Strange Animals Podcast Katherine Shaw

Thanks to Nathan-Andrew for suggesting giant ichthyosaurs!



Further reading:



Paleontologists unearth what may be the largest known marine reptile



Ruby and some other scientists with the ichthyotitan fossils [photos taken from this page]:







How the pieces fit together:







Show transcript:



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



This week we’re going to learn about some of the biggest animals that have ever swum through the oceans of this planet we call Earth, a suggestion from Nathan-Andrew.



We talked about ichthyosaurs way back in episode 63, but we haven’t really discussed these giant marine reptiles since. Ichthyosaurs and their close relations were incredibly successful, first appearing in the fossil record around 250 million years ago and last appearing around 90 million years ago. Most ichthyosaurs grew around 6 and a half to 11 feet long, or 2 to 3.3 meters, depending on species, so while they were pretty big animals, most of them weren’t enormous. They would have been fast, though, and looked a lot like fish or dolphins.



Even though ichthyosaurs were reptiles, they were warm-blooded, meaning they could regulate their body temperature internally without relying on outside sources of heat. They breathed air and gave birth to live babies the way dolphins and their relations do. They had front flippers and rear flippers along with a tail that resembled a shark’s except that the lower lobe was larger than the upper lobe. Some species had a dorsal fin too. They had huge eyes, which researchers think indicated they dived for prey. Not only were their eyes huge, they were protected by a bony eye ring that would help the eyes retain their shape even under deep-sea pressures.



We know a lot about what ichthyosaurs ate, both from coprolites, or fossilized poops, and from the fossilized remains of partially digested food preserved in the stomach area. Most ichthyosaurs ate cephalopods like squid and ammonites, along with fish, turtles, and pretty much any other animals they could catch. Ichthyosaurs also ate smaller ichthyosaurs.



Nathan-Andrew specifically suggested we look at Shastasaurus and Shonisaurus, two closely related genera that belong to the ichthyosaur family Shastasauridae. Both genera contained species that were much larger than the average dolphin-sized ichthyosaur. The biggest species known until recently was Shonisaurus sikanniensis, which grew to almost 70 feet long, or 21 meters.



Scientists are divided as to whether S. sikanniensis should be considered a species of Shonisaurus or if it should be placed in the genus Shastasaurus. The main difference is that species in the genus Shastasaurus were more slender and had a longer, pointier rostrum than species in the genus Shonisaurus. Either way, S. sikanniensis was described in 2004 and at the time was the largest ichthyosaur species ever discovered.



But in May of 2016 a fossil enthusiast came across five pieces of what he suspected was an ichthyosaur bone along the coast of Somerset, England. He sent pictures to a couple of marine reptile experts, who verified that it was indeed part of an ichthyosaur’s lower jawbone, called a surangular. Studies of the fossil pieces compared it to S. sikanniensis, and it was similar enough that the new fossil was tentatively placed in the family Shastasauridae. Based on those comparisons, scientists estimated that this new ichthyosaur might have grown to around 72 feet long, or 22 meters, or even longer.



Almost exactly four years after the 2016 discovery,

Thanks to Max for suggesting Titanoboa!



Further reading:



Largest known madtsoiid snake from warm Eocene period of India suggests intercontinental Gondwana dispersal



This Nearly 50-Foot Snake Was One of the Largest to Slither on Earth



Meet Vasuki indicus, the 'crocodile' that was a 50ft snake



Titanoboa had really big bones compared to its modern relatives:







Vasuki had big bones too:







Show transcript:



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



Almost exactly two years ago now, Max emailed to suggest we talk about titanoboa. The problem was that we had covered titanoboa in episode 197, and even though there’s always something new to learn about an animal, in this case since titanoboa is extinct there wasn’t much more I could share until new studies were published about it. But as the years passed I felt worse and worse that Max was waiting so long. A lot of listeners have to wait a long time for their suggested episode, and I always feel bad. But still there were no new studies about titanoboa!



Why am I telling you all this? Because we’re finally going to talk about titanoboa today, even though by now Max is probably old and gray with great-grandkids. But we’re only going to talk about titanoboa to compare it to another extinct snake. That’s right. Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a snake that was even longer than titanoboa!



Let’s start with Titanoboa, because it’s now been a really long time since episode 197 and all I remember about it is that it’s extinct and was way bigger than any snake alive today. Its discovery is such a good story that I’m going to include it too.



In 1994, a geologist named Henry Garcia found an unusual-looking fossil in Colombia in South America, in an area that had been strip-mined for coal. Fifty-eight million years ago the region was a hot, swampy, tropical forest along the edge of a shallow sea.



Garcia thought he’d found a piece of fossilized tree. The coal company in charge of the mine displayed it in their office along with other fossils. There it sat until 2003, when palaeontologists arranged an expedition to the mine to look for fossil plants. A researcher named Scott Wing was invited to join the team, and while he was there he poked around among the fossils displayed by the mining company. The second he saw the so-called petrified branch he knew it wasn’t a plant. He sent photos to a colleague who said it looked like the jawbone of a land animal, probably something new to science.



In 2007, the fossil was sent for study, labeled as a crocodile bone. But the palaeontologists who examined the fossil in person immediately realized it wasn’t from a crocodile. It was a snake vertebra—but so enormous that they couldn’t believe their eyes. They immediately arranged an expedition to look for more of them, and they found them!



Palaeontologists have found fossilized remains from around 30 individual snakes, including young ones. The adult size is estimated to be 42 feet, or 13 meters. The largest living snakes are anacondas and reticulated pythons, with no verified measurements longer than about 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Titanoboa was probably twice that length.



Because titanoboa was so bulky and heavy, it would be more comfortable in the water where it could stay cool and have its weight supported. It lived in an area where the land was swampy with lots of huge rivers.

Thanks to Khalil for suggesting the horny toad, also called the horned lizard or horned toad!



Further reading:



The Case of the Lost Lizard



The Texas horned lizard:



Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum)



The rock horned lizard [photo taken from article linked above]:







Show transcript:



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



This week we’re going to learn about a reptile suggested by Khalil, who is Leo’s friend, so a big shout-out to both. Khalil wants to learn about the horny toad, also called the horned toad or horned lizard.



We talked about it briefly back in episode 299. The horny toad is actually a lizard that lives in various parts of North America, especially western North America, from Canada down through much of the United States and into Mexico. The largest species is the Texas horned lizard, with a big female growing about 5 inches long, or almost 13 cm, not counting its tail.



The horny toad does actually resemble a toad in some ways. Its body is broad and rounded and its face has a blunt, froglike snout. Its tail is quite short. It’s also kind of sluggish and spends a lot of time just sitting in the sun, relying on its mottled coloration to camouflage it. If it feels threatened, it will actually just freeze and hope the predator doesn’t notice it. It’s covered with little pointy scales, and if a predator does approach, it will puff up its body so that the scales stick out even more and it looks larger. It also has true horns on its head, little spikes that are formed by projections of its skull, and if a predator tries to bite it, the horny toad will jerk its head up to stab its horns into the predator’s mouth.



Horny toads mainly eat a type of red ant called the harvester ant. The harvester ant is venomous but the horny toad is resistant to the venom and is specialized to eat lots and lots of the ants. Its esophagus produces lots of mucus when it’s eating, which collects around the ants and stops them from being able to bite before they die.



Because it eats so many venomous ants, many scientists think the horny toad stores some of the toxins in its body, especially in its blood. Its blood tastes especially bad to canids like coyotes that are common in the areas where it lives. But it does the horny toad no good to have bad-tasting blood if a predator has to bite it to find out, so the horny toad has a way to give a predator a sample of its blood in the weirdest way you can imagine.



If a horny toad is cornered by a predator and can’t run away, and puffing up isn’t helping deter the predator, the lizard has one last trick up its sleeve. It increases the blood pressure in its head by restricting some of the blood vessels carrying blood back to the heart, and when the blood pressure increases enough, it causes tiny blood vessels around the eyelids to rupture. It doesn’t just release blood, it squirts blood up to five feet away, or 1.5 meters. As if that wasn’t metal enough, the horny toad can aim this stream of blood, and it aims it right at the predator’s eyes.



Imagine for a moment that you are a hungry coyote. You’re young and don’t know that horny toads taste bad, you just know you’ve found this plump-looking lizard that doesn’t move very fast. It keeps puffing up and looking spiky, but you’re hungry so you keep charging in to try and grab it with your teeth in a way that won’t hurt your tongue on those spikes. Then, suddenly, your eyes are full of lizard blood that stings and makes it hard to see, and the blood drips down into your mouth and it tastes TERRIBLE. It doesn’t matter how hungry you are, this fat little lizard is definitely off the menu.

Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener for suggesting that we talk about some more species of praying mantis!



Further reading:

The luring mantid: Protrusible pheromone glands in Stenophylla lobivertex (Mantodea: Acanthopidae)

Dragons and unicorns (mantises) spotted in Atlantic forest



Citizen scientists help discover new mantis species



The dragon mantis [photo from first article linked above]:







The possibly new species of unicorn mantis [picture from second article linked above]:







Inimia nat, or I. nat, discovered after a citizen scientist posted its photo to iNat [photo from third article linked above]:







Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to revisit a popular topic that we’ve covered before, especially in episode 187, but which has been suggested by a couple of listeners who want to know more. It’s the praying mantis. Thanks to Elijah and an anonymous listener who suggested it. Elijah even keeps mantises as pets and sent me some pictures of them, which was awesome.

The praying mantis gets its name because it holds its spiny front legs forward and together, which sort of resembles someone holding their hands together while praying. That’s the type of praying spelled p r a y ing, not p r e y ing, which refers to killing and eating other organisms, but the praying mantis does that too. It’s a predator that will eat anything it can catch, including birds, fish, mice, lizards, frogs, and of course lots of insects.

There are thousands of mantises, also called mantids, with most species preferring tropical and subtropical climates. In general, a mantis has a triangular head with large eyes, an elongated body, and enlarged front legs that it uses to catch prey. Most species have wings and can fly, some don’t. Most are ambush predators.

We talked about several species of mantis in episode 187, and some more in episode 201. You can go back to those episodes to find out general information about mantises, such as how their eyes work and whether they have ears and whether they actually eat their mates (they do, sometimes). This week we’re going to focus on some findings about mantises that are new since those episodes came out.

The dragon mantis, Stenophylla lobivertex, was only discovered in the year 2000. Its body is covered with gray-green or green-brown lobes that help it blend in with the leaves in its forest home, but that also kind of make it look like a tiny dragon covered with scaly armor. Even its eyes are spiky. It lives in the tropics of South and Central America where it’s quite rare, and it usually only grows about an inch and a half long, or 4 cm. It spends most of the time in treetops, where it hunts insects, spiders, and other small animals.

Unlike many mantis species, the dragon mantis is mostly nocturnal. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t know a lot about it. In late 2017 through mid-2018, one member of a team of scientists studying animals in Peru noticed something weird in a captive female dragon mantis. Frank Glaw isn’t an expert in insects but in reptiles and amphibians, but he happened to observe what looked like two tiny maggots emerge from the mantis’s back, roughly above her last pair of legs, but then disappear again into her back. He thought he was seeing the results of parasitism, but a mantis expert suspected it was something very different.

Some praying mantis females release pheromones from a gland in about the same place on the back.

Thanks to River for suggesting this week's topic, the pufferfish!



Further reading:



Grass puffer fish communicate with each other using a non-toxic version of their deadly toxin



Mystery pufferfish create elaborate circular nests at mesophotic depths in Australia



Pufferfish, puffed:











A starry puffer, un-puffed [picture by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116912671]:







A grass puffer, un-puffed:







The mystery structure that turns out to be made by pufferfish:







Show transcript:

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

This week we’re going to learn about a weird fish suggested by River, the pufferfish!

Lots of fish have the name pufferfish, and sometimes they’re also called balloonfish, swellfish, bubblefish, or globefish. You might be able to guess from the names what they can do, but just in case you don’t know, the pufferfish can puff up to make itself big and round. The question you might have at this point is why, and how do they do this?

There are lots of pufferfish in various genera, all of them in the family Tetradontidae. Tetradontidae means “four teeth,” because obviously when you find an incredibly poisonous fish that can blow itself up like a balloon, sometimes with spikes that emerge from the skin, of course you’re going to name it after its teeth.

Most pufferfish live in the ocean, although some live in places where freshwater mixes with ocean water, and some species even live in rivers. It prefers warm, shallow water and eats invertebrates and plant material. Larger pufferfish can use their four big front teeth to crush the shells of mollusks, like clams and mussels.

Most pufferfish are quite small and often brightly colored with spots, stripes, and other markings. You’d think the biggest pufferfish has to be the one called the giant freshwater pufferfish, but while it is big, it’s not the biggest. The giant freshwater pufferfish can grow up to 26 inches long, or 67 cm, which is over two feet long. But the starry puffer is almost twice that length, up to 47 inches long, or 120 cm. That’s almost four feet long!

The starry puffer lives in tropical and subtropical parts of the Pacific Ocean, especially in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. It has a big head, two pairs of nostrils, and is a mottled gray and white in color with little black spots all over. It mostly eats crustaceans and mollusks, but will also eat algae, sponges, coral, urchins, and other invertebrates.

The pufferfish is a slow swimmer, but it has two really good defenses. If it feels threatened—for instance if a big fish tries to catch it, or it’s caught in a fishing net and hauled to the surface, or if a diver tries to make friends, the pufferfish will swell up until it looks like a balloon with fins. It does so by gulping air or water into its elastic stomach until it’s completely full.

If you’re wondering how this can help the fish, not only does this make the pufferfish look much larger, it also makes it harder to swallow. Not only that, the pufferfish has spines that may be hidden in the skin most of the time, but when the skin tightens as the fish expands into balloon shape, the spines poke out. Suddenly a potential predator isn’t just trying to swallow a fish way bigger than its mouth is, it’s pointy.

The pufferfish’s second defense is that its body contains a deadly poison. You may have heard about fugu, which is considered a delicacy even though it’s so poisonous that in Japan and some other countries, chefs have to be specially trained and licensed to prepare the fish to eat.

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



Further reading:



RNA for the first time recovered from an extinct species



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



Tasmanian devil research offers new insights for tackling cancer in humans



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







The Thylacine could opens its jaws verrrrrrry wide:







Show transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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