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by Katherine Shaw
A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!
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- 3 days ago6 min
Episode 509: Two Big Weird Heavy Animals
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s taking forever to shake this cold. I feel fine now, but I still sound pretty bad. I apologize for my voice this time, but hopefully it’s not too bad. Rather than postpone this episode until my voice recovers, let’s just have a short but info-packed episode about some weird big animals from the past. I think Llewelly alerted me to Neoparadoxia cecilialina, which appears in the fossil record between about 32 to 10 million years ago. It lived along the coast of the northern Pacific Ocean. It grew to around 8 feet long, or just under 2.5 meters, although the only specimen found so far wasn’t fully grown so it may have been a bit larger as an adult. It was a heavy animal with long legs, big feet, a big wide snout with eyes near the top of its head, and a tiny tail. In fact, it probably looked superficially like a weird hippopotamus. Like the hippo, it ate water plants. It was probably fully aquatic, meaning it lived its entire life in water. Neoparadoxia was a member of the order Desmostylia, which were all marine herbivores that probably mostly ate kelp. They all looked sort of like weird hippos but acted more like dugongs. Some researchers think Desmostylians went extinct when dugongs evolved and outcompeted them. Despite its strong-looking leg bones, many species of Desmostylia had spongy bones. This made the bones less dense but also weakened them. Weaker bones are not a problem for an ocean animal whose weight is supported by the water, but it does mean that it probably couldn’t support its weight on land. Whales and other cetaceans have a similar type of spongy bone. Desmostylus was a Desmostylian genus. It probably spent most of its time near the surface of shallow water. It may have preferred to live around the mouths of rivers and spent part of its time in fresh water, part in brackish water where the ocean and river mixed. It grew around 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, and it had toenails that were the remnants of hooves from when its ancestors lived on the land. It had two pairs of tusks that jutted forward from its long jaws, which it probably used to help dig up plants. Some species of Desmostylia had teeth that are similar to elephant teeth, which may have helped it deal with sand and grit when eating a diet of sea grass. Species that didn’t have spongy bones may have actually walked across the sea floor to eat plants, only surfacing to take breaths. So are Desmostylians more closely related to elephants or hippos or whales or dugongs? How about none of the above. Scientists are still trying to figure out how the Desmostylians were related to each other and to other animals, but so far they seem to be not very closely related to anything alive today. One suggestion is that they’re basal odd-toed ungulates that completely died out around 10 million years ago, leaving no living descendants. Another group of big heavy weird animals that went extinct around 28 million years ago was an order called Embrithopoda. Instead of looking sort of like hippos, Embrithopods looked more like rhinoceroses. They were land animals that probably evolved in Africa, although they also lived in parts of Eurasia, and they were probably about as closely related to Desmostylians as Desmostylians were to elephants and dugongs—and, in fact, Embrithopods were probably also distantly related to elephants and dugongs. They probably weren’t actually related to rhinos. This is weird at first glance, because Embrithopods look a lot like rhinos. Some species even had nose horns. For instance, Arsinoitherium lived in the rainforests of northern Africa around 30 million years ago, and stood around 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and had a pair of huge horns on the nose with another small pair over the eyes. But the nose horns were much different from the rhino’s horn. For one thing, both were side by side. For another, they weren’t made out of keratin fibers like the rhino’s horn. Instead, the horn cores were made of bone and were probably covered with keratinized skin something like giraffe ossicones. Either way, they were probably pretty darn impressive, especially if they were pointed at you. Embrithopods ate plants, especially tough plants. Some species may have been semiaquatic, living in swampy areas and in lakes. And that is pretty much all we know about them. I kind of want one as a pet after looking at pictures of its skeleton, but let’s just chalk that up to the cough medicine I’ve been taking. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!
- 1 weeks ago11 min
Episode 508: The Night Parrot and Friends
You can buy and download an ebook of Small Mysteries here! Thanks to Murray and Nathan Andrew for their suggestions this week! Happy Halloween! xeno-canto.org is an excellent resource for bird, insect, and other animal recordings by field scientists, naturalists, and citizen scientists! Further reading: Reconstruction of an extinct soundscape reveals ultrasonic communication in the Jurassic John Young Rediscovered the Australian Night Parrot, but Did He Lie About His Later Findings? A Naturalist With a Checkered Past Rediscovered a Long-lost Parrot . . . Then Things Got Interesting Night Parrot man in jail after bush bolthole bid ‘Breakthrough discovery’: Indigenous Rangers in outback WA find up to 50 night parrots one of Australia’s most elusive birds The Indo-Pacific leopard shark [photo by Felix Frost-Savage – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150136016]: A young Indo-Pacific leopard shark, so you can see why it’s also called the zebra shark: One of John Young’s controversial night parrot photos, showing wire mesh in the upper right-hand corner that might be part of a cage or enclosure: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our Halloween episode, and a brand new one since I wasn’t going to skip Halloween! I thought about covering a really spooky topic, but decided to go with interesting instead. Thanks to Murray and Nathan Andrew for their suggestions this week. First, though, a quick note that if you check the show notes, or go to the website at strangeanimalspodc
- 2 weeks ago10 min
Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman
Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Monster month is upon us, and to kick us off I’ve got a fun episode about a supposed Bigfoot discovery called the Minnesota Iceman. It happened in 1968, although the iceman had been around for a while as part of a traveling exhibition. But in 1968 a zoologist named Terry Cullen saw it at a livestock fair in Chicago. Curious and excited, Cullen talked to the owner of the exhibition, named Frank Hansen. Hansen said he wasn’t actually the iceman’s owner but that he was taking care of it for the owner. Cullen contacted two cryptozoologists and urged them to look at the iceman, author Ivan Sanderson and zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Both wrote several influential books and basically founded modern cryptozoology, which of course is the study of animals that might or might not actually exist. Ivan Sanderson comes up in the podcast occasionally because he was everywhere back in the day, managing to have all sorts of sightings of mystery animals with absolutely no proof except for his own say-so. But the iceman was clearly a real thing, because there it was. This is a good time to describe it, huh? It wasn’t a living animal but a dead one preserved in a block of ice. It was apelike but much larger than most apes with human-like proportions, and would have stood about six feet tall when alive, or 1.8 meters. The iceman’s face was somewhat flat in shape with pronounced brow ridges and a short snub nose. It had dark fur and enormous hands and feet, and while the ice obscured a lot of the details, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson got a good close look at it in Hansen’s home that December. The exhibition was on its winter break and Hansen kept it at his house in a refrigerated case. The body itself showed signs of injury, including a possibly broken arm and an eyeball dislodged from its socket. Both Sanderson and Heuvelmans took photos and made careful drawings of the iceman. Heuvelmans, who was a zoologist, published a description of it in a Belgian scientific journal in 1969. He first suggested it was a new species of human that he named Homo pongoides, but later he changed his mind and decided it was probably more closely related to Neandertals. Sanderson, meanwhile, was active in drumming up media interest. He also was sure it was a new species, but instead of Homo pongoides, he chose to call it Bozo. Yeah, Bozo. Sanderson published an article about the iceman in a 1969 issue of Argosy science fiction magazine, where he was an editor. In that article he suggests the iceman was the missing link between humans and apes. Remember what I’ve said about people claiming they’ve found the missing link? They either don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s a hoax. Sometimes both. Sanderson also contacted John Napier, a primatologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution and had a longstanding interest in the Yeti and other Bigfoot-type creatures, and suggested he investigate. Napier and the Smithsonian’s director, S. Dillon Ripley, also a Yeti enthusiast, were both interested. But when they asked to see the iceman, suddenly Hansen said nope, the iceman’s actual owner didn’t want anyone else looking at their…sideshow exhibit. Later Hansen said Napier and Ripley could see it after all. But when they did, it was clear to them that it wasn’t a real animal. Napier said it looked like a latex model. Hansen promptly said that he’d hidden the original, worried that he would get in trouble if it turned out to be a type of human, and that Napier had actually viewed the model he’d replaced the actual iceman with. Sanderson and Heuvelmans did say that the photos Napier took looked different from their own photos and what they remembered. But Hansen wouldn’t let anyone see the original iceman, so the scientists’ interest waned and that was pretty much it. So where did the iceman come from and where is it now? Surely by now some museum or university has bought the actual specimen and thawed it out to examine, right? Where’s the genetic profile? Why isn’t this thing in textbooks? Soooo, well. Let’s start with where it came from. Hansen said the body had been discovered in Siberia by seal hunters, floating in a block of sea ice just off the coast. But he also said it had been found not by Russian seal hunters but by Japanese whalers. Okay, well, maybe he couldn’t remember exactly who found it. But wait. He also said it had been shot by a hunter in Minnesota. And he also said it was killed in Vietnam and smuggled into the United States during the war in a body bag. And he also said someone discovered it in Hong Kong in a
- 3 weeks ago15 min
Episode 506: The Beast of Buderim
Photos of a mangy fox that make it look like it has stripes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Buderim is a small city in Queensland, Australia, right on the coast but extending up the side of a small mountain. It looks like an especially beautiful place in a beautiful part of the world, but in the 1990s it was in the news due to sightings of a strange animal. The animal was dubbed the Beast of Buderim by reporters. It all seems to have started in 1993 when a local artist was driving with her husband and saw a striped animal run across the road. She thought for certain it was a Tasmanian tiger, more properly called a thylacine. When she got home, she drew what she’d seen. It looks like a foxlike animal with black stripes, a long whiskery muzzle, and a long thick tail. In March of 1995 a local dentist and his ten-year-old daughter saw the animal while driving along the edge of the local rainforest one evening. It was dark but his headlights lit it up and he was able to give a good description of it. He said it was medium-sized, presumably meaning about the size of an average dog, and had stripes that were sort of like a tabby cat’s markings but somewhat like a brindled dog’s markings. He described its coat as goldy in color. He also said it had a pronounced bump above its eyes, although I’m not sure if he meant it had a bumped-up forehead or if he was referring to a brow ridge of some kind. The animal was standing on the road, but when the car approached, it arched its back and then ran into the trees. Another sighting occurred in August of 1995, but not near Buderim. A man in Bundaberg, a city over 130 miles away from Buderim, or 210 km, was driving at night and had to brake hard to avoid hitting a gray kangaroo as it bounded across the road. A moment later a large animal leaped onto the road after the kangaroo. In the glare of the headlights, the man reported that the animal was sandy in color with stripes that started about halfway down its back, and that its eyes glowed green-yellow. It was big too, four or five feet long, or 1.2 to 1.5 meters, not even counting its long, thick tail. It also had long jaws that the man said reminded him of a crocodile’s when it snarled at him. It made another huge leap and disappeared into the brush. Plenty of other sightings have been reported from around Buderim and other parts of Queensland, with the most recent in 2014 turning out to be a mangy fox. This is the same area where a different striped animal, usually called the Queensland tiger, was first reported in 1871 and occasionally spotted afterwards. Sometimes people confuse the Beast of Buderim and the Queensland tiger. We talked about the Queensland tiger in an episode a long time ago—I don’t remember which one, but I do remember there not being much evidence that it was a real animal. Some people think the Queensland tiger is a descendant of an extinct animal called Thylacoleo [thyla-CO-leo], while the Beast of Buderim is supposed to be a thylacine. Thylacoleo is sometimes called the marsupial lion, although it looked much different than a lion. It had a strong kangaroo-like tail that it could use as a balance to help it stand on its hind legs. Its front legs were extremely strong and it actually had a semi-opposable thumb that helped it grab onto prey. Its front claws were retractable like a cat’s claws too, an excellent example of convergent evolution. All these traits also meant that Thylacoleo could climb extremely well. It might not have been a very fast runner, though, and some researchers think it was an ambush predator, possibly dropping down from trees onto its prey. The largest species, Thylacoleo carnifex, stood over two feet tall at the shoulder
- Oct 5, 202611 min
Episode 505: Three Animal Mysteries
Further reading: Scientists solve a shark murder mystery Stone Age Animal Urine Could Solve a Mystery about Technological Development South African rock art possibly inspired by long-extinct species The porbeagle shark [photo by Andy Murch, taken from this site]: Dicynodont fossils and their possible art interpretation by the San people: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s finally monster month, and I’m looking forward to sharing lots of fun mystery animals and animal mysteries over the next four weeks. Our first mystery is from an article titled “Scientists solve a shark murder mystery.” The word solve is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this case, but let’s find out what happened to the shark. The shark in question was a porbeagle shark, a type of mackerel shark that can grow as much as 12 feet long, or over 3.5 meters, and is gray and white in color. It lives in cold water in the North Atlantic and around Antarctica, and it eats fish and cephalopods like squid. It hardly ever bothers people although people like to eat it, and in some regions it’s been so overfished that the species is listed as endangered. The porbeagle is especially unusual because it’s able to thermoregulate to some degree, like the basking shark and some other sharks that we talked about in episode 353, about warm-blooded fish. The porbeagle is actually really good at keeping its brain, eyes, and internal organs warm, which is why it’s so successful in cold water. It can live to be at least 65 years old. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the porbeagle, including where exactly it lives and how far it migrates throughout the year. A team of scientists has been tagging porbeagle sharks with little transmitters, like shark Air Tags, to find out where the sharks travel and other information, like how deeply they dive and what the water temperature is. The transmitter is attached to a shark’s fin and is designed to stay in place for a year, then detach and transmit all the information it’s gathered as soon as it floats to the water’s surface. In October 2020, the scientists captured an 8-foot, or 2.5 meter, female porbeagle and fitted her with a transmitter before releasing her again. They were especially happy to see that she was pregnant, partly because the porbeagle is endangered and reproduces slowly, partly because they were interested to find out where a pregnant shark traveled. About six months later, in April 2021, the tag began to transmit its information. It was too early for it to have detached on its own, but sometimes something happens to a tag and it ends up removed from the shark before it’s scheduled to. The team’s lead scientist, Brooke Anderson, examined the transmitter’s information and knew something weird had happened to the shark. Everything seemed normal until about a week before the tag began to transmit, when the tag indicated a slight but steady increase in the temperature of its surroundings, even though it was still deep underwater. Anderson suspected that the shark had been killed and eaten at that point, and the tag ended up inside the body of another ani
- Sep 28, 20268 min
Episode 504: The Mystery Roar
Further reading: Wolves on rise in France as bears wreak mountain havoc Can Brown Bears Survive in the Pyrenees? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. On the evening of August 4, 2019, two hikers set up camp in the Pyrenees Mountains. Laurent and Frédéric were familiar with the area and had plenty of experience hiking and camping. Once their camp was ready for the night, they took off their boots and socks and sat down to eat dinner and relax at a small campfire. If you’ve ever camped after a long hike, you’ll know that this is the best time of the day, when you can rest and air out your boots. After only a few minutes, though, the two heard grunts and growls in the darkness not far from their camp. They were concerned, but they had a fire and most animals won’t approach a fire. But the sounds got closer and closer. Then the animal roared—and it sounded like it was much closer than before. Laurent and Frédéric remembered that bears have become more common in the Pyrenees in the last few decades, and rather than take their chances with a hungry bear, they decided it was time to go. They shoved their bare feet into their boots, left everything behind, and raced back down the trail. It was late when they made it to the village of Germ so the hikers took refuge in a church where they spent the night. In the morning they hiked back up to their campsite to retrieve their belongings, expecting it to be trashed by a bear hunting for food. But everything was where they’d left it. Some people assumed the hikers had panicked over nothing, but the men were adamant that they’d heard something roaring as it came closer. In a news interview they said the final roar, the one that made them grab their boots and run, lasted several seconds and was so loud they could actually feel it in their chests. Brown bears were once fairly common in the Pyrenees but by 1991 they had all been killed, mostly by hunters. Habitat loss was also a factor as people built more roads and houses in the mountains. In 1995 a conservation program brought three bears from Slovenia to start a reintroduction program, and the way people acted, you’d think someone had released a thousand rabid weasels into their homes. Sheep and cattle farmers, and people who think the wilderness belongs to humans and humans only, protested the reintroduction of the bears, and one of the bears was shot and killed. This is despite the fact that farmers whose livestock are killed by bears get paid a lot of money by the French government. Approximately 1,000 sheep a year are killed in the Pyrenees—not by bears, but by pet dogs running loose. Conservation efforts continued despite protests and finally, by 2020, there were 64 bears living in the Pyrenees Mountains. The number may be a little larger—some estimates are as high as 100—but conservationists have difficulty counting the bears properly because protesters threaten them and in one case actually set a conservationist’s car on fire. The Pyrenees mountain range more or less divides France from Spain. It’s older than the Alps and especially known for its spectacular waterfalls. Many plants and animals that live in the Pyrenees are found nowhere else in the world, but unfortunately hunting and habitat loss have driven many of them to extinction. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of wild goat, went extinct in the year 2000. Conservationists have introduced a related animal, the western Spanish ibex, to help keep the mountain ecosystems healthy. The bears now living in the mountains are similarly important to the ecosystems. Conservationists are frustrated by protesters who don’t want bears in the mountains at all, especially considering that the Great Pyrenees dog was developed in the area to protect livestock from bears and other predators. Some shepherds in British Columbia, Canada, where both black bears and grizzlies live, successfully use Great Pyrenees dogs to guard their flocks from bears. Grizzlies are a subspecies of brown bear. But let’s go back to Laurent and Frédéric’s scary camping trip. Did they really encounter a bear or could it be something else? Bears are generally quite shy animals who avoid people when they can. Unlike black bears, which don’t growl, brown bears do make growling and grunting sounds occasionally. Males will growl or even roar at other males during mating season in spring and early summer, signaling aggression and the willingness to fight. A brown bear will sometimes growl or roar at a person to warn them away too. So it’s possible the hikers heard a bear who wasn’t interested in their food but just
- Sep 21, 20266 min
Episode 503: The Mystery of Typhloesus
Further reading: A possible home for a bizarre Carboniferous animal: is Typhloesus a pelagic gastropod? Typhloesus An artist’s rendition of what Typhloesus might have looked like [pic taken from the Nix Illustration link above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I recently discovered the excellent Nix Illustration blog, which is about scientific illustration and palaeontology. I’m finding so many fun topics that I keep going back to it, so I hope you don’t mind another invertebrate mystery I learned about from the site. There are links in the show notes if you want to read the original blog posts. This month’s mystery is Typhloesus wellsi, sometimes referred to as the “alien goldfish” because of its shape and its peculiar anatomy. It definitely wasn’t a fish. It lived around 324 million years ago and was first discovered in the early 1970s in Montana, in the middle of North America. It grew up to four inches long, or 10 cm, and was shaped not like a real goldfish but kind of like a goldfish cracker. Its body was roughly cylinder-shaped, and it had a vertical tail fin and a pair of fin-like lobes on its sides that are referred to as keels. But it didn’t have eyes or, as far as scientists can determine, an anus. It did have a mouth and gut cavity–but it also had something truly unexpected and mysterious in its body, a pair of disc-shaped organs that contained a lot of iron but whose function is completely unknown and unlike anything scientists have ever seen. Those initial specimens also contained lots of conodont teeth, which led scientists to hope they’d finally discovered the conodont animal. We’ve talked about conodont teeth before, but it’s been quite a while ago. Conodont animals were incredibly common for around 300 million years, and their teeth are found throughout the world. Technically they’re not teeth but tooth-like structures called conodont elements, some of them microscopic, some of them almost an inch long, or 2 cm. Each animal had three types of conodont elements, and they interacted in a way that we don’t fully understand since they were completely different from modern animal mouthparts. Until the 1980s, no one knew what the conodont animal looked like. The only fossils we had were the tiny teeth. Then some body impressions of the conodont animal were discovered. Now we know it was shaped like an eel and grew up to 20 inches long, or 50 cm. We also know it had large eyes, a notochord (or primitive spine), and fins on the tail end. It was probably related to hagfish and lampreys and may have looked similar, although not everyone agrees with this classification. Whatever the conodont animal was related to, Typhloesus definitely wasn’t one. It turns out that the conodont teeth associated with Typhloesus fossils were actually in its gut, after the alien goldfish ate a conodont animal. So scientists were back to square one. What was Typhloesus? In 2022, a study of several specimens revealed a clue. Typhloesus had a radula. That’s a mouthpart that resembles a tooth-studded tongue. Snails, for instance, use tiny radulas to scrape algae and other food off of rocks. True radulas are a trait of mollusks, which means Typhloesus was most likely an early mollusk, maybe even a gastropod like snails and slugs. That’s a start to classifying Typhloesus, but it doesn’t explain the pair of weird disc-shaped organs. It’s called a ferrodiscus and we still don’t know what it was for. Because of its placement just under the midgut and its high concentration of iron, which would have made it quite hard in comparison to most of the rest of its body, the ferrodiscus might have had something to do with digestion. Then again, it might have had something to do with chemoreception, which is probably how Typhloesus found its food. Some modern mollusks have a chemoreceptor organ under the radula, but it’s mainly a bundle of nerve cells and not any kind of weird iron discs. We just don’t know what the ferrodiscus was.
- Sep 14, 202611 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
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