Strange Animals Podcast

Further reading:

The “Tresco” Sea Serpent of 1903

Show transcript:

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

I have a fun episode for you this month, about the Sea Serpent of the Tresco, a sighting that occurred in 1903.

The Tresco was a merchant marine steam ship, and a detailed account of its encounter with a sea monster was reported by the second officer, Joseph Ostens Grey, who wrote about it for “The Wide World Magazine” soon after it happened. The account appeared in the October 1903 issue.

According to Grey, the ship left Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 28, 1903, reached Cuba on June 5, and returned to Philadelphia on June 14. On the return trip the ship was near Cape Hatteras, a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, when Grey spotted a disturbance in the otherwise calm water. At first he thought it was porpoises playing around, but as they approached the ship, he realized he was watching a large group of sharks traveling together very quickly. He thought they were bottle-nosed sharks, which is an old name for the porbeagle shark.

The porbeagle is a common shark in that part of the Atlantic. It’s silvery-gray and white in color, and grows around 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. It mainly eats fish and squid, and while Grey was confused as to why the sharks were in a group, it sometimes gathers in groups. It’s a fast-moving, energetic shark that can thermoregulate, which is something we talked about in episode 353, about warm-blooded fish.

Grey estimated there were about 40 sharks in the school, and he described them as “swimming shoulder to shoulder, closely packed together.” They passed out of sight and an hour later he saw something else approaching from the same direction that the sharks had traveled from. At first he thought it was a derelict boat floating low in the water, and in fact was so convinced that’s what it was that he ordered the Tresco to steer for it to check for survivors.

But in the 20 minutes or so that they traveled toward the big black thing in the water, Grey got more and more confused. It looked like the thing wasn’t just drifting on the current, but was actually traveling toward the Tresco. Then, when the ship came close, a big head raised out of the water.

Grey described it as dragon-like, and he stared at it in shock for a few seconds. Then he and the crew member steering the ship hid in the wheel-house, which allowed them to steer away from the monster without it being able to see them.

Grey went over to a porthole to get another look at the monster. The body was motionless but the snake-like tail was out of the water and lashing, while the head was still reared up. Grey estimated it was about 100 feet long, or a bit over 30 meters, and about 8 feet in diameter at the widest, or 2.5 meters. The ship itself was about 300 feet long, or 90 meters or so. The back was humped up toward the neck and sloped down to the tail end, and also sloped down toward the neck. The neck was thick but looked slender compared to the head, which was about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters.

Grey got a good look at the head. Its mouth was open and he saw a pair of fangs curving backward like walrus tusks. He didn’t see a tongue or nostrils, but did notice a pouch or drooping skin under the jaw and discolored saliva dripping from the corners of the mouth. Its eyes were reddish and set near the top of the head.

Grey also saw scales on the body, looking like big rough plates like an alligator’s hide, not like fish scales. The body looked bronze in color but oddly enough, it appeared darker underneath, more of a green color as far as he could see. It also had pectoral fins.

But as he watched, a dorsal fin raised along its back and a webbed crest raised on the head. He estimated the head crest was about a foot high, or 30 cm, at the front where it was tallest, which was a point with a webbing of skin stretched taut behind it.

As the ship passed by, the monster suddenly turned as though pivoting, its long tail trailing behind, and lowered its head. Grey had been terrified that the monster would attack the ship, and now that the danger seemed to be past, he remembered he needed to alert the ship’s captain. He rushed out to the state-room and burst in, where the captain was lying down to take a nap. Grey brought him on deck where the sailors had gathered to watch the monster as it swam away.

At this point the monster’s head seemed to be resting on its back or shoulders, and Grey thought it had folded its neck like a resting swan. By the time it was a quarter mile away it looked more or less like a derelict boat again. The captain was astonished, but mentioned that earlier he had heard a snorting or hooting sound nearby that made him thing of a tug-whistle, but higher in pitch, and the sailors wondered if that had been the monster. Grey hadn’t heard the sound himself.

And that was the last they saw of the sea monster. Five days later the ship returned to Philadelphia and Grey prepared his report. He included a copy of the ship’s log for the day, which included the note “10am passed school of sharks followed by a huge sea monster.”

So, what on earth could this monster really be? I’m assuming it’s not actually a real monster, since it doesn’t really resemble anything known to science, living or extinct. Grey reported its length as that of the blue whale, the largest animal ever known to live on earth, but in shape it sounds a lot more like a humongous leatherback sea turtle.

We talked about the leatherback most recently in episode 406. It’s the largest turtle alive today, and can grow some nine feet long, or 3 meters. Instead of having a hard shell like other sea turtles, its carapace is covered with tough, leathery skin studded with tiny osteoderms. Seven raised ridges on the carapace run from head to tail and make the turtle more stable in the water. Not only is the leatherback the biggest and heaviest turtle alive today by far, it’s the heaviest living reptile that isn’t a crocodile. It has huge front flippers, is much more streamlined even than other sea turtles, and has a number of adaptations to life in the open ocean.

The leatherback lives throughout the world, from warm tropical oceans up into the Arctic Circle. It mostly eats jellyfish, so it goes where the jellyfish go, which is everywhere. But even the biggest leatherback that ever lived can’t be mistaken for a hundred-foot-long monster.

Assuming the report wasn’t a hoax, it’s possible that the sailors saw a big leatherback or some other animal tangled in a lot of floating debris. When the ship approached it, the animal thrashed around in a panic before managing to turn around and swim away. That would explain why Grey said the monster pivoted around. That would also explain why from a distance the monster looked like a derelict vessel of some kind. It might actually have been a derelict, and the shock of seeing a head rise out of the debris made the sailors think the whole thing was a gigantic monster instead of a distressed animal all tangled up in old rigging.

Then again, maybe it was actually a monster unknown to science, but if that’s the case, no one has seen anything like it since.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!

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!