Strange Animals Podcast

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

It’s taking forever to shake this cold. I feel fine now, but I still sound pretty bad. I apologize for my voice this time, but hopefully it’s not too bad. Rather than postpone this episode until my voice recovers, let’s just have a short but info-packed episode about some weird big animals from the past.

I think Llewelly alerted me to Neoparadoxia cecilialina, which appears in the fossil record between about 32 to 10 million years ago. It lived along the coast of the northern Pacific Ocean. It grew to around 8 feet long, or just under 2.5 meters, although the only specimen found so far wasn’t fully grown so it may have been a bit larger as an adult. It was a heavy animal with long legs, big feet, a big wide snout with eyes near the top of its head, and a tiny tail. In fact, it probably looked superficially like a weird hippopotamus. Like the hippo, it ate water plants. It was probably fully aquatic, meaning it lived its entire life in water.

Neoparadoxia was a member of the order Desmostylia, which were all marine herbivores that probably mostly ate kelp. They all looked sort of like weird hippos but acted more like dugongs. Some researchers think Desmostylians went extinct when dugongs evolved and outcompeted them.

Despite its strong-looking leg bones, many species of Desmostylia had spongy bones. This made the bones less dense but also weakened them. Weaker bones are not a problem for an ocean animal whose weight is supported by the water, but it does mean that it probably couldn’t support its weight on land. Whales and other cetaceans have a similar type of spongy bone.

Desmostylus was a Desmostylian genus. It probably spent most of its time near the surface of shallow water. It may have preferred to live around the mouths of rivers and spent part of its time in fresh water, part in brackish water where the ocean and river mixed. It grew around 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters, and it had toenails that were the remnants of hooves from when its ancestors lived on the land. It had two pairs of tusks that jutted forward from its long jaws, which it probably used to help dig up plants.

Some species of Desmostylia had teeth that are similar to elephant teeth, which may have helped it deal with sand and grit when eating a diet of sea grass. Species that didn’t have spongy bones may have actually walked across the sea floor to eat plants, only surfacing to take breaths.

So are Desmostylians more closely related to elephants or hippos or whales or dugongs? How about none of the above. Scientists are still trying to figure out how the Desmostylians were related to each other and to other animals, but so far they seem to be not very closely related to anything alive today. One suggestion is that they’re basal odd-toed ungulates that completely died out around 10 million years ago, leaving no living descendants.

Another group of big heavy weird animals that went extinct around 28 million years ago was an order called Embrithopoda. Instead of looking sort of like hippos, Embrithopods looked more like rhinoceroses. They were land animals that probably evolved in Africa, although they also lived in parts of Eurasia, and they were probably about as closely related to Desmostylians as Desmostylians were to elephants and dugongs—and, in fact, Embrithopods were probably also distantly related to elephants and dugongs. They probably weren’t actually related to rhinos.

This is weird at first glance, because Embrithopods look a lot like rhinos. Some species even had nose horns. For instance, Arsinoitherium lived in the rainforests of northern Africa around 30 million years ago, and stood around 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and had a pair of huge horns on the nose with another small pair over the eyes. But the nose horns were much different from the rhino’s horn. For one thing, both were side by side. For another, they weren’t made out of keratin fibers like the rhino’s horn. Instead, the horn cores were made of bone and were probably covered with keratinized skin something like giraffe ossicones. Either way, they were probably pretty darn impressive, especially if they were pointed at you.

Embrithopods ate plants, especially tough plants. Some species may have been semiaquatic, living in swampy areas and in lakes. And that is pretty much all we know about them. I kind of want one as a pet after looking at pictures of its skeleton, but let’s just chalk that up to the cough medicine I’ve been taking.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

You can buy and download an ebook of Small Mysteries here!

Thanks to Murray and Nathan Andrew for their suggestions this week! Happy Halloween!

xeno-canto.org is an excellent resource for bird, insect, and other animal recordings by field scientists, naturalists, and citizen scientists!

Further reading:

Reconstruction of an extinct soundscape reveals ultrasonic communication in the Jurassic

John Young Rediscovered the Australian Night Parrot, but Did He Lie About His Later Findings?

A Naturalist With a Checkered Past Rediscovered a Long-lost Parrot . . . Then Things Got Interesting

Night Parrot man in jail after bush bolthole bid

‘Breakthrough discovery’: Indigenous Rangers in outback WA find up to 50 night parrots one of Australia’s most elusive birds

The Indo-Pacific leopard shark [photo by Felix Frost-Savage – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150136016]:

A young Indo-Pacific leopard shark, so you can see why it’s also called the zebra shark:

One of John Young’s controversial night parrot photos, showing wire mesh in the upper right-hand corner that might be part of a cage or enclosure:

Show transcript:

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

This week is our Halloween episode, and a brand new one since I wasn’t going to skip Halloween! I thought about covering a really spooky topic, but decided to go with interesting instead. Thanks to Murray and Nathan Andrew for their suggestions this week.

First, though, a quick note that if you check the show notes, or go to the website at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net, you’ll find a link to buy the Small Mysteries ebook! Unless I forgot to add it! It’s $3 and is available in epub, PDF, or whatever format file it is that Kindle uses. The ebook of Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie is there too for $5, which is cheaper than anywhere else.

We’ll start with Murray’s suggestion, the Indo-Pacific leopard shark! You might find this animal spooky if you’re afraid of sharks, but Murray isn’t, and in fact he was snorkeling off the coast of Australia where he lives when he saw a leopard shark not too long ago!

The Indo-Pacific leopard shark is also called the zebra shark, and it’s a different animal from the leopard shark that lives off the Pacific coast of North America. It’s bigger, for one thing. It can grow over 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters, and possibly larger. It’s covered with small dark brown spots on a lighter brown or yellowish background.

The reason it’s also called the zebra shark is because baby leopard sharks have stripes. The young shark is dark brown with a yellowish belly, and it has white or pale yellow stripes and spots. It looks so different from the adult leopard shark that scientists in the 18th century thought they were separate species.

The leopard shark lives in shallow water, often around coral reefs. It’s most active at night, and spends the day resting on the bottom of the ocean, doing nothing much. Murray pointed out that the leopard shark is the only shark that doesn’t have to keep swimming in order to push water through its gills, and I had to look this up to see if it was true. It turns out that a few sharks, including the leopard shark, have special organs called spiracles that pull water into the respiratory system without the shark needing to move. The spiracles are small openings just behind the eyes. It allows some bottom-dwelling sharks to rest on the sea floor. All other sharks really do have to keep swimming or they’ll suffocate. The leopard shark usually rests with its head pointing into a current, which helps bring oxygenated water to it so its spiracles are more effective.

The leopard shark mostly eats mollusks, along with small fish, crustaceans, and other small animals. It’s a slender, slow-moving shark that lives throughout the tropical Indo-Pacific. Its eyes are very small and so is its mouth, and it almost never bothers people. In other words, it’s not very spooky but it is very pretty.

Next, Nathan Andrew told me about an invertebrate that lived back in the Jurassic period, alongside dinosaurs. It’s an ancient katydid, an insect related to modern katydids, that lived about 165 million years ago.

We don’t know very much about what the world sounded like in those days. The sound-producing organs in most animals are made of soft tissue and don’t fossilize well. But katydids, crickets, and some related insects make their calls by stridulation, where the male has a serrated section of his wing or leg, depending on the species, and he rubs it over the opposite wing or leg to make a loud call. And the great thing is, the exoskeletons of these insects are made of chitin, which fossilizes well, as do their wings. The only problem is finding them, since they’re so small.

The research team worked with 20 well-preserved specimens of katydid ancestors called ensiferans, all of them found in the same part of China but including individuals from nine different species. Before they modeled the ensiferan wings, though, they used a microscanning laser, high-speed video, and motion detectors to measure the wings of living species of katydid and find out exactly how the wings moved. They used that information to build a digital model of the wings. Then they scanned the fossilized wings and applied them to their digital model, and examined how the ancient wings differed and didn’t differ from the modern wings.

The main reason they did all this was to get an idea of pitch and vibration in the ancient insects’ wings as they stridulated, and that gives us an idea of what they might have sounded like.

The different species of ensiferan communicated with different frequencies, including some that communicated in ultrasound, which is something that many modern katydids and their relatives still do.

But let’s listen to one of the recordings! First, though, here’s a modern katydid:

[katydid chirping]

Now, here’s a simulated call of an ancient katydid ancestor:

[ancient katydid chirping]

Finally, let’s talk about a spooky-sounding bird, the night parrot. It’s a small Australian parrot that’s yellowish-green with dark speckles and other markings. It’s closely related to the ground parrot, also found in Australia, which looks similar but is a brighter green.

Like the ground parrot, the night parrot can fly, but while the ground parrot prefers not to, the night parrot flies up to 25 miles a night, or 40 kilometers, to find food and water. It’s nocturnal and very shy, and spends almost all of its time in big clumps of spinifex and other grasses and shrubs, or in woodlands. Spinifex grows in dense banks, and the night parrot hides inside them during the day in tunnels it makes through the plants. It eats seeds and other plant material.

The night parrot used to be common throughout much of inland Australia, but is now critically endangered. For a long time scientists thought it was extinct, since there was not a single verified sighting of a night parrot between 1912 and 1979. Even now sightings are incredibly rare, leading to speculation that there may only be a few hundred or even just a few dozen of the birds left in the world.

In 1990 and 2006, two dead night parrots were found in different parts of western Queensland, so scientists knew the birds were still hanging on. Then in 2013, naturalist John Young discovered a small population of the birds.

You may remember that back in episode 474, which ran on March 2, 2026, we talked about the buff-breasted button quail. A naturalist named John Young featured in that episode, and I made sure to cite my sources very carefully, because accusing someone of scientific fraud is a serious matter. And yes, this is the same John Young.

In 2006, Young had learned of the dead night parrot discovered in western Queensland, and he camped out for weeks in the same area where it was found. He heard night parrot calls but couldn’t see them in the darkness. He searched for years until in 2013, he got photographs of a night parrot. But the presence of wire mesh in the photograph indicated Young might have trapped a night parrot to take its photo, which is illegal. The photos were also timestamped at 5pm, when a nocturnal bird wouldn’t have been active, and Young touched up the photos as well—he says to remove a spinifex twig from the bird’s feathers, but some people question whether he was erasing damage done to the feathers when he captured the bird.

The 2013 photos really do show a night parrot, but later photos that Young presented might not be real. He claimed to have found nests with eggs in them, but in the photos, some of the eggs look like they’re made of clay, while others are clearly eggs from a different parrot species. Even the nests are suspicious. Night parrots lay their eggs directly on the ground inside spinifex bushes, but Young’s photos show acacia leaves and other vegetation, not spinifex. There’s more, but you get the idea.

John Young was arrested in 2024 after evading the police for a year, by the way. His arrest didn’t have anything to do with birds so I won’t talk about it here, since this isn’t a true crime podcast. In 2025 he pleaded guilty and is still in prison as this episode goes live, which is where he belongs considering the crime in question.

In much better news, also in 2024 a team of Indigenous rangers and scientists discovered a population of 50 night parrots in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. One of the reason night parrots have become so rare is that feral cats eat them, but in this particular area, there are plenty of dingoes. Dingoes don’t eat night parrots, but they do eat cats. So the presence of dingoes has inadvertently helped save the night parrot. The area where the night parrots were found is being kept secret, except that it’s in the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area in northern Western Australia. It’s a very remote area where livestock and most vehicles are not allowed, which has also helped the night parrots survive.

This is what the night parrot sounds like, first a short call recorded in 2015, and then clips of a male calling during a thunderstorm, recorded in 2017.

[night parrot calls]

Maybe the night parrot isn’t actually a spooky bird despite its name, but it’s pretty awesome anyway! Have a fun, safe, and happy Halloween!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s.

Thanks for listening!

Show transcript:

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

Monster month is upon us, and to kick us off I’ve got a fun episode about a supposed Bigfoot discovery called the Minnesota Iceman.

It happened in 1968, although the iceman had been around for a while as part of a traveling exhibition. But in 1968 a zoologist named Terry Cullen saw it at a livestock fair in Chicago. Curious and excited, Cullen talked to the owner of the exhibition, named Frank Hansen. Hansen said he wasn’t actually the iceman’s owner but that he was taking care of it for the owner.

Cullen contacted two cryptozoologists and urged them to look at the iceman, author Ivan Sanderson and zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Both wrote several influential books and basically founded modern cryptozoology, which of course is the study of animals that might or might not actually exist. Ivan Sanderson comes up in the podcast occasionally because he was everywhere back in the day, managing to have all sorts of sightings of mystery animals with absolutely no proof except for his own say-so.

But the iceman was clearly a real thing, because there it was. This is a good time to describe it, huh? It wasn’t a living animal but a dead one preserved in a block of ice. It was apelike but much larger than most apes with human-like proportions, and would have stood about six feet tall when alive, or 1.8 meters. The iceman’s face was somewhat flat in shape with pronounced brow ridges and a short snub nose. It had dark fur and enormous hands and feet, and while the ice obscured a lot of the details, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson got a good close look at it in Hansen’s home that December. The exhibition was on its winter break and Hansen kept it at his house in a refrigerated case. The body itself showed signs of injury, including a possibly broken arm and an eyeball dislodged from its socket.

Both Sanderson and Heuvelmans took photos and made careful drawings of the iceman. Heuvelmans, who was a zoologist, published a description of it in a Belgian scientific journal in 1969. He first suggested it was a new species of human that he named Homo pongoides, but later he changed his mind and decided it was probably more closely related to Neandertals.

Sanderson, meanwhile, was active in drumming up media interest. He also was sure it was a new species, but instead of Homo pongoides, he chose to call it Bozo. Yeah, Bozo. Sanderson published an article about the iceman in a 1969 issue of Argosy science fiction magazine, where he was an editor. In that article he suggests the iceman was the missing link between humans and apes. Remember what I’ve said about people claiming they’ve found the missing link? They either don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s a hoax. Sometimes both.

Sanderson also contacted John Napier, a primatologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution and had a longstanding interest in the Yeti and other Bigfoot-type creatures, and suggested he investigate. Napier and the Smithsonian’s director, S. Dillon Ripley, also a Yeti enthusiast, were both interested. But when they asked to see the iceman, suddenly Hansen said nope, the iceman’s actual owner didn’t want anyone else looking at their…sideshow exhibit.

Later Hansen said Napier and Ripley could see it after all. But when they did, it was clear to them that it wasn’t a real animal. Napier said it looked like a latex model. Hansen promptly said that he’d hidden the original, worried that he would get in trouble if it turned out to be a type of human, and that Napier had actually viewed the model he’d replaced the actual iceman with. Sanderson and Heuvelmans did say that the photos Napier took looked different from their own photos and what they remembered. But Hansen wouldn’t let anyone see the original iceman, so the scientists’ interest waned and that was pretty much it.

So where did the iceman come from and where is it now? Surely by now some museum or university has bought the actual specimen and thawed it out to examine, right? Where’s the genetic profile? Why isn’t this thing in textbooks?

Soooo, well. Let’s start with where it came from. Hansen said the body had been discovered in Siberia by seal hunters, floating in a block of sea ice just off the coast. But he also said it had been found not by Russian seal hunters but by Japanese whalers. Okay, well, maybe he couldn’t remember exactly who found it. But wait. He also said it had been shot by a hunter in Minnesota. And he also said it was killed in Vietnam and smuggled into the United States during the war in a body bag. And he also said someone discovered it in Hong Kong in a deep freeze after it was confiscated by authorities from the seal hunters or possibly whalers.

In other words, Hansen was clearly just making all this up. But maybe he didn’t know where it came from. After all, he always said he wasn’t the iceman’s owner, although he wouldn’t say who the owner was, just that they were an “eccentric California millionaire.” He also claimed the specimen’s hairs and blood had been tested and came back with lots of anomalies, but he refused to let anyone have current samples and he conveniently didn’t have copies of the test reports.

In 2013 someone listed the iceman in an eBay auction. It was bought by the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas, where apparently it’s still on display. It looks like the photos and illustrations made by Heuvelmans and Sanderson, but it’s not a real animal. It’s a latex model, just like Napier suspected.

Back in the early 1970s, Napier had done some digging and discovered that in 1967, Hansen had commissioned a latex model of an ape-man from a company that made movie props.

It’s quite possible that there was more than one model of the iceman made, since obviously that would increase its earning power in sideshow exhibits. That would explain why the iceman Heuvelmans and Sanderson saw looked different from the iceman Napier and Ripley saw. Or the differences could have come about when the model was thawed for easier storage, then frozen again in ice when it was time to go back on tour.

Of course, some people refuse to believe that the iceman was a hoax. They believe Hansen really did switch out the actual real iceman with a model. They base this on the report by Heuvelmans and Sanderson that when they examined the iceman, there was a place where the ice had melted, exposing the skin, and they said they smelled putrefaction.

There are several possible explanations for this, however. Just as people see what they expect to see, people smell what they expect to smell. I’m sure that model didn’t smell great, either, especially after being exhibited all over the country all summer. My freezer smells kind of funny even though there’s literally nothing in it but ice. Any questionable whiffiness might have been interpreted as that of putrefaction. Or, of course Hansen might have thrown a piece of rotten meat in its case to make it smell more realistic.

Whatever the reason for the smell they reported, that’s a really slim reason to ignore all the evidence that points to the Minnesota iceman being a latex model. I mean, we actually have the model to look at, and we know Hansen commissioned a model right before the Minnesota iceman conveniently went on exhibition, and that was well before Napier even knew about it.

Everything points to a hoax, but really, you can’t exactly blame Hansen. He didn’t approach Sanderson and Heuvelmans, they approached him. Hansen was a showman, so he probably hoped that if he convinced the pair the iceman was real, it would lead to a lot more publicity and therefore more money for him. That was his job, after all, and it sounds like he was good at his job.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Photos of a mangy fox that make it look like it has stripes:

Show transcript:

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

Buderim is a small city in Queensland, Australia, right on the coast but extending up the side of a small mountain. It looks like an especially beautiful place in a beautiful part of the world, but in the 1990s it was in the news due to sightings of a strange animal.

The animal was dubbed the Beast of Buderim by reporters. It all seems to have started in 1993 when a local artist was driving with her husband and saw a striped animal run across the road. She thought for certain it was a Tasmanian tiger, more properly called a thylacine. When she got home, she drew what she’d seen. It looks like a foxlike animal with black stripes, a long whiskery muzzle, and a long thick tail.

In March of 1995 a local dentist and his ten-year-old daughter saw the animal while driving along the edge of the local rainforest one evening. It was dark but his headlights lit it up and he was able to give a good description of it. He said it was medium-sized, presumably meaning about the size of an average dog, and had stripes that were sort of like a tabby cat’s markings but somewhat like a brindled dog’s markings. He described its coat as goldy in color. He also said it had a pronounced bump above its eyes, although I’m not sure if he meant it had a bumped-up forehead or if he was referring to a brow ridge of some kind. The animal was standing on the road, but when the car approached, it arched its back and then ran into the trees.

Another sighting occurred in August of 1995, but not near Buderim. A man in Bundaberg, a city over 130 miles away from Buderim, or 210 km, was driving at night and had to brake hard to avoid hitting a gray kangaroo as it bounded across the road. A moment later a large animal leaped onto the road after the kangaroo. In the glare of the headlights, the man reported that the animal was sandy in color with stripes that started about halfway down its back, and that its eyes glowed green-yellow. It was big too, four or five feet long, or 1.2 to 1.5 meters, not even counting its long, thick tail. It also had long jaws that the man said reminded him of a crocodile’s when it snarled at him. It made another huge leap and disappeared into the brush.

Plenty of other sightings have been reported from around Buderim and other parts of Queensland, with the most recent in 2014 turning out to be a mangy fox. This is the same area where a different striped animal, usually called the Queensland tiger, was first reported in 1871 and occasionally spotted afterwards. Sometimes people confuse the Beast of Buderim and the Queensland tiger. We talked about the Queensland tiger in an episode a long time ago—I don’t remember which one, but I do remember there not being much evidence that it was a real animal.

Some people think the Queensland tiger is a descendant of an extinct animal called Thylacoleo [thyla-CO-leo], while the Beast of Buderim is supposed to be a thylacine.

Thylacoleo is sometimes called the marsupial lion, although it looked much different than a lion. It had a strong kangaroo-like tail that it could use as a balance to help it stand on its hind legs. Its front legs were extremely strong and it actually had a semi-opposable thumb that helped it grab onto prey. Its front claws were retractable like a cat’s claws too, an excellent example of convergent evolution. All these traits also meant that Thylacoleo could climb extremely well. It might not have been a very fast runner, though, and some researchers think it was an ambush predator, possibly dropping down from trees onto its prey. The largest species, Thylacoleo carnifex, stood over two feet tall at the shoulder, or 71 cm, and was heavy for its size.

Not only that, Thylacoleo had massive jaws with huge weird teeth. Its cheek teeth were enormous, basically just one giant tooth on each side. Its other teeth were much smaller in comparison and not very strong, but those giant cheek teeth and its strong jaws meant that Thylacoleo could bite right through meat and bones with no problem.

We don’t know for sure what Thylacoleo looked like, but we do have two separate pieces of rock art that probably depict it. They show it with pointed ears instead of rounded ones and stripes on its back.

Thylacoleo was an apex predator in the food web of Australian megafauna during the Pleistocene, and like many of the megafauna predators in other parts of the world, Thylacoleo required giant prey. When its prey started to go extinct due to climate change toward the end of the ice age, along with the arrival of humans who hunted megafauna efficiently, eventually Thylacoleo didn’t have anything to eat. It was too well adapted for killing large prey to switch over to smaller prey, and more nimble small predators out-competed it. We’re not sure when it went extinct, but the best guess right now is about 30,000 years ago and possibly 40,000 years ago. It’s definitely not alive today, no matter how awesome that would be.

But that’s all beside the point, because most people who have reported sightings of the Beast of Buderim say it looks like a thylacine. We talked about the thylacine in episode one and then I’ve hardly mentioned it, so let’s learn a bit about it now.

Unlike Thylacoleo, the thylacine went extinct less than a century ago, and we know exactly what it looked like, where it lived, and why it went extinct. We have photographs and even video of living thylacines kept in captivity. The last thylacine reported in the wild was shot and killed in 1930, while the last captive specimen died in 1936. People have reported sightings since, but no definitive proof of a living thylacine has been found despite lots of people searching for it. It was officially declared extinct in 1982.

The thylacine looked superficially like a canid and was about the size of a big dog, with a long body and long, somewhat cat-like tail although the tail was stiff, not flexible like a cat’s. The thylacine was tan or brown in color with darker stripes that started just behind the shoulders and continued down the hindquarters and down the tail. It had large, somewhat rounded ears, a long muzzle, and jaws that could open extremely wide.

The thylacine looks like it should be a scary animal, and European settlers certainly acted like it was a monster that killed sheep and other large livestock. In reality, though, it was a timid animal with weak jaws that mostly ate small animals like a flightless bird called the Tasmanian native hen. It would definitely kill domestic chickens but it certainly wasn’t killing sheep. It also couldn’t run very fast, although it could stand on its hind legs for short periods of time.

That didn’t stop the Tasmanian government from offering a bounty for dead thylacines. Bounties started as early as 1830 and a century later the thylacine was extinct. Hunting was only part of the problem, though. Habitat loss was an increasing issue as more and more wild land was converted to farmland, and introduced predators like foxes and dogs competed for food and sometimes killed the thylacine. The thylacine’s preferred prey was also declining in numbers for the same reasons. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a disease similar to distemper decimated wild and captive thylacines, possibly because the remaining population was weakened by a lack of genetic diversity.

One interesting thing about the thylacine is that both males and females had a pouch. Like other marsupials, the female’s pouch was where her babies finished developing after they were born. Her pouch was under her tail and opened toward the rear of the body, as in wombats, which is somewhat rare. It contained four teats. The male’s pouch was in the same place and is called a scrotal pouch. The male could withdraw his scrotum into the pouch to protect it when he was traveling through tall brush.

The thylacine only survived in Tasmania until its recent extinction. It had once been common in mainland Australia too but probably went extinct there at least 2,000 years ago and probably closer to 3,000 years ago. There’s no conclusive proof that it survived in Australia until modern times and no conclusive proof that it lives there now. But Queensland is in Australia and that’s where the beast of Buderim has been sighted. Could the beast be a relict population of thylacines?

The August 1995 sighting at first seems plausible, since it’s so detailed and the description matches the thylacine. But remember, the thylacine wasn’t a very fast animal, mostly ate quite small prey like birds the size of chickens, and didn’t seem to be very aggressive. It certainly wouldn’t be chasing a full-grown male gray kangaroo, as the witness reported. The eastern gray kangaroo is a large, muscular animal that can bound extremely quickly, up to 40 mph, or 64 km/hour, and has sharp claws on its hind feet. A male can stand 6 ½ feet tall, or almost 2 meters.

Aside from humans, the gray kangaroo’s only living predator is the dingo, a canid introduced to Australia by humans over 8,000 years ago. We talked about it in episode 232. The dingo is usually tan or reddish in color and it carries its tail low, not curved upward. It also has pointed ears.

It doesn’t have stripes, though, and the stripes are a common detail in all the beast of Buderim sightings. But there are a number of possible solutions that don’t involve thylacines. The dentist’s sighting from 1995 might easily have been a big domestic cat. The dentist even reported that it had tabby-cat markings and that it arched its back when it saw the car. Size can be hard to estimate in darkness, especially when you’ve seen something unexpected.

The artist’s sighting in 1993 is less detailed. We have her drawing of the animal but we don’t know whether she saw it in daytime or at night. She saw it run across the road, which means that even if it was broad daylight she probably didn’t get a great look at it. I suspect a lot of the details she included in her drawing were things she expected to see, not things she actually necessarily saw. That doesn’t mean she was lying, just that her brain was filling in details without her even being aware of it. I think she saw a fox.

As for the August 1995 sighting, where the animal was chasing a kangaroo, I think that witness saw a dingo.

But wait, you may be thinking, neither foxes nor dingos have stripes! We’ve established their lack of stripes already.

To solve the mystery of the stripes, we have to look at another reported sighting. This is the most recent one, from 2014. The animal in question turned out to be a mangy fox, but it also definitely looked like it had stripes. We know because the witness got photographs, and the photographs show a scruffy fox with a thin tail and what look like thin dark stripes along its sides. All the beast of Buderum witnesses described their animals as looking brindled, and the marking known as brindled in dogs and a few other animals consist of thin dark stripes that are fairly close together.

Many things can make an animal look like it has brindled stripes, including poor coat quality, a coat that’s damp from rain or fog, or a coat that’s so thick it’s almost quilted and is therefore likely to appear unusual in bright headlights. The August 1995 sighting happened in wintertime in Australia, when a dingo might be expected to have a thick undercoat.

Whatever the animals were that witnesses reported, I don’t think they saw thylacines. That doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t see something mysterious, though. There might be some rare striped animal in Queensland that gets seen occasionally and mistaken for a thylacine. It’s just much more likely that foxes, dingoes, and other known animals are the actual Beast of Buderim. But I would love to be proven wrong!

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

Further reading:

Scientists solve a shark murder mystery

Stone Age Animal Urine Could Solve a Mystery about Technological Development

South African rock art possibly inspired by long-extinct species

The porbeagle shark [photo by Andy Murch, taken from this site]:

Dicynodont fossils and their possible art interpretation by the San people:

Show transcript:

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

It’s finally monster month, and I’m looking forward to sharing lots of fun mystery animals and animal mysteries over the next four weeks.

Our first mystery is from an article titled “Scientists solve a shark murder mystery.” The word solve is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this case, but let’s find out what happened to the shark.

The shark in question was a porbeagle shark, a type of mackerel shark that can grow as much as 12 feet long, or over 3.5 meters, and is gray and white in color. It lives in cold water in the North Atlantic and around Antarctica, and it eats fish and cephalopods like squid. It hardly ever bothers people although people like to eat it, and in some regions it’s been so overfished that the species is listed as endangered.

The porbeagle is especially unusual because it’s able to thermoregulate to some degree, like the basking shark and some other sharks that we talked about in episode 353, about warm-blooded fish. The porbeagle is actually really good at keeping its brain, eyes, and internal organs warm, which is why it’s so successful in cold water. It can live to be at least 65 years old.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the porbeagle, including where exactly it lives and how far it migrates throughout the year. A team of scientists has been tagging porbeagle sharks with little transmitters, like shark Air Tags, to find out where the sharks travel and other information, like how deeply they dive and what the water temperature is. The transmitter is attached to a shark’s fin and is designed to stay in place for a year, then detach and transmit all the information it’s gathered as soon as it floats to the water’s surface.

In October 2020, the scientists captured an 8-foot, or 2.5 meter, female porbeagle and fitted her with a transmitter before releasing her again. They were especially happy to see that she was pregnant, partly because the porbeagle is endangered and reproduces slowly, partly because they were interested to find out where a pregnant shark traveled.

About six months later, in April 2021, the tag began to transmit its information. It was too early for it to have detached on its own, but sometimes something happens to a tag and it ends up removed from the shark before it’s scheduled to.

The team’s lead scientist, Brooke Anderson, examined the transmitter’s information and knew something weird had happened to the shark. Everything seemed normal until about a week before the tag began to transmit, when the tag indicated a slight but steady increase in the temperature of its surroundings, even though it was still deep underwater. Anderson suspected that the shark had been killed and eaten at that point, and the tag ended up inside the body of another animal that was able to thermoregulate. When the transmitter was expelled from the predator’s body, it floated to the surface and did what it was designed to do, transmit its saved information.

But while the porbeagle isn’t a huge shark, it’s still big and dangerous. It’s also a fast swimmer. Something really big had to have attacked the shark.

The first thing Anderson suspected was an orca, but she and her team immediately rejected that theory. Orcas are mammals, which means an orca’s internal temperature is much higher than the tag had recorded. That narrowed the suspects down to another shark that’s able to thermoregulate, but it also had to be a really big shark. They decided in the end that the porbeagle was probably eaten by a great white.

Next, we need to learn a little about the rock hyrax, because a deposit of ancient rock hyrax urine is helping scientists learn more about our own prehistoric ancestors.

The rock hyrax looks like a weird rodent but it’s actually more closely related to dugongs, manatees, and elephants. I’m literally not even kidding. Hyraxes are native to Africa although the rock hyrax also lives in parts of the Middle East. It’s also called the dassie. It’s a chonky animal with a short tail and thick fur, small rounded ears, and nails instead of claws. Even a big male rock hyrax grows less than two feet long, or 50 cm, about the size of a small marmot or groundhog, which it resembles superficially. It eats plants.

The rock hyrax lives in family groups of one male and several females, along with their young offspring. It doesn’t dig a burrow but lives in holes and shelters it finds already dug, including caves, and that brings us to the sort-of mystery.

Like many animals, the rock hyrax tends to pee in the same place every time it needs to go, and a group of hyraxes living in the same shelter tend to all pee in the same place. A good shelter, like a cave, will get used by generation after generation of hyraxes. The rock hyrax is well adapted to dry areas and its kidneys are efficient. It doesn’t need a lot of water. As a result, its urine tends to be fairly thick and it also hardens quickly when exposed to the air.

In other words: rock hyraxes have been peeing in one part of Boomplaas Cave in South Africa for at least 50,000 years, and that urine is preserved in thin layers that contain pollen and other clues about the climate over the last 50 millennia. The urine can be carbon dated, too. That means scientists can cut samples from that huge deposit of ancient urine, determine how old each layer is, and examine the pollen trapped inside to learn what kind of plants were growing in the area at the time. That helps them determine what the climate was like, which in turn helps them learn more about the ancient humans who lived in the area too.

Until the samples were tested in 2022, the changes in South Africa’s climate over the last 50,000 years wasn’t well known. Now we have an unbroken record of the climate. The main problem is that the urine smells really, really bad. Like, really really bad. But it’s worth it, for science.

Let’s finish with another mystery from South Africa. Around 200 years ago, between 1821 and 1835, some artists among the San people painted an interesting animal on a rock wall. It’s not the only part of the painting, which contains art of other animals and various cultural elements, but it’s the only animal that can’t be identified as something real.

Of course, you can’t study art the same way you’d study a fossil. If you draw a dragon from your imagination, that’s art. If a scientist comes along 200 years later and tries to claim that dragon was based on a real animal that had four legs and two wings and could breathe fire, they’re misunderstanding what art is. But if that same scientist looked at your drawing along with the journal you kept at the same time telling about how you visited the zoo, they might suggest that your drawing was inspired by the crocodiles and monitor lizards you saw.

That’s what Julien Benoit thinks about the painting of an animal referred to as the horned serpent. The San have lived in that particular part of South Africa for longer than hyraxes have been peeing in Boomplaas Cave, and their culture is rich and in many ways unchanged from that of their ancient ancestors. They know everything about their land, including all the animals that live there now and a lot that used to live there.

The horned serpent painting is a long-bodied animal that doesn’t actually look like a serpent or an animal with horns. It very clearly has legs even though they’re short, and its body is thick but with a long thin tail and a small head with downward pointing tusks. If the animal was painted near somewhere that you’d expect to find walruses, everyone would assume it’s a walrus. But it’s not a walrus, or probably not, and the painting doesn’t resemble anything that actually lives in South Africa.

However, Benoit suggests that it does resemble an animal that used to live in what is now South Africa, the dicynodont. It had downward-pointing tusks, a thick body, and fairly short, strong legs. It ate plants and was very common in the area when it was alive—but it went extinct over 200 million years ago.

Clearly, as ancient as the San culture is, they weren’t around in the Triassic, so how could they possibly have known about dicynodonts? The answer is pretty simple. Dicynodonts were so common that their fossils are regularly found in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, including well-preserved skulls eroding out of the ground.

The San would have undoubtedly come across these fossils. They even have myths about huge animals that once roamed the area but that died out long ago, and archaeologists have found collections of fossils made by the San centuries ago. Benoit thinks the so-called horned serpent is an artistic depiction of a dicynodont, with elements taken from the fossils and from myth.

In other words, basically, the San people understood paleontology and extinction long before Europeans figured it out.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!