago6 min
Episode 499: The Mystery of Amiskwia
Further reading: Cambrian Explosion Month #18: Stem-Gnathifera Ambiguous Amiskwia Amiskwia, possibly [picture taken from above link]: Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for May 2025! We’ve talked about a lot of strange and mysterious animals from the Cambrian in past episodes, especially episode 69, but I don’t think we’ve learned about Amiskwia yet. For a long time it was another mystery animal from the Burgess Shale and a few other places, dating back as much as 518 million years ago, but as of only a few years ago the mystery seems to be solved, at least mostly. Amiskwia grew about an inch long, or 2.5 cm, which actually made it one of the larger animals that lived in the Cambrian. It probably looked superficially like a slug, with a slightly flattened body and a pair of short tentacles on its head. It had a paddle-shaped tail and two flaps on its sides that probably acted as fins to help it swim. Its mouth was on the underside of its head and was surprisingly complicated, with two pairs of plates with little spikes on them. We even know about its internal anatomy, since some of the Amiskwia fossils are so well preserved that its insides can be studied too. It had a brain and a simple digestive tract. Amiskwia was described in 1911 by Charles Walcott, who described a lot of the Burgess Shale fossils. Walcott classified it as a type of arrow worm. When scientists gave it a closer look later, not everyone agreed it was related to modern arrow worms. Some suggested it might be a type of ribbon worm, or maybe an early mollusk, while others argued that it was so different from known animals that it belonged in its own phylum. A 2019 study suggested that Amiskwia’s weird mouth plates matched up with the mouth plates in a living animal, and a 2022 follow-up study confirmed the 2019 findings. Not everyone agrees, but as of now, Amiskwia is considered an ancestral gnathiferan. There! Mystery solved! Wait, what do you mean you don’t know what a gnathiferan is? As everyone knows, especially me, I definitely didn’t just learn about this type of animal myself just now, gnathiferans include a lot of different animals with complex jaws—not like your own jaws, but with little plates and spikes and moving parts made of chitin. Most gnathiferans are tiny, microscopic or barely a few millimeters long, so Amiskwia was a giant in comparison. Arrow worms are also generally considered to be gnathiferans, so Wolcott wasn’t too far off in his description of Amiskwia. We don’t know what Amiskwia ate, but it could probably swim pretty well and most likely hunted other animals or scavenged already dead ones. Scientists think it probably spent most of its time swimming well above the sea floor, which is why it’s a relatively rare fossil. Another Cambrian mystery animal that lived even earlier than Amiskwia, around 520 million years ago, and which is probably related to it, is Timorebestia. Its fossils were discovered in Greenland and only described in 2024. It had a pair of long tentacles or antennae, a rounded paddle-like tail, and fins on each side of its wide, flattened body. Its tentacles were around half the length of its body–and if Amiskwia was a giant compared to modern gnathiferans, Timorebestia was a colossus! It grew almost 8 inches long, or over 20 cm, not even counting its tentacles! Some Timorebestia specimens are so well preserved that scientists can identify what they ate right before they died, and it looks like they mostly ate small arthropods. Timorebestia was probably the biggest and strongest predator in the area when it was alive, one of the earliest apex predators discovered. Another similar animal was Nectocaris, which has been discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada and other Cambrian fossil sites in China and Australia. It was flattened and had a pa
- Aug 17, 20269 min
Episode 498: Octopolis
Further reading: https://sharonahill.substack.com/ https://metazoan.net/54-octlantis/ https://metazoan.net/109-octopolis-and-octlantis/ Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses The gloomy octopus [photo by Niki Hubbard – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/118664956, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123044473]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like April Fools Day, which is April first. I especially don’t like it when someone makes an April fools day post online and just leaves it there afterwards. It’s too easy for other people to stumble across it and think it’s real. This goes double for strange animal and cryptid reports. I subscribe to geologist Sharon Hill’s Pop Goes the Cryptid articles, and on March 31 she talked about a hoax called the North American Pine Squid. It got popular around Halloween of 2024. It’s said to be a black squid or octopus that lives in pine trees in remote, heavily forested places like the Pacific northwest and the Appalachian mountains. Most of the time it eats small animals like birds and squirrels, along with pine cones, but if someone walks underneath its tree, the pine squid grabs the person, pulls them up into the tree, and they’re never seen again. But you don’t have to worry, because the pine squid isn’t a real animal. It’s also not even a new story. It’s based on another hoax called the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, which dates back to 1998. In the case of the tree octopus, it wasn’t created as a hoax or an April fool’s joke but as a study about whether children can tell if a website is reliable or not. The researchers made a page with information about a type of octopus that lived in the ocean but that also climbed trees. Then they asked several classrooms of children around age 11, from different schools in different countries, to read the page, look at the pictures provided, and answer some questions. The study found that most of the children thought the page contained reliable information. Only a few figured out that the tree octopus wasn’t real. The study has been used repeatedly to argue that children need more lessons in how to evaluate a website to know if it contains reliable information, and of course that’s always a good thing. But it makes me a little angry too, because how were the kids supposed to know that octopuses can’t climb trees? There are so many amazing and strange animals out there, a tree octopus sounds perfectly normal if you don’t know very much about octopuses. So I argue that kids should be taught about everything, and taught in as interesting a way as possible so that they remember it better. The same goes for adults. But this episode isn’t actually about April fools day, tree octopuses, or pine squids. It is about a type of octopus, and what I’m going to tell you is so weird that I have to reassure you that it’s actually true. It’s not a hoax or an April fools joke or anything like that. It’s about the gloomy octopus and the underwater cities some populations have created, referred to as Octopolis and Octlantis. I swear I’m not making this up! The gloomy octopus lives off the eastern coast of Australia and the northern coast of New Zealand. It’s mainly brown and gray, but it has orange on the undersides of its arms, and it’s covered in little bumps that help camouflage it. Its eyes are white. On average, it has an armspan of about 6 ½ feet, or 2 meters, with females generally larger than males. Like many other octopuses, when the female lays her eggs, she stops eating completely and protects the eggs until they hatch. After they hatch, she dies. The gloomy octopus lives in shallow warm water and especially likes places with lots of rock
- Aug 10, 20267 min
Episode 497 Megarachne
Megarachne as we know it now: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Megarachne is only known from two specimens, neither of which is complete, which adds to the confusion. It lived around 300 million years ago in what is now South America. It was described in 1980 from the first specimen discovered and was named Megarachne, which means big spider. The scientist who described it thought it was a type of primitive spider related to modern tarantulas, but much bigger. He estimated its legspan was 20 inches, or 50 cm, with a body length of just over 13 inches, or 34 cm. That made it the largest spider ever known by a lot. Other palaeontologists, especially arachnologists who specialize in spiders and their relations, weren’t convinced Megarachne was a spider. But it wasn’t until 2005 when a more complete specimen was discovered that anyone could say for sure what it was. The second specimen made it clear that it wasn’t a spider at all but a sea scorpion, or eurypterid, and not an especially large one compared to some. It probably grew to 21 inches long, or 54 cm. But by then, Megarachne had gotten really popular as a giant spider. It was in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters, although the producers changed its name to Mesothelae right before it aired, which was just after the new findings about Megarachne came out. Mesothelae is a suborder of big spiders from parts of Asia that retain many traits of ancestral spiders. It was a valiant attempt by the BBC to make the documentary less incorrect, but of course the spider they were talking about still wasn’t a spider and no spider known has ever grown that large. But while Megarachne isn’t a giant spider, and isn’t even a very big eurypterid, it is important since not very many eurypterids are known from South America. It also appears to be closely related to Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, similar-looking euripterids from North America and Europe. But some researchers think it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. Instead of three similar creatures living in different areas, they think there’s something else going on. Eurypterids were arthropods, the phylum that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton that they molt periodically as they grow, and many arthropods have complicated life stages compared to other animals. When a shark hatches, it looks like a miniature adult and just grows larger as it gets older, but when an arthropod hatches, it usually doesn’t look anything like its adult form. Some arthropods go through many stages of life before reaching the adult body plan. Crustaceans have numerous larval stages, for instance, that often look very different from the adult. Some researchers think that Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus were all the same animal, and that the differences are due to it being in three different stages of development when it died and was preserved. We don’t have any way to know if this was correct, of course, not until we hopefully find more fossil remains. Other eurypterids did appear to go through some physical changes during maturation, as far as researchers can tell with the remains we have, but Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus belonged to a different family from other eurypterids and are much rarer. They might have been quite different developmentally. We can also look at the living relations to see how likely it is that eurypterids had different larval stages where they looked different from the adult form. Eurypterids were probably most closely related to horseshoe crabs, although not everyone agrees. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years and are really neat animals that we’re lucky to still have in the world. The horseshoe crab hatches into a larva that looks a lot like a trilobite. It does indeed go through physical changes as it grows and molts over the course of three years, so it’s reasonable to assume that eurypterids did too. On the other hand, some researchers think eurypterids were more closely related to modern scorpions. Scorpions actually give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, and the female carries the babies on her back for several days up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once the ba
- Aug 3, 20267 min
Episode 496 Two Mystery Invertebrates
Further reading: How did a tiny bee get to French Polynesia? Eight new species help solve a scientific mystery Secrets in the canopy: Scientists discover 8 striking new bee species in the Pacific Canopy specialist Hylaeus bees highlight sampling biases and resolve Michener’s mystery Scientists discover endoparasitic marine tapeworm trapped in Cretaceous amber Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for August 2024! It’s the start of Invertebrate August, so we have two invertebrate mysteries to discuss today, one mostly solved and one not. Let’s start with the solved mystery, about a tiny bee. In 1934, three tiny bee specimens were collected in French Polynesia, specifically on a particular type of flower in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The bees really were tiny, only 4 mm long. They weren’t described until 1965, when they were placed in the genus Hylaeus. This is a really big genus with over 500 species that live throughout the world, but the species most closely related to the newly described Tuamotu’s masked bee lives in Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. In case you’re kind of hazy on geography, like me, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand are part of what’s called Oceania, a giant chunk of the Pacific Ocean where there’s not a whole lot of land. I mean, except for Australia, which is big. The Tuamotu Archipelago is also part of Oceania, and part of French Polynesia, but it’s really remote. It consists of a spread-out collection of 78 low islands, many of them too tiny to support humans, none of them with a source of fresh water except for rain. They’re tropical and quite beautiful, with many unique animals and plants living on and around them. They’re also almost 2,500 miles, or 4,000 km away from the places where the tiny bee’s closest relatives live. Even in 1965, scientists had questions about the tiny bee. How did 4mm bees get to such remote islands, and were they even still around? The bees hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1934. Since the Tuamotu Archipelago has suffered from European explorers and missionaries bringing invasive species to some islands, colonization by France, and nuclear weapons testing, scientists worried the bee had gone extinct and that they would never solve the mystery of how it got there in the first place. Bees are attracted to flowers, and the three 1934 specimens were discovered on flowers, so naturally scientists had been looking for the bees on flowers. But it turns out that in the Polynesian islands, bees mostly hang out in the treetops. Once scientists figured this out, they began discovering new species of bee—eight of them in fact, collected between 2014 and 2019 from various islands in Fiji, Micronesia, and French Polynesia. All eight species are closely related to Tuamotu’s masked bee, so scientists now have a pretty good idea of how it traveled thousands of miles to get to its French Polynesian home. Its ancestors island-hopped. There are more than 1,700 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of them barely known to humans. Researchers think there are probably a lot more species of bee to be discovered in the treetops of Pacific islands, now that they know where to look. With luck, they’ll be able to find Tuamotu’s masked bee too, quietly living out its bee life above the scientists’ heads. Next, let’s discuss our unsolved mystery. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin, is the gift that just keeps on giving to the scientific world, and our mystery involves a flatworm found in amber. The amber comes from Myanmar and dates to about 99 million years ago. In addition to bits of inorganic matter like tiny pebbles and sand grains, most organisms found in amber from this site are insects and roundworms, animals you’d expect to find on and around trees. The team examining this particular piece of amber found lots of interesting things, but then they discovered this one. The flatworm is about 10mm long and it’s beautifully preserved, which means the scientists were able to compare it to modern flatworms to see what it might be most closely related to. It’s most similar to a parasitic flatworm found in shark intestines. You know, an animal not typically found in trees. (I stole that joke from paleontologist Kenneth De Baets, by the way. Credit where credit’s due.) It isn’t a complete worm but a partial one, basically a tentacle with little hooks to ke
- Jul 27, 20267 min
Episode 495 The Koao
Further reading: Gauguin’s Magical Mystery Koao Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The French painter Paul Gauguin moved to the island of Hiva Oa in 1901, less than two years before he died. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a volcanic archipelago in Polynesia in the South Pacific. It’s extremely remote, only slightly closer to Mexico than it is to New Zealand, although Hawaii is even closer. During his short time on Hiva Oa, Gauguin produced quite a few paintings, including a famous one whose title translates to “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.” It depicts a dancer and magician named Haapuani and represents the fast-vanishing local culture. One of the details of the painting is a bird on the ground next to a small dog. But no one can identify the bird in the painting. The bird is mostly blue but with green face and wings, and the small dog appears to be biting its wing or back. It’s about the size of a chicken, although details aren’t especially clear due to Gauguin’s painting style. The bill is a brownish-red and is thick and pointed. The eye is the same brown-red. No one paid much attention to the bird in the painting until a man named Thor Heyerdahl published a book about the Marquesas in 1974. He was most well known for his adventures sailing a balsawood boat, the Kon-Tiki, from South America to the Polynesian islands in 1947. In 1937, though, the most notable thing Heyerdahl did was see an unusual bird that he mentioned in his book. He wrote that the bird had no wings and ran extremely fast when he startled it. It vanished into a thick bank of ferns and although he tried to catch another glimpse of it, it was gone. He later said it was about the size of a long-legged gull. A French explorer also wrote about this bird in 1957, although he didn’t see it himself. He said the people who lived on the island called the bird koao, which meant “burrow bird” since it was supposed to hide in burrows. It was about the size of a rooster, purplish in color with a yellow bill, and while it only had little wings, its legs were long and it was a fast runner. By 1979, researchers investigating the koao were told that it had gone extinct from overhunting, specifically by the French colonizers of Hiva Oa. Other researchers learned that the bird was supposed to have red eyes and was the size of a duck. The ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy thought the bird sounded like a type of rail. Rails are relatively small birds that mostly stay on the ground. Even rail species that can fly are weak flyers, while many species are flightless. The family is a large one and includes birds like the American coot, the takahē of New Zealand, the common moorhen that lives throughout much of western Europe, South Asia, and parts of Africa, and the spotless crake that’s common throughout much of the South Pacific. Barloy suggested in 1979 that the koao might be a spotless crake. The spotless crake is bluish-gray with reddish-brown back and wings, a black bill, red eyes, and pale orangey legs that are long for its size. It’s shy and mostly crepuscular, but when it’s out in daylight it never goes far from vegetation where it can hide. It prefers freshwater wetlands but will also live in forests as long as it has plenty of groundcover for shelter. It eats insects, worms, crustaceans, and even carrion, as well as plant material like seeds and fruit. It can fly but it would much rather run away from danger. This doesn’t really fit with what we know of the koao. For one thing, the spotless crake is much smaller than a duck or rooster, smaller even than a crow. It doesn’t match the size or coloration of Gauguin’s mystery bird or the reports of the koao. Even Barloy later decided he was wrong and suggested the koao might be a different type of rail, maybe even an unknown species of takahē. The takahē is dark blue with a greenish back, and its heavy beak and strong legs are red. This is much more similar to the bird Gauguin painted. The takahē was considered extinct until a small population was rediscovered in 1948, and while it’s flightless, its ancestors weren’t. Like New Zealand, many remote islands–including Hiva Oa–have no native mammals exc
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It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Strange Animals Podcast as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Strange Animals Podcast podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Strange Animals Podcast product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Katherine Shaw.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Strange Animals Podcast release new episodes?
Strange Animals Podcast publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Strange Animals Podcast cover?
Strange Animals Podcast covers topics including Science, Natural Sciences, Life Sciences. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Strange Animals Podcast summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.