Podcast appearances and mentions of Kate Shaw

Thanks to Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Extinct Hippo-Like Creature Discovered Hidden in Museum: ‘Sheer Chance' The golden lion tamarin has very thin fingers and sometimes it’s rude: The golden lion tamarin also has a very long tail: The cotton-top tamarin [picture by Chensiyuan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153317160]: The pangolin is scaly: The pangolin can also be round: The East Siberia lemming [photo by Ansgar Walk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52651170]: An early painting of a mammoth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to look at some mammals suggested by Conner, Tim, Stella, Cillian, Eilee, PJ, and Morris. Let's jump right in, because we have a lot of fascinating animals to learn about! We'll start with suggestions by Cillian and Eilee, who both suggested a monkey called the tamarin. Tamarins live in Central and South America and there are around 20 species, all of them quite small. Cillian specifically suggested the golden lion tamarin, an endangered species that lives in a single small part of Brazil. It has beautiful golden or orange fur that's longer around the face, like a lion's mane but extremely stylish. Its face is bare of fur and is gray or grayish-pink in color, with dark eyes and a serious expression like it's not sure where it left its wallet. It grows about 10 inches long, or 26 cm, not counting its extremely long tail. The golden lion tamarin spends most of its time in trees, where it eats fruit, flowers, and other plant material, along with eggs, tree frogs, insects, and other small animals. It has narrow hands and long fingers to help it reach into little tree hollows and crevices where insects are hiding, but if it can't reach an insect that way, it will use a twig or other tool to help. The golden lion tamarin lives in small family groups, usually a mated pair and their young children. A mother golden lion tamarin often has twins, sometimes triplets, and the other members of her family help take care of the babies. Because the golden lion tamarin is endangered, mainly due to habitat loss, zoos throughout the world have helped increase the number of babies born in captivity. When it's safe to release them into the wild, instead of only releasing the young tamarins, the entire family group is released together. Eilee suggested the cotton-top tamarin, which lives in one small part of Colombia. It's about the same size as the golden lion tamarin, but is more lightly built and has a somewhat shorter tail. It's mostly various shades of brown and tan with a dark gray face, but it also has long white hair on its head. Its hair sticks up and makes it look a little bit like those pictures of Einstein, if Einstein was a tiny little monkey. Like the golden lion tamarin, the cotton-top tamarin lives in small groups and eats both plant material and insects. It's also critically endangered due to habitat loss, and it's strictly protected these days. Next, both Tim and Stella suggested we learn about the pangolin. There are eight species known, which live in parts of Africa and Asia. The pangolin is a mammal, but it's covered in scales except for its belly and face. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein that makes up fingernails, hair, hooves, and other hard parts in mammals. When it's threatened, it rolls up into a ball with its tail over its face, and the sharp-edged, overlapping scales protect it from being bitten or clawed. It has a long, thick tail, short, strong legs with claws, a small head, and very small ears. Its muzzle is long with a nose pad at the end, it has a long sticky tongue, and it has no teeth. It's nocturnal and uses its big front claws to dig into termite mounds and ant colonies. It has poor vision but a good sense of smell. Some species of pangolin live in trees and spend the daytime sleeping in a hollow tree. Other species live on the ground and dig deep burrows to sleep in during the day. It's a solitary animal and just about the only time adult pangolins spend time together is when a pair comes together to mate. Sometimes two males fight over a female, and they do so by slapping each other with their big tails. Unfortunately for the pangolin, its scales make it sought after by humans for decoration. People also eat pangolins. Habitat loss is also making it tough for the pangolin. All species of pangolin in Asia are endangered or critically endangered, while all species of pangolins in Africa are vulnerable. Pangolins also don't do well in captivity so it's hard for zoos to help them. Next, Conner wants to learn about the lemming, a rodent that's related to muskrats and voles. Lots of people think they know one thing about the lemming, but that thing isn't true. We'll talk about it in a minute. The lemming grows up to 7 inches long, or 18 cm, and is a little round rodent with small ears, a short tail, short legs, and long fur that's brown and black in color. It eats plant material, and while it lives in really cold parts of the northern hemisphere, including Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, it doesn't hibernate. It just digs tunnels with cozy nesting burrows to warm up in, and finds food by digging tunnels in the snow. Lemmings reproduce quickly, which is a trait common among rodents, and if the population of lemmings gets too large in one area, some of the lemmings may migrate to find a new place to live. In the olden days people didn't understand lemming migration. Some people believed that lemmings traveled through the air in stormy weather and that's why a bunch of lemmings would suddenly appear out of nowhere sometimes. They'd just drop out of the sky. Other people were convinced that if there were too many lemmings, they'd all jump off a cliff and die on purpose, and that's why sometimes there'd be a lot of lemmings, and then suddenly one day not nearly as many lemmings. Many people still think that lemmings jump off cliffs, but this isn't actually true. They're cute little animals, but they're not dumb. Next, let's learn about two extinct animals, starting with PJ's suggestion, the woolly mammoth. We actually know a lot about the various species of mammoth because we have so many remains. Our own distant ancestors left cave paintings and carvings of mammoths, we have lots of fossilized remains, and we have lots of subfossil remains too. Because the mammoth lived so recently and sometimes in places where the climate hasn't changed all that much in the last 10,000 years, namely very cold parts of the world with deep layers of permafrost beneath the surface, sometimes mammoth remains are found that look extremely fresh. The woolly mammoth was closely related to the modern Asian elephant, but it was much bigger and covered with long fur. A big male woolly mammoth could stand well over 11 feet tall at the shoulder, or 3.5 meters, while females were a little smaller on average. It was well adapted to cold weather and had small ears, a short tail, a thick layer of fat under the skin, and an undercoat of soft, warm hair that was protected by longer guard hairs. It lived in the steppes of northern Europe, Asia, and North America, and like modern elephants it ate plants. It had long, curved tusks that could be over 13 feet long, or 4 meters, in a big male, and one of the things it used it tusks for was to sweep snow away from plants. The woolly mammoth went extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, although a small population remained on a remote island until only 4,000 years ago. Our last animal this week is Morris's suggestion, and it's actually not a single type of animal but a whole order. Desmostylians were big aquatic mammals, and the only known order of aquatic mammals that are completely extinct. When you think of aquatic mammals, you might think of whales, seals, and sea cows, or even hippos. Desmostylians didn't look like any of those animals, and they had features not found in any other animal. Desmostylians lived in shallow water off the Pacific coast, and fossils have been found in North America, southern Japan, parts of Russia, and other places. They first appear in the fossil record around 30 million years ago and disappear from the fossil record about 7 million years ago. They were fully aquatic animals that probably mostly ate kelp or sea grass, similar to modern sirenians, which include dugongs and manatees. Let's talk about Paleoparadoxia to find out roughly what Desmostylians looked and acted like. Paleoparadoxia grew about 7 feet long, or 2.15 meters, and had a robust skeleton. It had short legs, although the front legs were longer and its four toes were probably webbed to help it swim. It probably acted a lot like a sirenian, walking along the sea floor to find plants to eat. Its nostrils were on the top of its nose so it could take breaths at the surface more easily, and it had short tusks in its mouth, something like modern hippos. It may have looked a little like a hippo, but also a little like a dugong, and possibly a little like a walrus. One really strange thing about Desmostylians in general are their teeth. No other animals known have teeth like theirs. Their molars and premolars are incredibly tough and are made up of little enamel cylinders. The order's name actually means “bundle of columns,” referring to the teeth, and the bundles point upward so that the tops of the columns make up the tooth's chewing surface. Actually, chewing surface isn't the right term because Desmostylians probably didn't chew their food. Scientists think they pulled plants up by the roots using their teeth and tusks, then used suction to slurp up the plants and swallow them whole. We still don't know very much about Desmostylians. Scientists think they were outcompeted by sirenians, but we don't really know why they went extinct. We don't even know what they were most closely related to. They share some similarities with manatees and elephants, but those similarities may be due to convergent evolution. Then again, they might be related. Until we find more fossils, the mysteries will remain. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny, and a contributing opinion Writer with the New York Times talks about the justices' responses to arguments in two cases involving transgender student athletes, plus other Supreme Court news.

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny, and a contributing opinion Writer with the New York Times talks about the justices' responses to arguments in two cases involving transgender student athletes, plus other Supreme Court news.

Thanks to Audie, Katie, Eilee, Emily, Maryjane, and Dylan for their suggestions this week! Sorry this episode is late–the site was down.

Here’s the big invertebrate episode I’ve been promising people! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Does the Spiral Siphonophore Reign as the Longest Animal in the World? The common nawab butterfly: The common nawab caterpillar: A velvet worm: A giant siphonophore [photo by Catriona Munro, Stefan Siebert, Felipe Zapata, Mark Howison, Alejandro Damian-Serrano, Samuel H. Church, Freya E.Goetz, Philip R. Pugh, Steven H.D.Haddock, Casey W.Dunn – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790318300460#f0030]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Hello to 2026! This is usually where I announce that I'm going to do a series of themed episodes throughout the coming year, and usually I forget all about it after a few months. This year I have a different announcement. After our nine-year anniversary next month, which is episode 470, instead of new episodes I'm going to be switching to old Patreon episodes. I closed the Patreon permanently at the end of December but all the best episodes will now run in the main feed until our ten-year anniversary in February 2027. That's episode 523, when we'll have a big new episode that will also be the very last one ever. I thought this was the best way to close out the podcast instead of just stopping one day. The only problem is the big list of suggestions. During January I'm going to cover as many suggestions as I possibly can. This week's episode is about invertebrates, and in the next few weeks we'll have an episode about mammals, one about reptiles and birds, and one about amphibians and fish, although I don't know what order they'll be in yet. Episode 470 will be about animals discovered in 2025, along with some corrections and updates. I hope no one is sad about the podcast ending! You have a whole year to get used to it, and the old episodes will remain forever on the website so you can listen whenever you like. All that out of the way, let's start 2026 right with a whole lot of invertebrates! Thanks to Sam, warbrlwatchr, Jayson, Richard from NC, Holly, Kabir, Stewie, Thaddeus, and Trech for their suggestions this week! Let's start with Trech's suggestion, a humble ant called the weaver ant. It's also called the green ant even though not all species are green, because a species found in Australia is partially green. Most species are red, brown, or yellowish, and they're found in parts of northern and western Australia, southern Asia, and on most islands in between the two areas, and in parts of central Africa. The weaver ant lives in trees in tropical areas, and gets the name weaver ant because of the way it makes its nest. The nests are made out of leaves, but the leaves are still growing on the tree. Worker ants grab the edge of a leaf in their mandibles, then pull the leaf toward another leaf or sometimes double the leaf over. Sometimes ants have to make a chain to reach another leaf, with each ant grabbing the next ant around the middle until the ant at the end of the chain can grab the edge of a leaf. While the leaf is being pulled into place alongside the edge of another leaf, or the opposite edge of the same leaf, other workers bring larvae from an established part of the nest. The larvae secrete silk to make cocoons, but a worker ant holds a larva at the edge of the leaf, taps its little head, and the larva secretes silk that the workers use to bind the leaf edges together. A single colony has multiple nests, often in more than one tree, and are constantly constructing new ones as the old leaves are damaged by weather or just die off naturally. The weaver ant mainly eats insects, which is good for the trees because many of the insects the ants kill and eat are ones that can damage trees. This is one reason why farmers in some places like seeing weaver ants, especially fruit farmers, and sometimes farmers will even buy a weaver ant colony starter pack to place in their trees deliberately. The farmer doesn't have to use pesticides, and the weaver ants even cause some fruit- and leaf-eating animals to stay away, because the ants can give a painful bite. People in many areas also eat the weaver ant larvae, which is considered a delicacy. Our next suggestion is by Holly, the zombie snail. I actually covered this in a Patreon episode, but I didn't schedule it for next year because I thought I'd used the information already in a regular episode, but now I can't find it. So let's talk about it now! In August of 2019, hikers in Taiwan came across a snail that looked like it was on its way to a rave. It had what looked like flashing neon decorations in its head, pulsing in green and orange. Strobing colors are just not something you'd expect to find on an animal, or if you did it would be a deep-sea animal. The situation is not good for the snail, let me tell you. It's due to a parasitic flatworm called the green-banded broodsac. The flatworm infects birds, but to get into the bird, first it has to get into a snail. To get into a snail, it has to be in a bird, though, because it lives in the cloaca of a bird and attaches its eggs to the bird's droppings. When a snail eats a yummy bird dropping, it also eats the eggs. The eggs hatch in the snail's body instead of being digested, where eventually they develop into sporocysts. That's a branched structure that spreads throughout the snail's body, including into its head and eyestalks. The sporocyst branches that are in the snail's eyestalks further develop into broodsacs, which look like little worms or caterpillars banded with green and orange or green and yellow, sometimes with black or brown bands too—it depends on the species. About the time the broodsacs are ready for the next stage of life, the parasite takes control of the snail's brain. The snail goes out in daylight and sits somewhere conspicuous, and its body, or sometimes just its head or eyestalks, becomes semi-translucent so that the broodsacs show through it. Then the broodsacs swell up and start to pulse. The colors and movement resemble a caterpillar enough that it attracts birds that eat caterpillars. A bird will fly up, grab what it thinks is a caterpillar, and eat it up. The broodsac develops into a mature flatworm in the bird's digestive system, and sticks itself to the walls of the cloaca with two suckers, and the whole process starts again. The snail gets the worst part of this bargain, naturally, but it doesn't necessarily die. It can survive for a year or more even with the parasite living in it, and it can still use its eyes. When it's bird time, the bird isn't interested in the snail itself. It just wants what it thinks is a caterpillar, and a lot of times it just snips the broodsac out of the snail's eyestalk without doing a lot of damage to the snail. If a bird doesn't show up right away, sometimes the broodsac will burst out of the eyestalk anyway. It can survive for up to an hour outside the snail and continues to pulsate, so it will sometimes still get eaten by a bird. Okay, that was disgusting. Let's move on quickly to the tiger beetle, suggested by both Sam and warblrwatchr. There are thousands of tiger beetle species known and they live all over the world, except for Antarctica. Because there are so many different species in so many different habitats, they don't all look the same, but many common species are reddish-orange with black stripes, which is where the name tiger beetle comes from. Others are plain black or gray, shiny blue, dark or pale brown, spotted, mottled, iridescent, bumpy, plain, bulky, or lightly built. They vary a lot, but one thing they all share are long legs. That's because the tiger beetle is famous for its running speed. Not all species can fly, but even in the ones that can, its wings are small and it can't fly far. But it can run so fast that scientists have discovered that its simple eyes can't gather enough photons for the brain to process an image of its surroundings while it runs. That's why the beetle will run extremely fast, then stop for a moment before running again. Its brain needs a moment to catch up. The tiger beetle eats insects and other small animals, which it runs after to catch. The fastest species known lives around the shores of Lake Eyre in South Australia, Rivacindela hudsoni. It grows around 20 mm long, and can run as much as 5.6 mph, or 9 km/hour, not that it's going to be running for an entire hour at a time. Still, that's incredibly fast for something with little teeny legs. Another insect that is really fast is called the common nawab, suggested by Jayson. It's a butterfly that lives in tropical forests and rainforests in South Asia and many islands. Its wings are mainly brown or black with a big yellow or greenish spot in the middle and some little white spots along the edges, and the hind wings have two little tails that look like spikes. It's really pretty and has a wingspan more than three inches across, or about 8.5 cm. The common nawab spends most of its time in the forest canopy, flying quickly from flower to flower. Females will travel long distances, but when a female is ready to lay her eggs, she returns to where she hatched. The male stays in his territory, and will chase away other common nawab males if they approach. The common nawab caterpillar is green with pale yellow stripes, and it has four horn-like projections on its head, which is why it's called the dragon-headed caterpillar. It's really awesome-looking and I put it on the list to cover years ago, then forgot it until Jayson recommended it. But it turns out there's not a lot known about the common nawab, so there's not a lot to say about it. Next, Richard from NC suggested the velvet worm. It's not a worm and it's not made of velvet, although its body is soft and velvety to the touch. It's long and fairly thin, sort of like a caterpillar in shape but with lots of stubby little legs. There are hundreds of species known in two families. Most species of velvet worm are found in South America and Australia. Some species of velvet worm can grow up to 8 and a half inches long, or 22 cm, but most are much smaller. The smallest lives in New Zealand on the South Island, and only grows up to 10 mm long, with 13 pairs of legs. The largest lives in Costa Rica in Central America and was only discovered in 2010. It has up to 41 pairs of legs, although males only have 34 pairs. Various species of velvet worm are different colors, although a lot of them are reddish, brown, or orangey-brown. Most species have simple eyes, although some have no eyes at all. Its legs are stubby, hollow, and very simple, with a pair of tiny chitin claws at the ends. The claws are retractable and help it climb around. It likes humid, dark places like mossy rocks, leaf litter, fallen logs, caves, and similar habitats. Some species are solitary but others live in social groups of closely related individuals. The velvet worm is an ambush predator, and it hunts in a really weird way. It's nocturnal and its eyes are not only very simple, but the velvet worm can't even see ahead of it because its eyes are behind a pair of fleshy antennae that it uses to feel its way delicately forward. It walks so softly on its little legs that the small insects and other invertebrates that it preys on often don't even notice it. When it comes across an animal, it uses its antennae to very carefully touch it and decide whether it's worth attacking. When it decides to attack, it squirts slime that acts like glue. It has a gland on either side of its head that squirts slime quite accurately. Once the prey is immobilized, the velvet worm may give smaller squirts of slime at dangerous parts, like the fangs of spiders. Then it punctures the body of its prey with its jaws and injects saliva, which kills the animal and starts to liquefy its insides. While the velvet worm is waiting for this to happen, it eats up its slime to reuse it, then sucks the liquid out of the prey. This can take a long time depending on the size of the animal—more than an hour. A huge number of invertebrates, including all insects and crustaceans, are arthropods, and velvet worms look like they should belong to the phylum Arthropoda. But arthropods always have jointed legs. Velvet worm legs don't have joints. Velvet worms aren't arthropods, although they're closely related. A modern-day velvet worm looks surprisingly like an animal that lived half a billion years ago, Antennacanthopodia, although it lived in the ocean and all velvet worms live on land. Scientists think that the velvet worm's closest living relative is a very small invertebrate called the tardigrade, or water bear, which is Stewie's suggestion. The water bear isn't a bear but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar, like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal with a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig's snout. It uses six of its fat little legs for walking and the hind two to cling to the moss and other plant material where it lives. Each leg has four to eight long hooked claws. Like the velvet worm, the tardigrade's legs don't have joints. They can bend wherever they want. Tardigrades have the reputation of being extremophiles, able to withstand incredible heat, cold, radiation, space, and anything else scientists can think of. In reality, it's just a little guy that mostly lives in moss and eats tiny animals or plant material. It is tough, and some species can indeed withstand extreme heat, cold, and so forth, but only for short amounts of time. The tardigrade's success is mainly due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it's called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis. When conditions improve, the tardigrade returns to normal. Another animal has a similar ability, and it's a suggestion by Thaddeus, the immortal jellyfish. It's barely more than 4 mm across as an adult, and lives throughout much of the world's oceans, especially where it's warm. It eats tiny food, including plankton and fish eggs, which it grabs with its tiny tentacles. Small as it is, the immortal jellyfish has stinging cells in its tentacles. It's mostly transparent, although its stomach is red and an adult jelly has up to 90 white tentacles. The immortal jellyfish starts life as a larva called a planula, which can swim, but when it finds a place it likes, it sticks itself to a rock or shell, or just onto the sea floor. There it develops into a polyp colony, and this colony buds new polyps that are clones of the original. These polyps swim away and grow into jellyfish, which spawn and develop eggs, and those eggs hatch into new planulae. Polyps can live for years, while adult jellies, called medusae, usually only live a few months. But if an adult immortal jellyfish is injured, starving, sick, or otherwise under stress, it can transform back into a polyp. It forms a new polyp colony and buds clones of itself that then grow into adult jellies. It's the only organism known that can revert to an earlier stage of life after reaching sexual maturity–but only an individual at the adult stage, called the medusa stage, can revert to an earlier stage of development, and an individual can only achieve the medusa stage once after it buds from the polyp colony. If it reverts to the polyp stage, it will remain a polyp until it eventually dies, so it's not really immortal but it's still very cool. All the animals we've talked about today have been quite small. Let's finish with a suggestion from Kabir, a deep-sea animal that's really big! It's the giant siphonophore, Praya dubia, which lives in cold ocean water around many parts of the world. It's one of the longest creatures known to exist, but it's not a single animal. Each siphonophore is a colony of tiny animals called zooids, all clones although they perform different functions so the whole colony can thrive. Some zooids help the colony swim, while others have tiny tentacles that grab prey, and others digest the food and disperse the nutrients to the zooids around it. Some siphonophores are small but some can grow quite large. The Portuguese man o' war, which looks like a floating jellyfish, is actually a type of siphonophore. Its stinging tentacles can be 100 feet long, or 30 m. Other siphonophores are long, transparent, gelatinous strings that float through the depths of the sea, and that's the kind the giant siphonophore is. The giant siphonophore can definitely grow longer than 160 feet, or 50 meters, and may grow considerably longer. Siphonophores are delicate, and if they get washed too close to shore or the surface, waves and currents can tear them into pieces. Other than that, and maybe the occasional whale or big fish swimming right through them and breaking them up, there's really no reason why a siphonophore can't just keep on growing and growing and growing… You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Holly for suggesting this week’s topic! Further reading: Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin [this article is not for children] Feejee Mermaid A manatee: A female grey seal, looking winsome: A drawing of the “original” Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Let's close out the year 2025 with a mystery episode! Holly suggested we talk about mermaids! Mermaids are creatures of folklore who are supposed to look like humans, but instead of legs they have fish tails. These days mermaids are usually depicted with a single tail, but it was common in older artwork for a mermaid to be shown with two tails, which replaced both legs. Not all mermaids were girls, either. Mermen were just as common. Cultures from around the world have stories about mermaid-like individuals. Sometimes they're gods or goddesses, like the Syrian story of a goddess so beautiful that when she transformed into a fish, only her legs changed, because her upper half was too beautiful to alter, or the Greek god Triton, who is usually depicted as a man with two fish tails for legs. Sometimes they're monsters who cause storms, curse ships, or lure sailors to their doom. Sometimes they can transform into humans, like the story from Madagascar about a fisherman who catches a mermaid in his net. She transforms into a human woman and they get married, but when he breaks a promise to her, she turns back into a mermaid and swims away. In 2012, a TV special aired on Animal Planet that claimed that mermaids were real, and a lot of people believed it. It imitated the kind of real documentaries that Animal Planet often ran, and the only disclaimer was in the credits. I remember how upset a lot of people were about it, especially teachers and scientists. So just to be clear, mermaids aren't real. Many researchers think at least some mermaid stories might be based on real animals. The explorer Christopher Columbus reported seeing three mermaids in 1493, but said they weren't as beautiful as he'd heard. Most researchers think he actually saw manatees. A few centuries later, a mermaid was captured and killed off the coast of Brazil by European scientists, and the careful drawings we still have of the mermaid's hand bones correspond exactly to the bones of a manatee's flipper. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale's, but unlike a whale it's slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee's tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. The manatee doesn't look a lot like a person, but it looks more like a person than most water animals. It has a neck and can turn its head like a person, its flippers are fairly long and resemble arms, and females have a pair of teats that are near their armpits, if a manatee had armpits, which it does not. But that's close enough for Christopher Columbus to decide he was seeing a mermaid. Seals may have also contributed to mermaid stories. In Scottish folklore, the selkie is a seal that can transform into human shape, usually by taking off its skin. There are lots of stories of people who steal the selkie's skin and hide it so that the selkie will marry the person—because selkies are beautiful in their human form. Eventually the selkie finds the hidden skin and returns to the sea. Similar seal-folk legends are found in other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Ireland. Many of the stories overlap with mermaid stories. Seals do have appealing human-like faces, have clawed front flippers that sort of resemble arms, and have rear flippers that are fused to act like a tail, even if it doesn't look much like a fish tail. The grey seal is a common animal off the coast of northern Europe, and a big male can grow almost 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters, although 9 feet is more common, or 2.7 meters. It has a large snout and no external ear flaps. Males are dark grey or brown, females are more silvery in color. It mainly eats fish, but will also eat other animals, including crustaceans, octopuses, other seals, and even porpoises. While I don't think it has anything to do with the mermaid or selkie legends, it is interesting to note that seals are good at imitating human voices. We learned about this in episode 225, about talking mammals. For instance, Hoover the talking seal, a harbor seal from Maine who was raised by a human after his mother died. Imagine if you were walking along the shore and a seal said this to you: [Hoover the talking seal saying “Hey get over here!”] Let's finish with the Japanese legend of the ningyo and a weird taxidermy creature called the Feejee mermaid. The ningyo is a being of folklore that dates back to at least the 7th century. It was a fish with a head like a person, usually found in the ocean but sometimes in freshwater. If someone found a ningyo washed up on shore, it was supposed to be a bad omen, foretelling war and other disasters. If you remember the big fish episode a few weeks ago, if an oarfish is found near the surface of the ocean around Japan, it's supposed to foretell an earthquake. The oarfish has a red fin that runs from its head down its spine, like a mane or a comb, and the ningyo was also supposed to have a red comb on its head, like a rooster's comb, or sometimes red hair. Some people think the ningyo is based on the oarfish. The oarfish is a deep-sea fish so it's rare, usually only seen near the surface when it's dying, and it has a flat face that looks more like a human face than most fish, if you squint and really want to believe you're seeing a mythical creature. These days, artwork of the ningyo usually looks a lot more like mermaids of European legend, but the earliest paintings don't usually have arms, just a human head on a fish body. But by the late 18th century, a weird type of artwork had become popular among Japanese fishermen, a type of crude but inventive taxidermy that created what looked like small, creepy mermaids. They looked like dried-out monkeys from the waist up, with a dried-out fish tail instead of legs. That's because that's exactly what they were. Japanese fishermen made these mermaids along with lots of other monsters, and sold them to travelers for high prices. The fishermen told tall tales about how they'd found the monster, killed it, and preserved it, and pretended to be reluctant to sell it, and of course that meant the traveler would offer even more money for it. The most famous of these fake monsters was called the Fiji Mermaid, and it got famous because P.T. Barnum displayed it in his museum in 1842 and said it had been caught near the Fiji Islands, in the South Pacific. It was about three feet along, or 91 cm, and was probably made from a young monkey and a salmon. The original Fiji mermaid was probably destroyed in a fire at some point, but it was such a popular exhibit that other wannabe showmen either bought or made replicas, some of which are still around today. People still sometimes make similar monsters, but they use craft materials instead of dead animals. They're still creepy-looking, though, which is part of the fun. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Thanks to Emily, Jo, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Highland Cattle Society Mongolian Sheep The Donkey Sanctuary The Highland cow is so cute (picture taken from the first site linked above): Some fat-tailed sheep (picture taken from the sheep article linked above): Donkeys: A happy donkey and a happy person (photo taken from the Donkey Sanctuary’s site, linked above): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. After last week's giant fish episode, this week we're going to have a shorter episode of animals you've probably seen, especially if you live in the countryside. But first, I forgot to credit two people from last week's episode, Dylan and Emily, who both wanted to hear about mudskippers along with Arthur! I had so many names I missed some. This week we'll talk about some domestic mammals, suggested by Alexandra, Jo, and Emily. Let's start with Emily's suggestion, the Highland cow. Cows are classified in the family Bovidae, which includes not just the domestic cow and its relations but goats, sheep, antelopes, and many other animals with cloven hooves who chew the cud as part of the digestive process–but not deer or giraffes, and not the pronghorn even though people call it an antelope. It is confusing. Many bovids have horns, usually only two but sometimes four or even six, and those horns are never branched. Sometimes only the male has horns, sometimes both the male and female. Bovids don't have incisors in the front of the upper jaw, only in the lower jaw. Instead, a bovid has a tough dental pad that helps it grab plants. The Highland cow is a breed of domestic cow that originated in Scotland, although it's now popular in many other places too. It's a tough animal with a long outer coat of fur and a short, fuzzy undercoat that helps it survive harsh winters. Most are reddish-brown, but some are black, silvery-white, dun, or other shades. It has long, wide horns and its long fur usually falls over its face, which protects its eyes and also looks incredibly cute. Not only can the Highland cow thrive on pasture that's considered poor, meaning the plants aren't as nutritious, it's also disease resistant, even-tempered, and intelligent. It's a compact, relatively small cow, but it's not a miniature cow. Like, you can't pick it up like a dog, although you could probably hug one if the farmer says it's okay. A bull can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, while cows are smaller overall. The Highland cow is raised for its meat, which is naturally lean and delicious. But because they also happen to be small for cows, and so even-tempered, and so cute, many small farms and petting zoos keep a few just as pets. Since the Highland cow likes eating plants that other cow breeds won't touch, it's also helpful for clearing overgrown land. Next, Alexandra wanted to learn more about the fat-tailed sheep, another bovid. The sheep is one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, with some experts estimating that it was first domesticated at least 11,000 years ago and possibly over 13,000 years ago, around Asia and the Middle East. Sheep are especially useful to humans because not only can you eat them, they produce wool. Wool has incredible insulating properties, as you'll know if you've ever worn a wool sweater in the snow. Even if it gets wet, you stay nice and warm. Even better, you don't have to kill the sheep to get the wool. The sheep just gets a haircut every year to cut its wool short. Wild sheep don't grow a lot of wool, though. They mostly have hair like goats. Humans didn't start selecting for domestic sheep that produced wool until around 8,000 years ago. The fat-tailed sheep isn't a single breed but a type of sheep, most common in central Asia, northern Africa, and the Middle East. It's adapted for life in arid conditions, where there isn't a lot of water. The fat deposits on both sides of the tail act like a camel's hump, allowing the animal to absorb the stored fat if it can't find enough food and water. The fat-tailed sheep can have a really huge tail, so big it can make up almost a third of its body weight. Because the fat mostly collects on either side of the tail bones, the tail's shape has two lobes, which makes the sheep look like it has an extra butt on its butt. In some breeds, the tail gets wider as the fat deposits grow, while in other breeds, the tail just gets longer, sometimes so long it actually brushes the ground. The tail fat helps the sheep, but it's also considered a delicacy to people. Wherever the fat-tailed sheep is raised, there are special recipes to cook the tail. Many breeds of fat-tailed sheep also produce long, coarse wool that's used to make carpets and felt. We'll finish with Jo's suggestion, the domestic donkey. Donkeys are equids, and instead of cloven hooves like bovids, they have solid hooves. They're closely related to horses and zebras, and more distantly related to rhinoceroses and tapirs. The domestic donkey is descended from the African wild ass. Researchers estimate it was domesticated around five to seven thousand years ago by the ancient nomadic peoples of Nubia in Africa, and quickly spread throughout the Middle East and into southern Asia and Europe. The domestic donkey is a strong, sturdy animal that's usually fairly small. One of the biggest breeds is the American Mammoth Jackstock, and another is the French Baudet du Poitou, which has long fur. Both breeds can be as big as a horse. Big donkey breeds like these were mostly developed to cross with horses, to produce even larger, stronger mules. Mules are hybrid animals and are infertile, but they're very strong. The donkey is usually gray or brown and has long ears. Most have a darker stripe down the spine, called an eel stripe, and another stripe across the shoulders. Many have a lighter-colored nose, belly, and legs. The donkey's mane is short and stands upright. The donkey's small size and big strength has made it a popular working animal throughout the world. It can carry loads, can be ridden, and can pull carts and plows. It's famously tough and can be stubborn if it doesn't feel like it's being treated well, and it can even be dangerous when it kicks and bites. Sometimes farmers keep donkeys with their sheep or other animals, because the donkey will look out for danger and warn the herd by braying if it sees a predator. If the predator gets too close, the donkey will attack it instead of running away. In many places in the world, the donkey is an important work animal even today. Not everyone is lucky enough to afford a tractor or truck, so donkeys do the same work for people that they've done for thousands of years. The problem is that when a donkey gets old or is injured, and can't work anymore, sometimes they're killed for meat or just abandoned. Luckily there are donkey rescues who do their best to help as many donkeys as they can, especially the Donkey Sanctuary. The Donkey Sanctuary started in England in 1969, but it now has sanctuaries throughout Europe, and it runs programs that offer free veterinary care and education about donkeys for people in many parts of the world. One important thing the Donkey Sanctuary does, and other donkey rescues do too, is give a home to elderly donkeys who can't work anymore. It's only fair that a hard-working donkey gets to retire and have a peaceful old age. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

It's an episode just absolutely full of fish! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Study uncovers mechanics of machete-like 'tail-whipping' in thresher sharks Business end of a sawfish: Giant freshwater stingray! The frilled shark looks like an eel: The frilled shark's teeth: The thresher shark and its whip-like tail [photo by Thomas Alexander - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50280277]: The Halmahera epaulette shark, looking a little bit like a long skinny koi fish [photo by Mark Erdmann, California Academy of Sciences, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30260864]: A mudskipper, which is a fish even though it kind of looks like a weird frog [photo by Heinonlein - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44502355]: The red-lipped batfish wants a big kiss: The male blue groper is very blue [photo by Andrew Harvey, some rights reserved (CC BY) - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/62196538, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=157789928]: The giant oarfish is very long: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a big fish episode! I mean, it's a big episode about a lot of different fish, not necessarily fish that are big—although some of them sure are! Thanks to Arthur, Yuzu, Jayson, Kabir, Nora, Siya, Joel, Elizabeth, Mac, Ryder, Alyx, Dean, and Riley. I told you this is a big fish episode. Let's jump right in with a fish suggested by Jayson, the sawfish. There are five species of sawfish alive today. The smallest can still grow over 10 feet long, or 3 meters, while the biggest species can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters. The largest sawfish ever reliably measured was 24 feet long, or 7.3 meters. The sawfish lives mostly in warm, shallow ocean waters, usually where the bottom is muddy or sandy. It can also tolerate brackish and even freshwater, and will sometimes swim into rivers and live there just fine. The sawfish is a type of ray, and rays are most closely related to sharks. Like sharks, rays have an internal skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone, but they also have bony teeth. You can definitely see the similarity between sharks and sawfish in the body shape, although the sawfish is flattened underneath, which allows it to lie on the ocean floor. There's also another detail that helps you tell a sawfish from most sharks: the rostrum, or snout. It's surprisingly long and studded with teeth on both sides, which makes it look like a saw. The teeth on the sawfish's saw are actual teeth. They're called rostral teeth and the rostrum itself is part of the skull, not a beak or a mouth. It's covered in skin just like the rest of the body. The sawfish's mouth is located underneath the body quite a bit back from the rostrum's base, and the mouth contains a lot of ordinary teeth that aren't very sharp. Since the sawfish has plenty of teeth in its mouth, you may be wondering how and why it also has extra teeth on both sides of its saw. It's because the rostral teeth evolved from dermal denticles. Dermal denticles look like scales but they're literally teeth, they're just not used for eating. Sharks have them too, along with some other fish. In the case of the sawfish, the rostral teeth grow much larger than an ordinary dermal denticle, and stick out sideways. Both the rostrum and the head are packed with electroreceptors that allow the sawfish to sense tiny electrical charges that animals emit as they move. This might mean a school of fish swimming through muddy water, or it might mean a crustacean hiding in the sand. The sawfish sometimes uses its rostrum to dig prey out of the sand, but it also uses it to slash at fish or other animals.

The Author Events Series presents Jill Lepore  | We the People : A History of the U.S. Constitution Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture Standby seating will be available in the overflow room for guests who wish to wait for an opportunity to be seated in the main auditorium, if space permits. These standby seats will be available on a first come, first served basis. Auditorium seats are not guaranteed. In Conversation with Kate Shaw Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding-the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions-We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. ''One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change,'' Lepore writes. ''Another was to allow for change without violence.'' Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat. Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of ''originalism,'' Lepore contends in this ''gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past'' that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process. Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore ''has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union.'' At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night! All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 9/24/2025)

Thanks to Måns, Sam, Owen and Askel for this week's suggestions! Further reading: Shingleback Lizard What controls the colour of the common mānuka stick insect? The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has skin flaps that hide its shadow. There's a lizard in this photo, I swear! [photo by Charles J. Sharp - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92125100]: A shingleback lizard, pretending it has two heads: The beautiful wood nymph is a beautiful moth but also it looks like a bird poop: The Indian stick insect (photo by Ryan K Perry, found on this page): The buff tip moth mimics a broken-off stick. This person has a whole handful of them: A cuttlefish can change colors quickly [photo by Σ64 - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77733806]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about a few types of camouflage, a suggestion by Måns, and we'll also talk about some camouflaged animals suggested by Sam, Owen and Aksel, Dylan, and Nina. There are lots of types of camouflage, not all of it visual in nature. Back in episode 191 we talked about some toxic moths that generate high-pitched clicks that bats hear, recognize, and avoid. Naturally, some non-toxic moths also generate the same sounds to mimic the toxic moths. Måns specifically suggested cryptic coloration, also called crypsis. It's a type of camouflage that allows an animal to blend into their surroundings, which can involve multiple methods. Some animals have cryptic coloration mainly along the edges of the body, to defeat a skill many predators use called edge detection. A lot of amphibians and reptiles have patches surrounded by an outline, with dark patches having a darker outline and light patches having a lighter outline. This acts as disruptive camouflage, hiding the outline of an animal's body as it moves around. Some animals take this camouflage even further, with a way to hide their own shadow. This is the case with the mossy leaf-tailed gecko, which is native to the forests of eastern Madagascar. It can grow up to 8 inches long, or 20 cm, not counting its tail, and it's nocturnal. Its tail is flat and broad, sort of shaped like a leaf, but it doesn't disguise itself as a leaf. The mossy leaf-tailed gecko has a complicated gray and brown pattern that looks like tree bark, and it can change its coloration a little bit to help it blend in even more. At night it's well hidden in tree branches as it climbs around looking for insects, but in the day it needs to hide really well to avoid becoming some other animal's snack while it's sleeping. It does this by finding a comfortable branch and flattening its body and tail against it so that it just looks like another part of the branch. But to make it even more hidden, it has a flap of skin along its sides that wraps even farther around the branch. Not only do these skin flaps hide its edges, it hides its shadow, since the flaps are really flat and there's no curved edge of a lizard belly pressed against a branch that a predator might notice. The most common kind of cryptic coloration is called countershading, and it's so common that you might not even have noticed it although you see it almost every time you see a fish, amphibian, reptile, and many birds and mammals. Countershading is an animal that's darker on top and lighter underneath, like a brown mouse with a white belly. It's even found in some insects and other invertebrates. Countershading is another way to hide a shadow. If a dolphin, for instance, was gray all over, its underside would look darker because of shadows, since sunlight shines down from the sky and makes shadows underneath the body. That would make its body shape look rounder, meaning it stands out more and a predator would notice it more easily. But most dolphins are pale gray or even white underneath.

Further reading: Study: Giant Therizinosaurs Used Their Meter-Long, Sickle-Like Claws for Display Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. I am delighted to report that Therizinosaurus lived in what is now Mongolia in Central Asia, in the Gobi Desert. 70 million years ago, the land wasn't a desert at all but a forest with multiple rivers and streams flowing through it. Lots of other dinosaurs and birds lived in the area, including a tyrannosaurid called Tarbosaurus that was probably the only predator big enough to kill Therizinosaurus. When the first Therizinosaurus fossils were discovered in the 1950s, they were initially thought to belong to a type of giant turtle. Later it was reclassified as a sauropod relation, not a turtle. These days, we know for sure it's not a turtle and we're pretty sure it's not anything like a sauropod. The Therizinosaurus fossils found so far are incomplete. All we have are some ribs, one hind foot, and mostly complete arms and hands. We don't have any parts of the skull or any vertebrae, so paleontologists still have a lot of questions about what Therizinosaurus looked like and how it lived, although we have more complete specimens of some of its close relations to help scientists make good guesses. Luckily we have its hands, because its claws are enormous. Therizinosaurus had claws bigger than any other dinosaur known. Therizinosaurus was a big dinosaur overall, with an estimated length of 33 feet, or 10 meters, although until a more complete specimen is discovered we can't know for sure how big it really was. It may have stood up to 16 feet tall, or 5 meters, and walked on its hind legs. It's classified as a theropod these days, a group that includes famous dinosaurs like T. rex and Spinosaurus, but it wasn't closely related to those big fast meat-eaters. Most paleontologists think Therizinosaurus ate plants, but again, we don't know for sure since we don't have any of its teeth to examine. Its closest relatives were herbivorous but its immediate ancestors were carnivorous. If Therizinosaurus was a plant-eater, why did it have such enormous claws? Its claws were seriously terrifying! Its arms were big and strong in general, measuring about 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, including long, slender fingers, and the claws measured over three feet long! That's more than a meter long. If the claws were covered with a keratin sheath, which is probable, they would have been even longer when Therizinosaurus was alive. They were relatively thin and straight with a curve at the end. There are many reasons why an animal develops big claws. Predators need claws to help grab prey or tear meat into pieces, or an animal may need big claws to help it dig or climb trees. Claws are also great for defense. Some animals use claws to grab tree branches and bend them closer to the animal's mouth, which is something that giant ground sloths probably did, at least sometimes. The new study published in February 2023 examined the claws of Therizinosaurus and lots of other dinosaurs to learn how strong they were. The claws were 3D scanned, and then the scans were used in various models that measured the stress placed on each claw in various different activities. The study discovered that the claws of different dinosaurs were strong in different ways depending on what they were used for, which wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was that Therizinosaurus's claws were weak no matter which model the scientists used. In other words, Therizinosaurus probably didn't use its claws to fight other dinosaurs unless it just had to, because they would break too easily. It wouldn't have dug with its claws or even used them to hook branches down closer to its mouth. As far as we can tell, its claws were basically useless. But obviously, Therizinosaurus used its claws for something or it wouldn't have evolved to have such gigantic claws.

Kevin provides his unique take on the news of the day. What does Australia's highest earning CEO, Australia's owner of the largest agricultural holdings, and the most disappointed past Labor premier all have in common? They are all women.We speak with Kate Shaw about the amazing array of speakers at the public housing forum: ENOUGH! Standing together for Victoria's public housing held at The Capitol theatre on Thursday, October 23, 2025.Why are we set on demolishing the towers when it is more efficient, more humane, and more environmentally friendly to follow international practice, and retro-fit them?!

Further reading: Mysterious ‘blue goo' at the bottom of the sea stumps scientists Three new species of ground snakes discovered under graveyards and churches in Ecuador Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. I've come down a cold this week, and while I'm feeling better, it is settling into my chest as usual and I'm starting to cough. Since I'm still recovering and need to be in bed instead of sitting up researching animals, and since my voice is already sounding a little rough, here's a Patreon episode this week instead of a regular episode. I had been planning to run old Patreon episodes for a few weeks in December so I could have some time off for the holidays, and those were already scheduled, so I just moved one of those episodes up to use this week instead. This is a Patreon episode from October of 2022, where we talked about two very slightly spooky animal discoveries. We'll start with a suggestion from my brother Richard, about a strange newly discovered creature at the bottom of the ocean. On August 30, 2022, the NOAA Ocean Exploration research team was off the coast of Puerto Rico. That's in the Caribbean, part of the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was mostly collecting data about the sea floor, including acoustic information and signs of climate change and habitat destruction. Since the Caribbean is an area of the ocean with high biodiversity but also high rates of fishing and trawling, the more we can learn about the animals and plants that live on the sea floor, the more we can do to help protect them. When a remotely operated vehicle dives, it sends video to a team of scientists who can watch in real time and control where the rover goes. On this particular day, the rover descended to a little over 1,300 feet deep, or around 407 meters, when the sea floor came in view. Since this area is the site of an underwater ridge, the sea floor varies by a lot, and the rover swam along filming things and taking samples of the water and so forth, sometimes as deep as about 2,000 feet, or 611 meters. The rover saw lots of interesting animals, including fish and corals of various types, even a fossilized coral reef. Then it filmed something the scientists had never seen before. It was a little blue blob sitting on the sea floor. It wasn't moving and it wasn't very big. It was shaped roughly like a ball but with little points or pimples all over it and a wider base like a skirt where it met the ground. And it was definitely pale blue in color. Then the rover saw more of the little blue blobs, quite a few of them in various places. The scientists think it may be a species of soft coral or possibly a type of sponge, possibly even a tunicate, which is also called a sea squirt. All these animals are invertebrates that don't move, which matches what little we know about the blue blob. The rover wasn't able to take a sample from one of the blue blobs, so for now we don't have anything to study except the video. But we know where the little blue blobs are, so researchers hope to visit them again soon and learn more about them. Next, let's return to dry land and learn about some newly discovered snakes. In fact, we're not just on dry land, we're way up high in the Andes Mountains in South America, specifically in some remote villages in Ecuador. A teacher named Diego Piñán moved to the town of El Chaco in 2013, and he started noticing dead snakes on the road that he didn't recognize. He also realized that people were killing the snakes on purpose. A lot of people are afraid of snakes, so Piñán made sure to teach his students about them so they would learn that most snakes aren't dangerous. He also kept the dead snakes he found and preserved them in alcohol so he could figure out later what species they were. But he never could figure it out. Then a scientist named Alejandro Arteaga assembled a team to study the animals found in remote areas of the...

Thanks to Alexandra, Jayson, and Eilee for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Scientists have discovered an ancient whale species. It may have looked like a mash-up of ‘a seal and a Pokémon' The nomenclatural status of the Alula whale Field Guide of Whales and Dolphins [1971] The little Benguela dolphin [photo taken from this site]: The spinner dolphin almost looks like it has racing stripes [photo by Alexander Vasenin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25108509]: The Alula whale, which may or may not exist: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week let's learn about some whales and dolphins, including an ancient whale and a mystery whale, all of them really small. Thanks to Alexandra, Eilee, and Jayson for their suggestions! Let's start with an ancient whale, suggested by Jayson. The genus Janjucetus has been known since its first species was described in 2006, after a teenage surfer in Australia discovered the fossils in the late 1990s. It grew to about 11 feet long, or 3.5 meters, and lived about 25 million years ago. So far it's only been found around Australia. But much more recently, just a few months ago as this episode goes live, a new species was described. That's Janjucetus dullardi, also found in Australia along the same beach where the first Janjucetus species was found, and dating to around the same time period. We don't know a lot about the newly described whale, since it's only known from some teeth and partial skull. Scientists think the individual was a juvenile and estimate it was only around 6 feet long when it died, or 2.8 meters. Small as it was, it would have been a formidable hunter when it was alive. Its broad snout was shaped sort of like a shark's and it had strong, sharp teeth and large eyes. Because it was an early whale, it wouldn't have looked much like the whales alive today. It might even have had tiny vestigial back legs. Its eyes were huge in proportion to its head, about the size of tennis balls, and it probably relied on its eyesight to hunt prey because it couldn't echolocate. Its serrated teeth and strong jaws indicate that it might have hunted large animals, but some scientists suggest it could also filter feed the same way a crabeater seal does. Modern crabeater seals have similar teeth as Janjucetus, as do a few other seals. The projections on its teeth interlock when the seal closes its mouth, so to filter feed the seal takes a big mouthful of water, closes its teeth, and uses its tongue to force water out through its teeth. Amphipods and other tiny animals get caught against the teeth and the seal swallows them. If Janjucetus did filter feed, it probably also hunted larger animals. Otherwise its jaws wouldn't have been so strong or its teeth so deeply rooted. But Janjucetus wasn't related to modern toothed whales. While it wasn't a direct ancestor of modern baleen whales, it was part of the baleen whale's family tree. Baleen whales, also called mysticetes, have baleen plates made of keratin instead of teeth. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushes its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It's just like the crabeater seal, but really specialized and way bigger. Whether or not Janjucetus could and did filter feed doesn't really matter, because the fact that it's an ancestral relation of modern baleen whales but it had teeth helps us understand more about modern whales. Next, Eilee wanted to learn about the Benguela [BEN-gull-uh] dolphin, also called Heaviside's dolphin. It lives only off the southwestern coast of Africa, and it's really small, only a little over 5 and a half feet long at the most, or 1.7 meters. It's dark gray with white markings,

Thanks to Viki, Erin, Weller, and Stella for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups The thylacine could open its jaws really wide: A sugar glider, gliding [photo from this page]: A happy quokka and a happy person: A swimming platypus: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some marsupial mammals suggested by Erin, Weller, and Stella, and a bonus non-marsupial from Australia suggested by Viki. Marsupials are mammals that give birth to babies that aren't fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother's pouch. Not all female marsupials actually have a pouch, although most do. Marsupials are extremely common in Australia, but they're also found in most other places around the world. Let's start with Weller's suggestion, the Tasmanian tiger. We've talked about it before, but not recently. We talked about it in our very first episode, in fact! Despite its name, it isn't related to the tiger at all. Tigers are placental mammals, and the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial. It's also called the thylacine to make things less confusing. The thylacine was declared extinct after the last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sightings have continued ever since. It's not likely that a population is still around these days, but the thylacine is such a great animal that people hold out hope that it has survived and will one day be rediscovered. It got the name Tasmanian tiger because when European colonizers arrived in Tasmania, they saw a striped animal the size of a big dog, about 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 was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail, with a doglike head and rounded ears. The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to mainland Australia and the Australian island of Tasmania, but 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. The thylacine mostly ate small animals like ducks, water rats, and bandicoots. Its skull was very similar in shape to the wolf, which it wasn't related to at all, but its muzzle was longer and its jaws were comparatively much weaker. Its jaws could open incredibly wide, which usually indicates an animal that attacks prey much larger than it is, but studies of the thylacine's jaws and teeth show that they weren't strong enough for the stresses of attacking large animals. Next, Stella wanted to learn about the sugar glider, and I was surprised that we haven't talked about it before. It's a nocturnal marsupial native to the forests of New Guinea and parts of Australia, with various subspecies kept as exotic pets in some parts of the world. It's called a glider because of the animal's ability to glide. It has a flap of skin between its front and back legs, called a patagium, and when it stretches its legs out, the patagia tighten and act as a parachute. This is similar to other gliding animals, like the flying squirrel. The sugar glider resembles a rodent, but it isn't. It's actually a type of possum. It lives in trees and has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb around more easily, and of course it can glide from tree to tree. It's an omnivore that eats insects, spiders, and other small animals, along with plant material, mainly sap. It will gnaw little holes in a tree to get at the sap or gum that ...

Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Further reading: World's rarest parrot, extinct in wild, hatches at zoo Kakapo recovery This Parrot Stood 3 Feet Tall and Ruled the Roost in New Zealand Forests 19 Million Years Ago The magnificent palm cockatoo: The gigantic kakapo: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a bird episode, specifically some interesting parrots. Thanks to Fleur, Yuzu, and Richard from NC for their suggestions! Parrots are intelligent, social birds that are mostly found in tropical and subtropical parts of the world, but not always. Most parrots eat plant material exclusively, especially seeds, nuts, and fruit, but some species will eat insects and other small animals when they get the chance. Most parrots are brightly colored, but again, not always. And, unfortunately, most parrot species are endangered to some degree due to habitat loss, hunting for their feathers and for the pet trade, and introduced predators like cats and rats. All parrots have a curved beak that the bird uses to open nuts and seeds, but which also acts as a tool or even a third foot when it's climbing around in trees. All parrots have strong clawed feet that they also use to climb around and perch in trees, and to handle food and tools. Let's start with Yuzu's suggestions, the cockatoo and the parakeet. A parakeet is a small parrot, but it's a term that refers to a lot of various types of small parrots. This includes an extinct bird called the Carolina parakeet. It was small parrot that was common throughout a big part of the United States. It had a yellow and orange head and a green body with some yellow markings, and was about the size of a mourning dove or a passenger pigeon. Its story of extinction mirrors that of the passenger pigeon in many ways. The Carolina parakeet lived in forests and swamps in big, noisy flocks and ate fruit and seeds, but when European settlers moved in, turning forests into farmland and shooting birds that were considered pests, its numbers started to decline. In addition, the bird was frequently captured for sale in the pet trade and hunted for its feathers, which were used to decorate hats. By 1860 the Carolina parakeet was rare anywhere except the swamps of central Florida, and by 1904 it was extinct in the wild. The last captive bird died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, which was not only the same zoo where the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, it was the same cage. It was declared extinct in 1939. The parakeet Yuzu is probably referencing is the budgie, or budgerigar. It's the one that's extremely common as a pet, and it's native to Australia. In the wild it's green and yellow with black markings, but the domestic version, which has been bred in captivity since the 1850s, can be all sorts of colors and patterns, including various shades of blue, yellow all over, white, and piebald, meaning the bird has patches of white on its body. The budgie can learn to repeat words and various sounds, especially if it's a young bird. I had two parakeets as a kid, named Dandelion and Sky so you can guess their colors, and neither learned to talk although I really tried to teach them. Some birds just aren't interested in mimicry, while others won't stop, especially if they get attention when they speak. In the wild, budgies live in flocks that will travel long distances to find food and water. The birds mostly eat grass seeds, especially spinifex, but will sometimes eat wheat, especially in areas where farmland has destroyed much of their wild food. They're social birds that are sometimes called lovebirds, although that's the name of a different type of bird too, because they will preen and feed their mates. Like many birds, the parakeet can see ultraviolet light, and their feathers glow in UV light. This makes them even more attractive to potential mates,

Kate Shaw is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she teaches and writes about the presidency, the law of democracy, the Supreme Court, and reproductive rights and justice. Her scholarly writing has appeared, among other places, in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review, and her popular writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. She co-hosts the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and is a Contributing Opinion Writer with the New York Times. Kate helps unpack the legal developments involving National Guard troop deployment; Trump's weaponization of the Justice Department; the James Comey, Tish James and John Bolton indictments; the government shutdown and funding of SNAP benefits; and more. Got somethin' to say?! Email us at BackroomAndy@gmail.com Leave us a message: 845-307-7446 Twitter: @AndyOstroy Produced by Andy Ostroy, Matty Rosenberg, and Jennifer Hammoud @ Radio Free Rhiniecliff Design by Cricket Lengyel

Thanks to William who suggested we talk about the Loch Ness Monster for our big Halloween episode! Further reading: 1888 (ca.): Alexander Macdonald's Sightings 1933, July 22: Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer's Loch Ness Encounter The 1972 Loch Ness Monster Flipper Photos White Mice, Bumblebees, and Alien Worms? Unexpected Mini-Monsterlings in Loch Ness Further watching: 1933 King Kong clip: Brontosaurus attack! The following stills are from the above King Kong clip: The drawing by Rupert T. Gould for his 1934 book about the Loch Ness Monster. He drew it after interviewing Mr. Spicer about his 1933 sighting: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our big Halloween episode to finish off monster month! I hope your October has been amazing and you have fun plans for Halloween. William suggested we learn about the Loch Ness Monster, so let's go! We talked about the Loch Ness Monster, AKA Nessie, a really long time ago, back in episode 29. Those old episodes aren't even available in the feed anymore—you have to go to the website to find them, and the audio isn't very good. So here's a revised and updated Nessie episode! There are some spooky stories associated with this one, but not too scary. Let's call it one and a half out of five monsters on the spooky scale. First, a little background about what Loch Ness is. It's the biggest of a chain of long, narrow, steep-sided lakes and shallow rivers that cut the Scottish Highlands right in two along a fault line. Loch Ness is 22 miles long, or 35 km, with a maximum depth of 754 feet, or 230 meters, the biggest lake in all of the UK, not just Scotland. During the Pleistocene, or ice age, Scotland was repeatedly covered with glaciers and ice sheets that were almost a kilometer thick. The ice only completely melted about 8,000 years ago. The massive weight of the glaciers over the fault line, where the rocks are already weaker, started the process of carving out the lake, and when the ice started melting in earnest around 10,000 years ago, the massive amounts of meltwater washed the weakened rocks out and left the deep valley that is now Loch Ness. The land slowly rose from where the ice had pressed it down, so that Loch Ness is now about 50 feet above sea level, or 15 meters. In other words, Loch Ness is only about 10,000 years old. All the lochs and their rivers have made up a busy shipping channel since the Caledonian Canal made them more navigable with a series of locks and canals in 1822, but the area around Loch Ness was well populated and busy for centuries before that. It's a beautiful area, so Loch Ness has also long been a popular tourist destination, well before the Nessie sightings started. There have been stories of strange creatures in Loch Ness and all the lochs, but nothing that resembles the popular idea of Nessie. The stories were mostly of water monsters of Scottish folklore, like the kelpie we talked about in episode 351, or of out-of-place known animals like a bottle-nosed dolphin that was captured at sea and released in the loch as a prank in 1868. The oldest monster report in the area actually comes from the 7th century, but it's supposed to have happened in the River Ness, which drains from the lake. When local people told St. Columba about a monster that had grabbed a man swimming in the River Ness, and presumably ate him, the saint went there to take care of the monster. He told one of his followers to swim across the river, which sounds pretty rough, but the saint said, “Don't worry, fam, I gotchu,” but in old-timey language. The man started swimming and sure enough, a water beast approached. The saint made the sign of the Christian cross and said, “Stop right there, don't touch him. Get back, monster!” The monster swam away immediately and was never seen again. The next sighting important enough for people to write down happened more than 1,400 years later,

Thanks to Richard of NC, Richard my brother, Siya, Ezra, and Owen and Aksel for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Creature Feature: Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid Nocturnal Spiders Use Trapped Fireflies as Glowing Bait to Attract Additional Prey A male vampire deer: The adorable googly eyed squid [still taken from video linked above]: The snowy owl [photo by Bill Bouton from San Luis Obispo, CA, USA - Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus, male, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19899431]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week for monster month, let's learn about some animals that are considered spooky, although in actuality they're just regular animals who don't even know the meaning of spooky. Thanks to Ezra, Owen and Aksel, Richard from NC, my brother Richard, and Siya for their suggestions! We'll start with the two Richards. Richard from NC suggested vampire deer, and my brother Richard suggested zombie salmon. The vampire deer is more commonly called the water deer, but considering it has tusks growing down from its upper jaw that look like fangs, vampire deer is an excellent name. Females have short tusks, but in males they grow quite long, sometimes over 3 inches long, or 8 cm. Since the animal only stands about two feet tall at the shoulder, or 65 cm, that's pretty impressive. Its hind legs are longer than its front, so that when it runs it sort of bounces like a rabbit. It has a very short tail, small rounded ears, and is golden brown in color with a lighter underside. It doesn't have antlers. We talked about the musk deer in episode 366, which also has fangs instead of antlers, but the vampire deer isn't closely related to the musk deer. The vampire deer currently lives in Korea, China, and Russia although it used to be much more widespread. It mostly lives in reedy habitats near rivers, and it's a solitary animal although females will sometimes congregate to eat. Males protect their territories by fighting with their tusks, although they don't actually drink blood. As for the zombie salmon, it's not a type of fish but something that can happen to an ordinary salmon. The salmon is a fish that famously spends most of its adult life in the ocean, but travels up rivers to spawn. The eggs hatch in freshwater and the baby fish grow up in the river, and then they migrate to the ocean and live there for almost the rest of their lives. Eventually the fish is fully mature and ready to spawn, so it travels to the river where it was hatched, fights its way upstream, and the cycle starts all over with the new generation. Almost all salmon die after spawning. This is partly because the energy requirements of swimming upstream is so high, but also because a salmon is genetically programmed to die after spawning. This is called senescence, and while it's common in invertebrates like octopuses and some insects, it's rare in vertebrates. Not only that, there's not enough food for an adult salmon in the spawning area, and an adult salmon's body is adapted for salt water, not fresh water, so it can't live long in rivers as an adult anyway. A small number of female Atlantic salmon are able to return to the ocean, recover and regain their strength, and spawn again a few years later, but for all other species, after spawning, that's it. Within days all the salmon have died. But sometimes, rarely, a salmon remains alive for weeks after spawning. It doesn't have the energy to return to the ocean, and its body is in the process of shutting down for planned senescence, and the freshwater is causing damage to the fish's skin. But still it survives, growing more and more raggedy, just like a zombie in a movie. But unlike movie zombies, it doesn't want to eat brains. Eventually the zombie salmon dies, if something doesn't catch and eat it first. Next, Siya suggested the googly-eyed squid.

This week we're going to learn about a bunch of bats! Thanks to John, Murilo, and Alexandra for their suggestions! Further reading: Why Bats Can't Walk: The Evolutionary Lock That Keeps Them Flying On a Wing and a Song—Bats Belt out High-Pitched Tunes to Woo Mates Why some bats hunt during the day Puzzling Proto-Bats A pekapeka just walking around catching bugs on the ground [photo by Rod Morris, from link above]: BLOOOOOOD! but a really cute smile too: The western red bat looks ready for Halloween! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week as monster month continues, we're going to learn about bats! We've talked about bats in lots of previous episodes, but we have a lot of really neat information in this one that we've never covered before. Thanks to John, Alexandra, and Murilo for their suggestions! John suggested we learn about diurnal bats and also asked if there are any flightless bats, maybe ones that live on islands. There are lots of island-living bats, and many birds that live on islands evolve to be flightless. It makes sense that bats might do the same thing--but I couldn't find any information about any known bat that has lost the ability to fly. The reason seems to be how highly derived bats are. That means they're specialized, the only mammal known that has ever evolved true flight. Unlike birds, which don't need to use their legs when flying, bats' legs are actually part of the wings. The wing membranes, called patagia, stretch not just between the elongated finger bones of the bat's hands, they also stretch between the arms and legs, and connect the legs too. A January 2025 study comparing bat skeletons to the skeletons of birds determined that unlike in birds, where the size of the legs doesn't have anything to do with the size of the wings, in bats the leg size and the wing size are closely related. If a bat evolves smaller wings, its legs also evolve to become smaller. That's why there are no bats that resemble ostriches, with tiny wings but really long legs. Another possible reason is that bat legs have evolved to point backwards compared to other animals. It's not just the feet, the knees are also rotated backwards. That's why bats hang upside-down when they're not flying. Many species of bat never land on the ground, because they literally can't walk at all. But there are a few species of bats that can walk quite well. One is the increasingly threatened New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It lives in a few places in both the North and South Islands, as well as some small islands off the coast, although it used to be much more widespread. It's also called by its Maori name, the pekapeka. The pekapeka mainly lives in forested areas and is quite small. It's brown with a lighter belly, and it has big ears, as do most bats. Its eyes are small and its vision isn't very good, but it has a good sense of smell. Its wings are small so its legs are correspondingly small too, but its legs are also strong despite their size. It has a clawed thumb toe on its feet and on its wings that helps it climb around in trees when it needs to, and it also spends about half of its time on the ground. It walks just fine, crawling with its wings folded so that the ends point up and back, out of the way. And yes, its legs are rotated backwards as you'd expect in a bat, and it roosts by hanging from its feet in trees. The pekapeka flies normally and catches insects using echolocation, just like other microbats throughout the world. It especially likes moths. Unlike almost all other bats, it finds a lot of its food on the ground too, using its sense of smell to track down spiders, insects and larvae, and other small invertebrates. It will actually dig into the dirt and leaf litter to find food. It also eats nectar and flowers, and is an important pollinator of some plants. One great thing about the pekapeka is that the males sing to attract a ma...

Supreme Court expert, Strict Scrutiny star, and Obama White House alum Kate Shaw joins Harry to preview the new SCOTUS term. A steady stream of emergency rulings that mostly backed President's Trump power grab has set the tone for a new year at the court. Kate and Harry preview several of the upcoming blockbuster cases, especially those dealing with executive power and gay rights. They then broaden the conversation, discussing whether any precedent is safe from the conservative supermajority; whether legal reasoning really remains the basis of the court's decisions; and most important: whether there is any executive action so heinous that the court won't permit it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new Supreme Court term started on Monday, and the justices have a lot on their plates. They'll be deciding a host of big issues in the coming months – including if Trump can fire board members of the Federal Reserve and whether his tariff policy is overstepping presidential authority. But first, on Tuesday, the court heard arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case focused on whether conversion talk-therapy for minors is protected by the First Amendment. So, for more on this Supreme Court term and what we can expect, we spoke to Kate Shaw, co-host of Crooked Media's Strict Scrutiny and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.And in headlines, National Guard troops arrive at an Army training center outside of Chicago, Attorney General Pam Bondi avoids questions from Democratic lawmakers, and more terrible news for furloughed federal workers.Show Notes:Check out Strict Scrutiny – https://tinyurl.com/7dfbhmc5Call Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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It's October, AKA Monster Month! Let's learn about some animals of the Skeleton Coast--which sounds spooky, but actually isn't. Lots of brown fur seals [photo by Robur.q - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The desert plated lizard [photo by redrovertracy, some rights reserved (CC BY) - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/45483586, CC BY 4.0]: Rüppell's korhaan [photo by By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: The pearl spotted owlet is cute rather than spooky, but it has a haunting call [photo by Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It's October at last, and that means monster month! To start us off this year, we're going to learn about animals of the Skeleton Coast, which sounds a lot more spooky than it actually is. The Skeleton Coast is a stretch of coastline 310 miles long, or 500 km, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It's part of Namibia, a huge country in southern Africa that's mostly quite dry, with two deserts within its borders. Because the country gets so little rainfall, it has to conserve water for its people, animals, and crops, so the government is serious about conservation and natural resources. It's home to one of the most cutting-edge water treatment plants in the world, and since the government's establishment in 1993, it's been working to help farmers and citizens in general to practice sustainable natural resource management. It's also a beautiful part of the world, with amazing geography, and animals and plants found nowhere else in the world, so eco-tourism has been increasing, which helps the economy. Namibia is also home to the San people, who call the Skeleton Coast “the land god made in anger.” The northern part of the coast is blocked off from land by huge sand dunes, while the southern part is rocky. To get there, you have to cross a desert, and then cross a treacherous marsh that's hundreds of miles across. Then to get home, you have to go back the way you came across the marsh and the desert, because launching a boat from the Skeleton Coast is impossible if you don't have a powerful engine. The sea along the Skeleton Coast is treacherous, with lots of rocks offshore, extremely heavy surf, and frequent thick fogs. There are around a thousand shipwrecks visible along the coast, with the oldest dating to the 1530s, and thousands more documented that aren't visible or haven't been found yet. Ships still wreck there sometimes. Animals do live along the Skeleton Coast, especially seals. The brown fur seal, also called the Cape fur seal, has a huge colony in the northern part of the coast, which is a national park. The brown fur seal lives in various parts of southern Africa, with a subspecies that also lives on some islands off southeastern Australia and Tasmania. A big male can grow 7 ½ feet long, or 2.3 meters, and as you can probably guess from its name, it's mostly brown in color. Males have a short mane on the neck that's usually darker than the rest of its fur. It has magnificent long whiskers, especially males. The brown fur seal mainly eats fish, but it also likes squid and will eat other animals like crustaceans and even birds. It can dive deeply and stay underwater for over seven minutes. It spends most of its life in the water, mainly only coming out on land to breed, give birth, and take care of the babies. The seals used to be killed for their fur, but this was outlawed in Namibia in 1990 except by special permit, which has allowed the seals' numbers to increase. The Skeleton Coast is named that mainly because of the massive amounts of seal bones that fur hunters left behind after killing and skinning seals. Unfortunately, something the rocks around the Skeleton Coast collect are plastic debris, especially fishing debris like nets.

Thanks to Brody, Oz, and Sam for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Chasing gold Two spectacled hare-wallabies hanging out under a spinifex bush [picture from this site]: A regular swamp wallaby [photo by jjron - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022233]: The glorious golden swamp wallaby [photo by Jack Evershed, taken from the first article linked above]: The takin can also be golden: The gaur is so incredibly big! It's so big, honestly, it's just ridiculous: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have suggestions from Oz, Sam, and Brody, with some interesting mammals! Let's start with Brody's suggestion, the wallaby! It's been a while since we talked about the wallaby, which is an adorable marsupial closely related to the kangaroo. It's native to Australia and New Guinea, although not every animal that's called a wallaby is actually part of the family Macropodidae. One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the word Macropodidae means big feet. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance. We talked about the wallaby last in episode 390, so let's learn about some species of wallaby that we didn't talk about then. For example, the spectacled hare-wallaby. It's a small species that's common in northern Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea. It's active at night and is mostly solitary, so unless you're wandering around at night you might not have seen one. It's called the spectacled hare-wallaby because it has orange-colored fur around its eyes so that it looks sort of like it's wearing glasses. The rest of its fur is brown, gray, and golden. Its ears are small and its tail and hind legs are very long, with short little front legs. It's very cute. The spectacled hare-wallaby prefers sandy or stony areas, like dunes and shrubland, where it can find lots of plants to eat but can easily hop away if it spots a predator. It's smaller than a domestic cat, but it can travel incredibly fast when it wants to. If you live along the eastern part of Australia, you might have seen the swamp wallaby, also called the black wallaby because it's mostly dark gray or gray-brown in color, often with a white tip to the tail. It's stocky and much larger than the spectacled hare-wallaby, almost three feet tall, or 85 cm, when it's sitting up. It doesn't just live in swamps but also likes forests and other areas with lots of places to hide. Unlike the spectacled hare-wallaby, it's not that fast and can't always outrun potential predators, but it's good at hiding because its fur is so dark. Most wallabies are grazers, meaning they mainly eat grass, but the swamp wallaby is a browser. Instead of having grinding teeth to break down grass, its teeth are sharper for cutting through plant material like bushes, shrubs, and ferns. The swamp wallaby will even use its front legs to pull branches into reach so it can eat the leaves. Wallabies are marsupials, meaning the babies are born extremely early by our standards, crawl into the mother's pouch and clamp onto a teat, and continue to develop in the pouch. Wallabies usually only have one baby at a time, but the mother swamp wallaby has two babies in its pouch almost all its adult life. The swamp wallaby has two uteruses, and a few days before the first baby is ready to be born, the female comes into estrus again, meaning she's ready to mate. By the time her first baby is born, she's already pregnant with her second baby. When the second baby is born, the first baby is old enough that's it doesn't spend all the time in the pouch—but by then,

Thanks to Joelle, Jacob, and Anna for their suggestions this week! Further reading/watching: Gulper Eel Balloons Its Massive Jaws Watch rare footage of a shapeshifting eel with 'remarkably full tummy' swimming in the deep sea The beautiful stellar jay: The maybe not quite as beautiful but really awesome gulper eel (with its mouth full of water, image taken from first video linked above): The same eel as above but with its mouth open so you can see just how big it is! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about a bird suggested by Joelle, Jacob, and Anna, and a weird fish also suggested by Jacob. Let's start with the bird, the stellar jay, also called Steller's jay! In the last few years there has been a push among bird enthusiasts to change the common names of birds named after people to names that are more general. While Steller's jay hasn't officially been renamed to the stellar jay, a lot of people are calling it that already so that's what we'll call it here. The word stellar means outstanding, and that's definitely a good description of this bird. The stellar jay is a beautiful bird that lives in western North America down into parts of Central America. It's closely related to the blue jay found in eastern North America, and if you saw it from the middle down you might think it was a blue jay, except that it doesn't have white markings on its tail and wings. It has a blue tail and wing feathers with dark bars, but from about the shoulders up it looks very different from the blue jay. It's silvery-gray, brownish, or black on its head, neck, and back. Some populations have a white eyebrow marking that makes the bird look like it's frowning. It has a crest like the blue jay, but its crest is bigger, spikier like it hasn't brushed its hair yet, and the bird itself is bigger overall than its eastern cousin. The stellar jay lives in forests, especially coniferous forests, where it eats pretty much anything it can find. It's an omnivore that likes insects and other invertebrates, eggs and baby birds of other species, and even small animals like lizards and mice, but it also eats lots of nuts, berries, seeds, and other plant material. It will visit bird feeders, and especially likes sunflower seeds and raw peanuts. The stellar jay is a corvid, distantly related to crows and magpies, and it shares the corvid trait of being intelligent, sometimes aggressive, and loud. It will imitate hawks in order to scare other birds away from food, and it will often chase smaller birds away from feeders. During nesting season, the birds get a lot quieter, and the male will sneak his way to and from the nest to feed his mate while she's sitting on the eggs. The stellar jay prefers to build its nest in a conifer, either in a hollow in the trunk or on branches close to the trunk. This is what the stellar jay sounds like: [bird calls] Jacob also suggested we learn about the gulper eel, which is sort of the opposite of the stellar jay. It's a deep-sea fish with a lot of names, including pelican eel and my favorite, the umbrella-mouth. It's black or sometimes dark brown and can grow up to about three feet long, or 90 cm. Much of its length consists of a long, whip-like tail. The gulper eel's mouth is ENORMOUS, ridiculously enormous, especially considering how slender the rest of the fish is. Its lower jaw is hinged and is extremely long, with a stretchy pouch of skin that forms its mouth and I guess you can call them cheeks. It is a very weird fish. Most of the time it keeps its jaw folded down against its sides, so that the jaws are barely visible and it looks more or less like a regular eelh. But when it wants to, the gulper eel can unfold its jaw and gulp in water to inflate its pouch, which makes it look like a black balloon with a tail. It sometimes does this if it feels threatened so that it looks bigger,

Thanks for Preston and Pranav for suggesting this week's topics! Further reading: DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery' gecko Snow Leopards Dispersed Out of Tibetan Plateau Multiple Times, Researchers Say Conquest of Asia and Europe by snow leopards during the last Ice Ages uncovered The crested gecko AKA the eyelash gecko: The fluffy snow leopard: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a couple of suggestions from Preston and one from Pranav! This is the first episode I've recorded in my new apartment, so let's make it a good one. First, Preston wanted to learn more about the crested gecko, mainly because he has a pet crested gecko named George Washington. That is one of the best gecko names ever! The crested gecko is also called the eyelash gecko. We've talked about it a few times, but not recently at all. It's native to a collection of remote Pacific islands called New Caledonia, where it spends most of its time in trees, eating insects and other small animals, but also fruit, nectar, and lots of other food. It's an omnivore and nocturnal, and can grow more than 10 inches long, or 25 cm. It gets its names from the tiny spines above its eyes that look like eyelashes, and more spines in two rows down its back, like a tiny dragon. It can be brown, reddish, orange, yellow, or gray, with various colored spots, which has made it a popular pet. These days all pet crested geckos were bred in captivity, since it's now protected in the wild. The crested gecko has tiny claws on its toes, which is unusual since most geckos don't have claws. It can drop its tail like other geckos if a predator is after it, but the tail doesn't grow back. Since its tail is prehensile and helps it climb around in trees, you'd think the gecko would have trouble climbing after it loses its tail, but it doesn't. Maybe that's because in addition to claws, like other geckos it has basically microscopic hairlike structures on its toes that allow it to climb smooth surfaces like windows and walls and the trunks of smooth trees. It can also jump long distances to get to a new branch. The crested gecko was discovered by science in 1866, but wasn't seen after that in so long that people thought it was extinct. Then in 1994, a German herpetologist out looking for specimens after a tropical storm found a single crested gecko. It turns out that the geckos had been fine all along, but because they're nocturnal and mostly live in trees, scientists just hadn't spotted any. While we're talking about geckos, Pranav requested that we revisit Delcourt's giant gecko with some updated information. We did mention the new findings back in episode 389, but it's really interesting so let's go over it again. Way back in episode 20 we talked about Delcourt's giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn't labeled and he didn't recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he'd ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn't know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species. No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum's other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau. In June of 2023,

This is a chapter of the Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie book, which you can buy or request at the library! Further reading: Debunking a Great New England Sea Serpent A narwhal. I use this picture all the time: The diseased black snake that was taken for a baby sea serpent: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to have a sea monster episode! This is actually a chapter of the book that I published a few years ago now, Beyond Bigfoot and Nessie, and it's called the Gloucester Sea Serpent. We had a Patreon episode recently that was about a different sea serpent, and while I was researching that, it was driving me completely nuts, because I kept trying to find the episode where I talked about the Gloucester sea serpent, and I finally remembered that that wasn't an episode at all. It was just a chapter in the book. Maybe it's time to record it. While the Gloucester sea serpent was first mentioned in a traveler's journal in 1638, it really came to prominence almost two centuries later. On August 6, 1817, two women said they'd seen a sea monster in the Cape Ann harbor. A fisherman said he'd seen it too, but neither the fisherman nor the women were believed. A 60-foot, or 18-meter, sea serpent in the harbor? Ridiculous! Only a few days later, though, the monster started showing up in Gloucester Bay and attracted major attention—not because it was elusive, but because it was so commonly seen. Sailors, fishers, and even people on shore saw what was described as a huge serpent in the waters of Gloucester Bay, Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. On one occasion more than two hundred people watched it for nearly four hours. The creature's length was described as anywhere up to 150 feet long, or 46 meters, and many people said it had a horse-sized head. Some people described its head as being about the same shape as a horse's too, although with a shorter snout. The body was snake-like and about the thickness of a barrel. Many people thought the sea monster had humps along the back, usually referred to as bunches or occasionally joints. Others said it undulated through the water in an up-and-down motion, which looked like humps. Others said it had no bunches or humps at all. Most people agreed that its back was dark brown. One of the earlier witnesses, a man named Amos Story, watched the sea serpent from shore for an hour and a half. He was adamant that it had no bunches, that he only saw at most about 12 feet of its length at one time, or 3.6 meters, and that its head resembled that of a sea turtle. It was also fast, with Story claiming it covered a mile in only three minutes or so. That's about 20 miles per hour, or 32 kilometers per hour—an incredible speed for an animal in the water. As it happens, the leatherback sea turtle has been recorded as swimming that fast, and it can grow over 7 feet long, or 2.2 meters, and possibly much longer. It lives throughout the world's oceans and is just as happy in cold waters as it is in tropical waters. In other words, it's possible Story actually saw a huge leatherback turtle, which would explain why it had a turtle-like head that it held above the surface of the water at least part of the time. This is something leatherback turtles do. Then again, the leatherback has distinctive ridges and serrations on its back that Story didn't mention. So many people reported seeing the sea serpent that the Linnaean Society of New England decided it needed to investigate. The society had only formed a few years before, in 1814, to promote natural history. By 1822 it had disbanded, but in those eight years it accomplished quite a bit, including opening a small museum in Boston. Its most controversial endeavor was the sea serpent investigation. Members of the Linnaean Society interviewed witnesses, making careful notes that were signed by the interviewees to indicate the details were accur...

Trump was losing in the courts. He's not anymore.In the early months of the administration, the courts were proving a powerful check on President Trump, blocking many of his boldest actions. But those were the lower courts. In the past few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in, and it has handed Trump win after win after win.So what do these decisions enable the president to do? And why is the Supreme Court giving Trump what he wants?To pull all this apart, I'm joined by Kate Shaw. She is a former Supreme Court law clerk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast.Note: This episode was recorded on Aug. 21, before Trump announced his intention to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and before Immigration and Customs Enforcement re-arrested Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and began processing him for deportation to Uganda.Mentioned:“Don't Believe Him” by Ezra Klein“This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built” by Peter M. ShaneBook Recommendations:Lawless by Leah LitmanVera, or Faith by Gary ShteyngartWe the People by Jill LeporeThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Josh Chafetz. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

While I'm at Dragon Con, here's an old Patreon episode about Tennessee water mysteries, including some spooky sightings of what were probably bears, and some mystery fish! Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. As this episode goes live, I should be at Dragon Con, so I decided to go ahead and schedule an old Patreon episode to run instead of trying to get a new episode ready in time. It's about some water mysteries in my home state of Tennessee, although I actually just moved away from Tennessee to Georgia. Tennessee is in the southeastern United States, a long thin state divided into three geographical sections. East Tennessee borders the southern Appalachian Mountains, Middle Tennessee is on the Cumberland Plateau, and West Tennessee borders the Mississippi River. The only natural lake in the state is Reelfoot in northwestern Tennessee, a shallow, swampy body of water formed in the early 19th century. Before 1811, instead of a lake a small river flowed through the area, a tributary of the Mississippi. In earlier accounts, Reelfoot River is called Red Foot River. Most of the residents of the area at the time were Choctaw, although white settlers lived in the small town of New Madrid near the bank of the Mississippi. From December 1811 through February 1812, a series of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone changed the land radically. There were three main quakes and innumerable smaller ones, ranging from an estimated 6.7 for the smallest quake to a possible 8.8 for the largest. In the initial quake and aftershocks on 16 December 1811, chimneys collapsed, trees fell, and fissures opened and closed, projecting water or sand high in the air. Boats on the Mississippi capsized as huge waves crashed from bank to bank. A woman named Eliza Bryan, who lived in New Madrid, wrote an account of the quakes: On the 16th of December, 1811, about 2 o'clock a.m., a violent shock of earthquake, accompanied by a very awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but hoarse and vibrating, followed by complete saturation of the atmosphere with sulphurous vapor, causing total darkness. The screams of the inhabitants, the cries of the fowls and beasts of every species, the falling trees, and the roaring of the Mississippi, the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as it is supposed, to an eruption in its bed, formed a scene truly horrible. From this time on until the 4th of February the earth was in continual agitation, visibly waving as a gentle sea. On that day there was another shock…and on the 7th, at about 4 o'clock a.m., a concussion took place so much more violent than those preceding it that it is denominated the ‘hard shock.' The Mississippi first seemed to recede from its banks, and its waters gathered up like a mountain… Then, rising 15 or 20 feet perpendicularly and expanding, as it were, at the same time, the banks overflowed with a retrograde current rapid as a torrent. A riverboat captain reported in another account that his boat was caught in a ferocious current on the Mississippi, crashing across waves he estimated as six feet high, or 1.8 m. He also reported whirlpools that he estimated were 30 feet deep, or 9 m. He saw all the trees on either bank fall at once. The December quake was so large it was felt across North America, from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Then, only five weeks later, it happened again, followed by the third major earthquake on 7 February. Only 15 miles, or 24 km, from the epicenter, the land dropped 20 feet, or 6 m, and created a basin that immediately filled with water. Reelfoot Lake was formed, Tennessee's only natural lake. Reelfoot is a state park these days, popular with boaters, fishers, hunters, and birdwatchers. The only cryptid sighting I could find took place in the Glass community near Obion, within ten miles, or 16 km, of the lake. A man who grew up in Glass reported in 2009 that a bipeda...

Thanks to Mila for suggesting one of our topics today! Further reading: The mystery of the ‘missing' giant millipede Never-before-seen head of prehistoric, car-size 'millipede' solves evolutionary mystery A centipede compared to a millipede: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Let's finish invertebrate August this year with two arthropods. One is a suggestion from Mila and the other is a scientific mystery that was solved by a recent discovery, at least partially. Mila suggested we learn about centipedes, and the last time we talked about those animals was in episode 100. That's because centipedes are supposed to have 100 legs. But do centipedes actually have 100 legs? They don't. Different species of centipede have different numbers of legs, from only 30 to something like 300. Like other arthropods, the centipede has to molt its exoskeleton to grow larger. When it does, some species grow more segments and legs. Others hatch with all the segments and legs they'll ever have. A centipede's body is flattened and made up of segments, a different number of segments depending on the centipede's species, but at least 15. Each segment has a pair of legs except for the last two, which have no legs. The first segment's legs project forward and end in sharp claws with venom glands. These legs are called forcipules, and they actually look like pincers. No other animal has forcipules, only centipedes. The centipede uses its forcipules to capture and hold prey, and to defend itself from potential predators. A centipede pinch can be painful but not dangerous unless you're also allergic to bees, in which case you might have an allergic reaction to a big centipede's venom. Small centipedes can't pinch hard enough to break a human's skin. A centipede's last pair of legs points backwards and sometimes look like tail stingers, but they're just modified legs that act as sensory antennae. Each pair of a centipede's legs is a little longer than the pair in front of it, which helps keep the legs from bumping into each other when the centipede walks. The centipede lives throughout the world, even in the Arctic and in deserts, but it needs a moist environment so it won't dry out. It likes rotten wood, leaf litter, soil, especially soil under stones, and basements. Some centipedes have no eyes at all, many have eyes that can only sense light and dark, and some have relatively sophisticated compound eyes. Most centipedes are nocturnal. The largest centipedes alive today belong to the genus Scolopendra. This genus includes the Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow over a foot long, or 30 cm. It's reddish or black with yellow bands on the legs, and lives in parts of South America and the Caribbean. It eats insects, spiders--including tarantulas, frogs and other amphibians, small snakes and lizards, birds, and small mammals like mice. It's even been known to catch bats in midair by hanging down from cave ceilings and grabbing the bat as it flies by. Some people think that the Amazonian giant centipede is the longest in the world, but this isn't actually the case. Its close relation, the Galapagos centipede, can grow 17 inches long, or 43 cm, and is black with red legs. But if you think that's big, wait until you hear about the other animal we're discussing today. It's called Arthropleura and it lived in what is now Europe and North America between about 344 and 292 million years ago. Before we talk about it, though, we need to learn a little about the millipede. Millipedes are related to centipedes and share a lot of physical characteristics, like a segmented body and a lot of legs. The word millipede means one thousand feet, but millipedes can have anywhere from 36 to 1,306 legs. That is a lot of legs. It's probably too many legs. The millipede with 1,306 legs is Eumillipes persephone, found in western Australia and only described in 2021.

Rosie and Bella interview Steve Mintern from OFFICE, critical urban geographer Dr Kate Shaw and designer and activist Cat Macleod about the environmental and social impacts of demolishing the 44 public housing towers in Melbourne. Steve Mintern is a landscape architect and is one of the managing directors of OFFICE, a charitable not-for-profit design and research practice in Melbourne. OFFICE is made up of a group of architects who assist community groups in advocating for better outcomes within their built environment. We talk about the research OFFICE has done into certain public housing communities, such as the Ascot Vale Estate, and their more sustainable solution of Retain, Repair and Reinvest.Critical urban geographer Dr Kate Shaw has a background in urban planning, focusing on the cultures of cities and the political-economic and social processes that shape them. Cat Macleod is a long-time climate and social justice activist and a designer passionate about saving the public housing towers. We speak to both of them together on the current pickets and research surrounding the situation which does not support the demolition of the public housing towers. Resources mentioned includeRAHU: https://rahu.org.au/?srsltid=AfmBOoqLeQJPL0-b596hLCtlDy0Jw7skKV25ZHDnijFEUWbcUnT_-zt_Save Public Housing Collective:https://www.savepublichousing.com/

Thanks to Yonatan and Eilee for this week's suggestion! Further reading: Replanted rainforests may benefit from termite transplants A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds A family of termites has been traversing the world's oceans for millions of years Worker termites [photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a topic I've been wanting to cover for a while, suggested by both Yonatan and Eilee. It's the termite episode! We talk a lot about animals that eat termites, and in many cases termite-eating animals also eat ants. I've always assumed that termites and ants are closely related, but they're not. Termites are actually closely related to cockroaches, which are both in the order Blattodea, but it's been 150 million years since they shared a common ancestor. They share another trait too, in that no one wants either insect infesting their house. Like most cockroach species, though, most termite species don't want anything to do with humans. They live in the wild, not in your house, and they're incredibly common throughout most of the world. That's why so many animals eat termites almost exclusively. There are just so many termites to eat! There are around 3,000 species of termite and about a third of them live in Africa, with another 400 or so in South America, 400 or so in Asia, and 400 or so in Australia. The rest live in other parts of the world, but they need warm weather to survive so they're not very common in cold areas like northern Europe. A termite colony consists of a queen, soldiers, and workers, which sounds very similar to ants, but there are some major differences. Worker termites take care of the nest and babies, find and process food so the other termites can eat it, and store the processed food. They also take care of the queen. Unlike ants and bees, worker termites aren't only female and aren't always sterile. Soldiers are bigger and stronger than workers, with much bigger heads and jaws so they can fight off potential predators. In some species, the soldiers have such big jaws that they can't actually eat without help. Worker termites feed them. Finally, the queen is the largest individual in the colony, usually considerably larger than workers, but unlike queen bees and ants, she has a mate who stays with her throughout her life, called a king. Some termite queens can live to be as much as 50 years old, and she and the king spend almost their entire lives underground in a nesting chamber. The larger the colony, the more likely it is that the colony has more than one queen. The main queen is usually the one that started the colony along with her king, and when it was new they did all the work—taking care of the eggs and babies, foraging for food, and building the nest itself. As the first workers grew up, they took on more of those tasks, including expanding the nest. Workers are small and their bodies have little to no pigment, so that they appear white. Some people call them white ants, but of course they're not ants. Workers have to stay in a humid environment like the nest or their bodies dry out. Workers and soldiers don't have eyes, although they can probably sense light and dark, and instead they navigate using their antennae, which can sense humidity and vibrations, and chemoreceptors that sense pheromones released by other termites. Termites have another caste that's not as common, usually referred to as reproductives. These are future kings and queens, and they're larger and stronger than workers. They also have eyes and wings. When outside conditions are right, usually when the weather is warm and humid, the reproductive termites leave the nest and fly away. Males and females pair off and search for a new nesting site to start their own colony. Termites mainly eat dead plant material, including plant material that most other animals can't digest.

It's a tiny mystery animal! Further reading: Salinella – what the crap was it? Some of Frenzel's drawings of Salinella: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Johannes Frenzel was a German zoologist in the 19th century. He worked in Argentina for several years, studying microscopic and near-microscopic animals, and seemed to be a perfectly good scientist who did good work but didn't make a real splash. But these days he's remembered for a mystery animal that is still causing controversy in the scientific community. Frenzel described a strange worm-like animal he named Salinella salve in 1892, and Salinella hasn't been seen since. According to Frenzel's description of it, Salinella is very different from every other animal known. It's so different, in fact, that some scientists think Frenzel just made the whole thing up. In 1890 or 1891, a colleague gave Frenzel a soil sample reportedly from the salt pans in Argentina. We don't know exactly where it came from, just that it's somewhere in the Río Cuarto region. Frenzel put the sample in an aquarium and added water, although apparently some iodine got mixed in too, either on purpose or maybe by accident. Then he forgot all about the sample for a few weeks. It wasn't covered and Frenzel reported that some dead flies had fallen into the aquarium. When Frenzel finally got around to examining the sample, he discovered something he had never seen before. No one else had either, before or since. He said it was a worm-like animal about 2 millimeters long, and there wasn't just one of them. There were quite a few in the sample, some in the soil and some attached to the glass. When he studied the tiny worms, he discovered they had a very basic, very unusual body plan. It was basically just a tube open at both ends, with a single layer of cells around the interior sac. Each cell was covered with cilia on both the exterior side of the animal and the interior side. Cilia are hair-like structures, and salinella used them to move around, a method of propulsion called ciliary gliding. It didn't have any organs or even tissues—basically nothing you'd expect even in a very simple animal. It reproduced by splitting down the middle, called transverse fission. Assuming Frenzel was describing a real animal, and was describing it accurately, this body plan is unlike any other animal known. It's most similar to what scientists think the body plan was of the precursors to sea sponges. It's also similar in some ways to a group of parasitic animals called Mesozoa, which are wormlike, very simple, only a few millimeters long at most, and which have an outer layer of ciliated cells. Mesozoans aren't well understood and most scientists these days think the group is made up of animals that aren't closely related to each other. Salinella has sometimes been considered a mesozoan, but it's still not that close of a match. Frenzel took detailed notes and made careful drawings of Salinella, and compared it to known animals like protozoans. His description of the animal is solid, and he described many other animals in his career that are well-known to scientists today. The main reason some scientists now think Frenzel made Salinella up is because it's so weird and no one has been able to find it since. Frenzel died in 1897 without ever having the chance to look for more specimens. In 1963 an American biologist placed Salinella in its own phylum, which he named Monoblastozoa. In the early 2010s, a team of German scientists visited various saline lakes in Argentina and Chile in hopes of finding Salinella specimens, but without luck. The area where the original soil sample came from has mostly been converted to farmland, so if Salinella was restricted to that one spot, it might well be extinct now. So what happened to the type specimens that Frenzel collected? We don't know. They vanished sometime between 1891 when Frenzel moved b...

It's Invertebrate August! These creatures are the most invertebrate-y of all! Further reading: Dubious Diskagma Horodyskia is among the oldest multicellular macroorganisms, finds study A painting of diskagma, taken from the top link above: Little brown jug flowers (not related to diskagma in any way!): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This episode started out as the March 2025 Patreon episode, but there was more I wanted to add to it that I didn't have time to cover in that one. Here's the expanded version to kick off Invertebrate August, which also happens to be episode 444 and releasing on August 4th! It's about two mystery fossils. The first is named Diskagma, which means disc-shaped fragment, and it was only described in 2013. That's partly because it's so small, barely two millimeters long at most, and partly because of where it's found. That would be fossilized in extremely old rocks. When I saw the illustration accompanying the blog post where I learned about Diskagma, I thought it was a cluster of cup-like flowers, sort of like the flowers of the plant called little brown jug. I was ready to send the link to Meredith Hemphill of the Herbarium of the Bizarre podcast, which by the way you should be listening to. But then I saw how old Diskagma is. It's been dated to 2.2 billion years old. That's older than any plant, probably by as much as a billion years. Even more astounding, it lived on land. As a reminder, the Cambrian explosion took place about half a billion years ago, when tiny marine animals diversified rapidly to fill new ecological niches. That happened in the water, though, mainly in shallow, warm oceans. If you go back to around 850 million years ago, that may have been roughly the time that land plants evolved from green algae that lived in fresh water. Plant-like algae, or possibly algae-like plants, might be as old as 1 billion years old. But before then, scientists don't find evidence of anything except microbes living on land, and they were probably restricted to lakes and other bodies of fresh water. That's because there wasn't much soil, just broken-up rock that contained very few nutrients and couldn't retain much water. Diskagma was shaped like a tiny elongated cup, or an urn or vase, with what looks like a stem on one end and what looks like an opening at the other end. The opening contained structures that look like little filaments, but the filaments didn't fill the whole cup. Most of the cup was diskagma's body, so to speak, although we don't know what it contained. We also don't know what the filaments were for. We do know that the stem actually did connect diskagma to other cups, so that they lived in little groups. We don't know if it was a single animal with multiple cuplike structures or if it was a colony, or really anything. That's the problem. We don't know anything about diskagma except that it existed, and that it lived on land 2.2 billion years ago. Tiny as it was, though, it wasn't microscopic, and it definitely appears more complex than would be expected that long ago, especially from something living on dry land. One suggestion is that the main part of its body contained a symbiotic bacteria that could convert chemicals to nutrients. As in many modern animals, especially extremophiles, the bacteria would have had a safe place to live and the diskagma would have had nutrients that allowed it to live without needing to eat. Diskagma lived at an interesting time in the earth's history, called the great oxygenation event, also called the great oxidation event. We talked about it in episode 341 in conjunction with cyanobacteria, because cyanobacteria basically started the great oxygenation event. Cyanobacteria are still around, by the way, and are doing just fine. They're usually called blue-green algae even though they're not actually algae. Cyanobacteria photosynthesize,

Thanks to Jayson and warblrwatchr for suggesting this week's invertebrates! Further reading: Parasite of the Day: Orthohalarachne attenuata Trap-jaw ants jump with their jaws to escape the antlion's den Get out of my noooooose: An ant lion pit: An ant lion larva: A lovely adult antlion, Nannoleon, which lives in parts of Africa [photo by Alandmanson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58068259]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It's almost August, and of course we're doing invertebrate August again this year. Let's get ready by talking about a few extra invertebrates this week, with suggestions from Jayson and warblrwatchr. Before we get started, I have some quick housekeeping. First, a big shout-out to Nora who emailed me recently. I just wanted to say hi and I hope you're having a good day. Next, I'm moving in just a few weeks to Atlanta, Georgia! I know I was talking forever about moving to Bloomington, Indiana, but I changed my mind. The next few episodes are already scheduled so I can concentrate on moving. I'm about 75% packed at this point and have given away or sold a lot of stuff, including a lot of books. But I have a collection that a listener might be interested in. I offered it to the patrons last month but no one grabbed it, so I'll offer it here. I have every issue of the little magazine Flying Snake ever published, 30 in all. They're a fun hodgepodge of articles, reprinted newspaper clippings, old photos, and other stuff more or less associated with cryptozoology and weirdness in general. I've decided they take up too much space on my shelves to take with me to Atlanta. If you're interested in giving them a home, let me know and I'll box them up and send them to you for free. The first person who says they'll take them will get them, but the catch is that you have to take them all. I won't just send you a few. I'll also throw in all four volumes of the Journal of Cryptozoology. This offer stands until mid-August when I move, because if I have to move them to my new apartment, I'm just going to keep them. Okay, now let's learn about some invertebrates! First, Jayson wanted to learn about a tiny invertebrate called Orthohalarachne attenuata. It doesn't have a common name because most people will never ever encounter it, or think about it, and I kind of wish I didn't have to think about it because it's gross. Thanks a lot, Jayson. It's a mite that lives in the nasal passages of seals, sea lions, and walruses. It's incredibly common and usually doesn't bother the seal very much, although sometimes it can cause the seal to have difficulty breathing if the infestation is heavy. The adult mite spends its whole life anchored in the seal's nasal passages with sharp little claws, although it can move around if it wants to. Its larvae are more active. The mite is mainly spread by seals sneezing on each other, which spreads the larvae onto another seal, and the larvae crawl into the new seal's nose and mouth. Unless you're a seal or other pinniped, this might sound gross but probably doesn't bother you too much. But consider that in 1984, a man went to the doctor when one of his eyes started hurting. The doctor found a mite attached to his eyeball, and yes, it was Orthohalarachne attenuata. The man had visited Sea World two days before he started feeling pain in his eye, and happened to be close to some walruses that were sneezing. Luckily for pinnipeds kept in captivity in zoos that give their animals proper care, mite infestations can be treated successfully by veterinarians. Let's move on quickly to an invertebrate that isn't a parasite that can get in your eyes, the ant lion! It was suggested by warblrwatchr and I've been wanting to cover it for a while. When I was a kid, there was a strip of soft powdery dirt under the eaves of the school gym that always had ant lions in it,

Kate Shaw is trusting the process — the bioprocess. The Auburn senior took that sweet Pathway to the Plains to pursue the ever versatile bioprocess engineering degree. And, as you'll find out, that one decision has led to a lot precision. 

Further reading: The Trees That Miss the Mammoths The disappearance of mastodons still threatens the native forests of South America Study reveals ancient link between mammoth dung and pumpkin pie A mammoth, probably about to eat something: The Osage orange fruit looks like a little green brain: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Way back at the end of 2017, I found an article called “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” and made a Patreon episode about it. In episode 320, about elephants, which released in March of 2023, I cited a similar article connecting mammoths and other plants. Now there's even more evidence that extinct megafauna and living plants are connected, so let's have a full episode all about it. Let's start with the Kentucky coffeetree, which currently only survives in cultivation and in wetlands in parts of North America. It grows up to 70 feet high, or 21 meters, and produces leathery seed pods so tough that most animals literally can't chew through them to get to the seeds. Its seed coating is so thick that water can't penetrate it unless it's been abraded considerably. Researchers are pretty sure the seed pods were eaten by mastodons and mammoths. Once the seeds traveled through a mammoth's digestive system, they were nicely abraded and ready to sprout in a pile of dung. There are five species of coffeetree, and the Kentucky coffeetree is the only one found in North America. The others are native to Asia, but a close relation grows in parts of Africa. It has similar tough seeds, which are eaten and spread by elephants. The African forest elephant is incredibly important as a seed disperser. At least 14 species of tree need the elephant to eat their fruit in order for the seeds to sprout at all. If the forest elephant goes extinct, the trees will too. When the North American mammoths went extinct, something similar happened. Mammoths and other megafauna co-evolved with many plants and trees to disperse their seeds, and in return the animals got to eat some yummy fruit. But when the mammoths went extinct, many plant seeds couldn't germinate since there were no mammoths to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds. Some of these plants survive but have declined severely, like the Osage orange. The Osage orange grows about 50 or 60 feet tall, or 15 to 18 meters, and produces big yellowish-green fruits that look like round greenish brains. Although it's related to the mulberry, you wouldn't be able to guess that from the fruit. The fruit drops from the tree and usually just sits there and rots. Some animals will eat it, especially cattle, but it's not highly sought after by anything. Not anymore. In 1804, when the tree was first described by Europeans, it only grew in a few small areas in and near Texas. The tree mostly survives today because the plant can clone itself by sending up fresh sprouts from old roots. But 10,000 years ago, the tree grew throughout North America, as far north as Ontario, Canada, and there were seven different species instead of just the one we have today. 10,000 years ago is about the time that much of the megafauna of North and South America went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, elephant-like animals called gomphotheres, camels, and many, many others. The osage orange tree's thorns are too widely spaced to deter deer, but would have made a mammoth think twice before grabbing at the branches with its trunk. The thorns also grow much higher than deer can browse. Trees that bear thorns generally don't grow them in the upper branches. There's no point in wasting energy growing thorns where nothing is going to eat the leaves anyway. If there are thorns beyond reach of existing browsers, the tree must have evolved when something with a taller reach liked to eat its leaves. The term “evolutionary anachronism” is used to describe aspects of a plant,

Well, it was another consequential Supreme Court term. So, we had to have Chris's wife Kate Shaw, along with the other co-hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, Melissa Murray and Leah Litman back to break down some of the biggest SCOTUS decisions including Medina v. Planned Parenthood, U.S. v. Skrmetti, and Trump v. CASA. There's a lot to discuss about the Court's evolving ideology under Trump 2.0. This conversation was recorded on July 1, 2025. 

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that mass layoffs at the Department of Education can move forward for now. Law professor Kate Shaw joins us to discuss what this means for President Trump's plan to dismantle the department. Then, Florida lawmaker Anna Eskamani talks about her recent visit to 'Alligator Alcatraz,' a controversial detention center in the Everglades holding hundreds of migrants. And, Texas is weighing a controversial plan to draw new congressional maps ahead of next year's midterm elections. Carnegie Mellon University's Jonathan Cervas explains the possible implications.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Look, don't touch: birds with dart frog poison in their feathers found in New Guinea The hooded pitohui: The rufous-naped bellbird: The regent whistler: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some birds that by human standards seem pretty mean, although of course the birds are just being birds. Thanks to Maryjane and Siya for their suggestions this week! We'll start with Maryjane's suggestion, the Northern shrike. It lives in North America, spending winter in parts of Canada and the northern United States. In summer it migrates to northern Canada. It's a lovely gray and black bird with a dark eye streak, white markings on its tail and wings that flash when it flies, and a hooked bill. It's a strong bird about the size of an American robin, and both the male and female sing. They will sometimes imitate other bird songs, and during breeding season a pair will sing duets. The Northern shrike looks very similar to the loggerhead shrike that lives farther south, in the southern parts of Canada and throughout most of the United States and Mexico. Most important to us today, the Northern shrike is sometimes called the butcher bird, because in the olden days, butchers would hang meat up to cure--but we'll get to that part. It prefers to live in the edges of a forest near open spaces, and in the summer it lives along the border of the boreal forest and tundra. While it's just a little songbird, in its heart it's a falcon or hawk. It eats a lot of insects and other invertebrates, especially in summer, but it mainly kills and eats other songbirds and small mammals like mice and lemmings, even ones that are bigger and heavier than it is. The shrike has ordinary feet for a perching bird, not talons, but its feet are strong and can hold onto struggling prey. Its beak is deadly to small animals. The bill has a sharp hook at the end and is notched so that it has two little projections that act like fangs. It will hover and drop onto its prey, or grab a bird in mid-flight and bear it to the ground to kill it. Sometimes it will hop along the ground until it startles a bird or insect into flying away. It will even flash the white patches on its wings to frighten hidden prey into moving. If the shrike kills a wasp or bee, it will remove the stinger before eating it. It will pick off the wings of large insects and will sometime beat a dead insect against a rock or branch to soften it up and break off parts of the hard exoskeleton before eating it. Shrikes are territorial and will chase away birds that are much bigger than them, like ducks and even geese. During nesting season, the female takes care of the eggs and the male provides food for her. To prove that he can provide lots of food for the female while she's incubating the eggs, he will cache food throughout his territory in advance. This is something shrikes do anyway, but it's especially important during nesting season. If a shrike catches an animal it doesn't want to eat right away, it will store it for later. It will cram it into a crack in a rock, impale it on a thorn or other sharp item like the points of a barbed wire fence, or wedge it into the fork of a tree branch. Then it can come back and eat it in a day or two when it's hungry, or take the food to its mate. When the eggs hatch, both parents help feed the babies. When the babies are old enough to leave the nest, the parents go their separate ways, but they will often each take some of the fledglings with them so they can continue to feed them and help them learn to hunt. Since a nest can have as many as nine babies, it's not always possible for one parent to take all the babies. The siblings stick together even once they're mostly grown and independent, often through their first winter.

Thanks to Micah for suggesting this week's topic, the trilobite! Further reading: The Largest Trilobites Stunning 3D images show anatomy of 500 million-year-old Cambrian trilobites entombed in volcanic ash Strange Symmetries #06: Trilobite Tridents Trilobite Ventral Structures A typical trilobite: Isotelus rex, the largest trilobite ever found [photo from the first link above]: Walliserops showing off its trident [picture by TheFossilTrade - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133758014]: Another Walliserops individual with four prongs on its trident [photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about an ancient animal that was incredibly successful for millions of years, until it wasn't. It's a topic suggested by Micah: the trilobite. Trilobites first appear in the fossil record in the Cambrian, about 520 million years ago. They evolved separately from other arthropods so early and left no living descendants, that they're not actually very closely related to any animals alive today. They were arthropods, though, so they're distantly related to all other arthropods, including insects, spiders, and crustaceans. The word trilobite means “three lobes,” which describes its basic appearance. It had a head shield, often with elaborate spikes depending on the species, and a little tail shield. In between, its body was segmented like a pillbug's or an armadillo's, so that it could flex without cracking its exoskeleton. Its body was also divided into three lobes running from head to tail. Its head and tail were usually rounded so that the entire animal was roughly shaped like an oval, with the head part of the oval larger than the tail part. It had legs underneath that it used to crawl around on the sea floor, burrow into sand and mud, and swim. Some species could even roll up into a ball to protect its legs and softer underside, just like a pillbug. Because trilobites existed for at least 270 million years, there were a lot of species. Scientists have identified about 22,000 different species so far, and there were undoubtedly thousands more that we don't know about yet. Most are about the size of a big stag beetle although some were tinier. The largest trilobite found so far lived in what is now North America, and it grew over two feet long, or more than 70 centimeters, and was 15 inches wide, or 40 cm. It's named Isotelus rex. I. rex had 26 pairs of legs, possibly more, and prominent eyes on the head shield. Scientists think it lived in warm, shallow ocean water like most other trilobites did, where it burrowed in the bottom and ate small animals like worms. There were probably other species of trilobite that were even bigger, we just haven't found specimens yet that are more than fragments. Because trilobites molted their exoskeletons the way modern crustaceans and other animals still do, we have a whole lot of fossilized exoskeletons. Fossilized legs, antennae, and other body parts are much rarer, and preserved soft body parts are the rarest of all. We know that some trilobite species had gills on the legs, some had hairlike structures on the legs, and many had compound eyes. A specimen with preserved eggs inside was also found recently. Some incredibly detailed trilobite fossils have been found in Morocco, including details like the mouth and digestive tract. The detail comes from volcanic ash that fell into shallow coastal water around half a billion years ago. The water cooled the ash enough that when it fell onto the trilobites living in the water, it didn't burn them. It did suffocate them, though, since so much ash fell that the ocean was more ash than water. The ash was soft and as fine as powder, and it covered the trilobites and protected their bodies from potential damage, while also preserving the body details as they fos...

Thanks to Cara for suggesting we talk about the long-beaked echidna this week! Further reading: Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years A short-beaked echidna: The rediscovered Attenborough's long-beaked echidna: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about an animal suggested by Cara, the echidna, also called the spiny anteater. It's a type of mammal, but it's very different from almost all the mammals alive today. We talked about the echidna briefly in episode 45, but this week we're going to learn more about it, especially one that was thought to be extinct but was recently rediscovered. Cara specifically suggested we learn about the long-beaked echidna, which lives only in New Guinea. The short-beaked echidna lives in New Guinea and Australia. The names short and long beaked make it sound like the echidna is a bird, but the beak is actually just a snout. It just looks beak-like from a distance and is covered with tough skin, sort of like the platypus's snout is sometimes called a duck-bill. In June and July of 2023, an expedition made up of scientists and local experts from various parts of Indonesia, as well as from the University of Oxford in England, discovered and rediscovered a lot of small animals in the Cyclops Mountains. They even discovered an entire cave system that no one but some local people had known about, and they discovered it when one of the expedition members stepped on a mossy spot in the forest and fell straight through down into the cave. But one animal they were really hoping to see hadn't made an appearance and they worried it was actually extinct. That one was Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, a type of mammal known as a monotreme. There are three big groups of mammals. The biggest is the placental mammal group, which includes humans, dogs, cats, mice, bats, horses, whales, giraffes, and so on. A female placental mammal grows her babies inside her body in the uterus, each baby wrapped in a fluid-filled sac called a placenta. Placental mammals are pretty well developed when they're born. The second type is the marsupial mammal group, which includes possums, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, sugar gliders, and so on. A female marsupial has two uteruses, and while her babies initially grow inside her, they're born very early. A baby marsupial, called a joey, is just a little pink squidge about the size of a bean that's not anywhere near done growing, but it's not completely helpless. It has relatively well developed front legs so it can crawl up its mother's fur and find a teat. Some species of marsupial have a pouch around its teats, like possums and kangaroos, but other species don't. Once the baby finds a teat, it clamps on and stays there for weeks or months while it continues to grow. The third and rarest type of mammal these days is the monotreme group, and monotremes lay eggs. But their eggs aren't like bird eggs, they're more like reptile eggs, with a soft, leathery shell. The female monotreme keeps her eggs inside her body until it's almost time for them to hatch. The babies are small squidge beans like marsupial newborns, and I'm delighted to report that they're called puggles. There are only two monotremes left alive in the world today, the platypus and the echidna. The echidna has a pouch and after a mother echidna lays her single egg, she tucks it in the pouch. Monotremes show a number of physical traits that are considered primitive. Some of the traits, like the bones that make up their shoulders and the placement of their legs, are shared with reptiles but not found in most modern mammals. Other traits are shared with birds. The word monotreme means “one opening,” and that opening, called a cloaca, is used for reproductive and excretory systems instead of those systems using separate openings.

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and a contributing opinion writer with the New York Times, talks about recent Supreme Court decisions including Medina v. Planned Parenthood, which permits South Carolina to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, and another decision from the shadow docket that allows the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries where they have no connections.

This week we're going to learn about a new finding about the skull referred to as the Dragon Man! Further reading: We've had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s—only nobody knew The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. It never fails that only a few days after our annual updates episode, a study is published that's an important update to an older episode. This time it's an update so important that it deserves its own episode, so let's learn more about one of our own extinct close relations, the Denisovan people. We didn't know about the Denisovans until 2010, when DNA was sequenced from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008. Scientists were surprised when the DNA didn't match up with Neanderthal DNA, which is what they expected, since they knew Neanderthals had lived in the cave at various times over thousands of years. Instead, the DNA was for a completely different hominin, a close relation of both humans and Neanderthals. Since then, researchers have found some Denisovan teeth, two partial mandibles, a rib fragment, and some other bone fragments, but nothing that could act as a type specimen. The type specimen is the preserved specimen of a new species, which is kept for scientists to study. It needs to be as complete as possible, so a handful of fragments just won't work. Even without a type specimen, having Denisovan DNA answered some questions about our own history as a species. Ever since scientists have been able to sequence genetic material from ancient bones, they've noticed something weird going on with our DNA. Some populations of people show small traces of DNA not found in other human populations, so scientists suspected they were from long-ago cross-breeding with other hominin species. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced, it matched some of the unknown DNA traces, but not all of them. Mystery DNA sequences in a closely related population are called ghost lineages. The Denisovan DNA matched the ghost lineage scientists had identified in some populations of people, especially ones in parts of east Asia, Australia, and New Guinea. This is your reminder that despite tiny genetic differences like these, all humans alive today are 100% human. We are all Homo sapiens. Naturally, we as humans are interested in our family tree. We even have an entire field of study dedicated to studying ancient humans and hominins, paleoanthropology. Lots of scientists have studied the Denisovan remains we've found, along with the genetic material, but they really need a skull to learn so much more about our long-extinct distant relations. Luckily, we've had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s. But wait, you may be saying, you just said we didn't have anything but bone fragments and teeth! Why didn't you mention the skull? It's because the skull was hidden by its finder, a Chinese construction worker. The man was helping build a bridge and was ashamed that he was working for a Japanese company. That region of China was under Japanese occupation at the time, and the man didn't want anyone to know that he was working for people who were treating his fellow citizens badly. He thought the skull was an important find similar to the Peking Man discovery in 1929, so he hid the skull at the bottom of an abandoned well to keep it safe. He didn't dare share any information about it until he was on his death-bed, when he whispered his secret to his son. It wasn't until 2018 that the man's family took another look at the skull and realized it definitely wasn't an ordinary human skull. It was obviously extremely old and had a pronounced brow and really big teeth. In 2021 the skull was classified as a new species of hominin, Homo longi, where the second word comes from the Mandarin word for dragon. That's because the area where it was found is called Dragon River.

Seth takes a closer look at Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson grilling each other in a very heated discussion about the merits of U.S. military intervention in Iran. Then, Chris Hayes talks about elected officials and law-abiding people getting detained by ICE, breaks down the heated debate between Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and discusses his wife, Kate Shaw's viral moment about nationwide injunctions.Following that, Mike Birbiglia talks about Seth telling him he would be a bad day drinking guest, shares his dad's reaction to his stand-up special, "The Good Life," and chats about receiving an email offering him a movie role. Plus, Mike continues the conversation backstage at Studio 8G exclusively for this podcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and a contributing opinion writer with the New York Times, discusses the latest news coming out of the Supreme Court, including the court's ruling in a Tennessee case regarding gender affirming care for minors and more.   

Thanks to Nicholas, Måns, Warblrwatchr, Llewelly, and Emerson this week, in our yearly updates episode! Further reading: An Early Cretaceous Tribosphenic Mammal and Metatherian Evolution Guam's invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey Rhythmically trained sea lion returns for an encore -- and performs as well as humans Scientists Solve Mystery of Brown Giant Pandas Elephant turns a hose into a sophisticated showering tool New name for one of the world's rarest rhinoceroses Antarctica's only native insect's unique survival mechanism Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth to rip apart their prey The nutria has really orange teeth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week is our annual updates episode, and we'll also learn about an animal suggested by Emerson. But first, we have some corrections! Nicholas shared a paper with me that indicates that marsupials actually evolved in what is now Asia, with marsupial ancestors discovered in China. They spread into North America later. So I've been getting that wrong over many episodes, over several years. Måns shared a correction from an older episode where I mentioned that humans can't get pregnant while breastfeeding a baby. I've heard this all my life but it turns out it's not true. It is true that a woman's fertility cycle is suppressed after giving birth, but it's not related to breastfeeding. Some women can become pregnant again only a few months after giving birth, while others can't get pregnant again for a few years. It depends on the individual. That's important, since the myth is so widespread that many women get pregnant by accident thinking they can't since they're still feeding a baby. Warblrwatchr commented on the ultraviolet episode and mentioned that cats can see ultraviolet, which is useful to them because mouse urine glows in UV light. Finally, Llewelly pointed out that in episode 416, I didn't mention that fire ant venom isn't delivered when the ant bites someone. The ant bites with its mandibles to hold on, then uses the stinger on its back end to sting repeatedly. Now, let's dive into some updates about animals we've talked about in past episodes. As usual, I don't try to give an update on every single animal, because we'd be here all week if I did. I just chose interesting studies that caught my eye. In episode 402, we talked about snakes that travel in unusual ways, like sidewinders. Even though I had a note to myself to talk about the brown tree snake in that episode, I completely forgot. The brown tree snake is native to parts of coastal Australia and many islands around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It's not native to Guam, which is an island in the western Pacific, way far away from the brown tree snake's home. But in the late 1940s, some brown tree snakes made their way to Guam in cargo ships and have become invasive since then. The brown tree snake can grow up to six and a half feet long, or 2 meters, and is nocturnal, aggressive, and venomous. It's not typically a danger to adults, but its venom can be dangerous to children and pets. The government employs trained dogs to find the snakes so they can be removed, and this has worked so well that brown tree snake population is declining rapidly on the island. But that hasn't stopped the snake from driving many native animals to extinction in the last 75 years, especially birds. One of the things scientists did in Guam to try and protect the native birds was to place smooth poles around the island so birds could nest on top but snakes couldn't climb up to eat the eggs and chicks. But before long, the snakes had figured out a way to climb the poles, a method never before documented in any snake. To climb a pole, the snake wraps its body around it, with the head overlapping the tail. Then it sort of scoots itself up the pole with tiny motions of its spine...

In a very unusual one-on-one--make that one-on-two--Harry sits down with Penn law professor Kate Shaw and Pennsylvania congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon to discuss the recent hearing in Congress at which Professor Shaw testified and Congresswoman Scanlon posed questions for the minority. The hearing was a tendentious and contrived set piece directed by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan with the clear goal of supporting the Trump administration's claim that federal judges such as Jeb Boasberg are improperly enjoining administration action. From their respective vantage points Professor Shaw and Congresswoman Scanlon explain the rules of the road about how to counter false claims about the constitution and the role of judges in it. Then with general discussion of ways in which the minority can be effective in the sharply constrained roles that the system forwards them.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kate Shaw is a constitutional law professor at University of Pennsylvania Penn Carey Law School. Shaw joins Preet to discuss legal challenges to President Trump's executive orders and the constitutionality of Elon Musk's role in DOGE. They also discuss whether Justice Amy Coney Barrett is shifting away from the conservative majority and upcoming Supreme Court cases on birthright citizenship and transgender care.  Plus, in a special excerpt from the CAFE Insider podcast, Preet and Joyce Vance speak with First Amendment expert Erwin Chemerinksy about the constitutionality of Trump's attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil based on his involvement in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Visit cafe.com/insider to subscribe and hear the full conversation. For show notes and a transcript of the episode head to our website.  Have a question for Preet? Ask @PreetBhararaon Twitter or Bluesky with the hashtag #AskPreet. Email us at staytuned@cafe.com, or call 833-997-7338 to leave a voicemail. Stay Tuned with Preet is brought to you by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices