Episodes

  • Episode 492: Basilosaurids

    Episode 492: Basilosaurids
    Jul 6 2026
    Further reading: Giant early whale Basilosaurus hunted the calves of other whales Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s look at some extinct whale ancestors this month, basilosaurids. We talked about the ancestors of whales in episode 72, about weird whales. After mosasaurs went extinct at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, basilosaurids evolved to fill the ecological niche they left. Mosasaurs were big marine reptiles while basilosaurids were big marine mammals, but in many ways basilosaurids looked more like mosasaurs than they did modern whales. Basilosaurids differed from their ancestors in that they were fully aquatic. They didn’t come out of the water at all and probably couldn’t. They did still have hind legs, but they were tiny and scientists think the animal probably only used the legs to help stay in place while mating. The hind legs were really small in comparison to the body, only 14 inches long, or 35 cm, in a 52-foot specimen, or 16 meters. Tyrannosaurus rex would look at that and say, “you’ve got really small legs, bruh.” Its front legs were larger and more flipper-like, although it still had an elbow joint that modern whales have lost, although modern seals still have an elbow joint. The reason Basilosaurids have a name that sounds an awful lot like a dinosaur name is because the person who described the first one scientifically thought it was a reptile. That was a man named Richard Harlan, an early paleontologist, who thought the fossils he was sent belonged to a marine reptile, possibly a mosasaur relation. In 1839 he named it Basilosaurus, which means “king lizard.” Then he took the fossils to another Richard, Richard Owen, who gave them a second look. Owen pointed out that the teeth didn’t look anything like reptile teeth and that the animal was probably some kind of whale. He and Harlan decided to rename the animal Zeuglodon, but it was too late! The first name was published, and Basilosaurus stayed king lizard despite not being a reptile. That didn’t stop many paleontologists from using Zeuglodon instead for quite a while, which has caused all kinds of confusion. Fossils of that particular species are especially common in the southern United States, so common in some places that the fossilized vertebrae were sometimes used as house supports. We talked about Basilosaurus in the paleontological frauds episode, because bones from six different basilosaurs formed the fake sea serpent skeleton exhibited around the United States and Europe in 1845. Basilosaurus did look a little bit like a sea serpent in that it was very long and relatively slender, and its body wasn’t rigid like a modern whale’s. It grew up to 66 feet long, or 20 meters, and probably longer, and is sometimes described as eel-like. It probably had small flukes at the end of the tail, but it didn’t swim like a modern whale. Its vertebrae were large, hollow, and filled with fluid. This made Basilosaurus buoyant but probably also meant it had trouble diving very deeply. There are only two species in the genus Basilosaurus, although there are lots of other Basilosaurids in other genera. The other Basilosaurus was slightly smaller and is most well known from an incredible bone bed in Egypt called Wadi al Hitan. Around 35 million years ago, Wadi al Hitan was a shallow coastal area full of life. It wouldn’t have looked all that weird to us at first glance, because a lot of the animals and plants that lived there were early relations of the ones that are still around today. These included sea cows that ate marine plants, various crocodilians, sea turtles, sea snakes, lots of birds, including pelicans, and lots of fish, including sawfish, sharks, and rays. There was even a kind of elephant living along the coast of this warm, shallow sea, Moeritherium, which probably looked more like a hippo or tapir than an elephant. There were also whales, specifically a type of dolphin-like animal called Dorudon. Dorudon was also a basilosaurid, but it only grew about 16 feet long, or 5 meters. It ate fish and other small animals and probably looked a lot like a miniature Basilosaurus—in fact, it was initially thought to be a juvenile Basilosaurus when it was first discovered. Dorudon may actually be a direct ancestor of modern whales, although we don’t know for sure. Paleontologists think Dorudon used Wadi al Hitan as a calving ground. About half of the Dorudon fossils found there are of calves. But there are also fossils of Basilosaurus, and it was there to hunt. In 2016, a complete skeleton of a Basilosaurus was discovered at Wadi al Hitan. Complete skeletons are incredibly rare in the fossil record, and this one was beautifully preserved. It even had the remains of its last meals preserved in the space that had once been its stomach, the first time preserved stomach contents had ever been found associated with a basilosaurus. ...
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    8 mins
  • Episode 493: NEW The Mystery of Esconichthys and Friends

    Episode 493: NEW The Mystery of Esconichthys and Friends
    Jul 13 2026
    Yes, this is a NEW episode! Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions this week. (Actual episode starts at 3 minutes 28 seconds.) Find the Backerkit campaign here! Further reading: Nix Illlustration: Esconichthys The southern hognose snake [picture by Caudatejake – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: A beach wolf spider [photo by Memer15151 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0]: Oviraptor may have looked kind of like this when alive [art by PaleoNeolitic – Own work, CC BY 4.0]: Two halves of an esconichthys fossil: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Oh, hi! This is a brand new episode, earlier than I expected! I noticed recently that one of the Patreon episodes I’d scheduled for September is one that I’d already run in the main feed a few years ago. I decided to just make a new episode for this week and move the episode that would have run this week to that September slot, because I have an announcement! For our five-year anniversary I published the book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, with a lot of the entries taken from episodes but also some new topics added. I always intended to do a follow-up for our ten-year anniversary, and have even done a lot of work on it. It’s called Small Mysteries, focusing on smaller mystery animals that don’t get a lot of attention. It’s about half the length of Beyond Bigfoot, all or almost all chapters taken from the podcast. But at this point, I don’t think I have time to finish it. I’m staying very busy and happy, with a part-time job taking care of people’s pets while they’re on vacation, and I’m also writing fiction again. But since that book is half-done, and a lot of people might want a copy even if I don’t add much more to it, I’m going to make it available as an ebook only. Do you remember last time I made a crowdfunding campaign, and the people who backed the campaign got a copy of the book as soon as it was published? I’m doing that again, but NOT for Small Mysteries. It’s for a different book, called The Moonhound, a cozy fantasy set in an alternate reality Smoky Mountains. The main character is a rabbit who moves to the mountains and meets a possum, and they have adventures. Even if this doesn’t interest you, there’s a $1 backer tier and if you click that, you have the option to add the Small Mysteries ebook for $2. That means the book is $3. Does that make sense? I feel like it’s confusing. The campaign starts on July 15, 2026 and runs through August 15, 2026. If you’re listening to the episode before July 15, 2026, you can click through the link in the show notes and follow the campaign, so that you get an email when it goes live. If it’s between July 15 and August 15, 2026, click the link in the show notes and there’s the campaign! If it’s after August 15, 2026, see if there’s a link in the show notes that will take you to a place where you can buy the ebook. Okay, that took way too long, so let’s get to this week’s episode! We have some suggestions that have come in recently, so we’ll cover a few of those animals, and we’ll finish up with a small fossil mystery in honor of the book. Thanks to Eesa, Grace, and Viki for their suggestions! A quick shout-out to Remy and Julien, and Dylan, Emily, and Michelle for their suggestions too. I’ll get to those in the 500th episode that will run at the end of August. We’ll start with Viki’s suggestion, the hognose snake. The name hognose is used for various species of snake, most of them in North and South America, but some in Madagascar. It’s a common snake in many parts of North America, so since we talked about the eastern hognose back in episode 81, let’s talk about the southern hognose in this episode. It’s found along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, including parts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida, and because it has a restricted range where people like to live too, it’s vulnerable to habitat loss. It used to live in other states too but its range has shrunk considerably since it was first described in 1766. The southern hognose grows about two feet long, or 61 cm, and like other hognose snakes, its nose turns up like a little pig’s snout. The shape of its nose actually may help it dig into leaf litter and dirt to hide. Some individuals are brown or gray, some are red or yellowish. It has darker blotches on its upper side and adults have white bellies. It has a big head that makes some people believe it’s venomous, but it’s actually harmless to humans and most animals. The only animals that really need to worry about the hognose are amphibians, like toads, frogs, and salamanders, although it will also eat lizards, small mammals like mice, and even large insects. It especially likes to eat toads, and while some toads are toxic, the hognose snake is resistant to toad toxins. A toad will frequently puff ...
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    16 mins
  • Episode 494: Four Water Animals

    Episode 494: Four Water Animals
    Jul 20 2026
    Further reading: New species of extinct vampire-squid-like cephalopod When teeth grow on the body Fossil shark turns into mystery pterosaur Scientists Had Never Seen This Elusive Whale Alive—Until Now Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This month I wasn’t sure what to cover in this episode, so I decided to just click on four random bookmarks of scientific articles that I’ve had waiting for attention, and we’ll discuss them. We haven’t done a four articles episode in a long time! The first article is from March 2022, and it’s about the discovery of an ancient cephalopod. Cephalopods include octopuses and squid. Octopuses famously have eight arms, while squid have eight arms and two feeding tentacles. Despite its name, the deep-sea vampire squid is actually more closely related to octopuses than to squid, and a newly discovered fossil is an ancestor to both. The fossil is 328 million years old and was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 1988 but was only studied recently. Fossils of soft-bodied animals are incredibly rare, and this one is remarkably well-preserved. All of the animal’s arms are preserved, including the suckers, but instead of eight arms, it had ten. Scientists have long suspected that the ancestors of modern octopuses and vampire squid had ten arms. The vampire squid has eight arms and two feeding filaments that are vestigial arms. But this is the first fossil found that shows ten arms. The fossil is of an animal with a torpedo-like body shaped like a modern squid. Two of its arms appear to be elongated compared to its other arms. It’s about 4 and a half inches long including its arms, or 12 cm. That’s pretty much all we know about it now, but hopefully the fossil will reveal more information as it continues to be studied. Our next article is from October 2017 and is intriguingly titled “When teeth grow on the body.” It sounds horrific, but it’s actually a study of certain catfish that grow bony plates with tiny teeth on their bodies as defense. Catfish don’t have scales, but some species of denticulate catfish that live in South America grow bony plates that act like armor. Many of these plates are covered in thin little teeth–actual teeth, including enamel and dentin, with pulp inside. They’re called extra-oral teeth, dermal denticles, or odontodes, and the study determined that they appeared about 120 million years ago in ancient catfish that hadn’t yet evolved the bony plates. The teeth regrow when they’re lost, and in some species, males grow larger teeth than females and use them to fight other males. Imagine biting someone without needing to open your mouth. Our next article is from November 2020, about more fossils. The fossils were discovered in a collection at the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton in England, and were originally found in the latter half of the 19th century by miners. A PhD student at the University of Portsmouth was studying fossilized shark spines from the collection when he realized they weren’t actually shark spines. Instead, they were jaw fragments from pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that filled many ecological niches that birds fill today. One of the species identified from the collection is called Ornithostoma, which means bird mouth, an animal that lived in the early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago, in what is now Europe. We know very little about it except that it didn’t have teeth, but it probably ate fish. But there were some other jaw fragments that didn’t belong to Ornithostoma, and in fact don’t match up to any known pterosaur jaws. It may belong to a new species, but the fossils are so fragmentary that there’s no way to know for sure. The rocks that the fossils came from were completely destroyed more than a century ago during phosphate mining, so unless more fragments are found in other collections, we may never learn more about this mystery pterosaur. Our last article is from July 2022, and I have no idea why I haven’t talked about it on the podcast before now. It’s about Sato’s beaked whale, also called kurotsuchi. It’s a type of four-toothed whale with a short beak, and it’s dark gray and can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. It was only identified in 2016 as being different from the two other known species of four-toothed whales, after careful analysis, including DNA analysis, of dead individuals that had been found washed ashore. Until the summer of 2021, no one had ever seen a living Sato’s beaked whale. Then some researchers studying orcas spotted 14 of the beaked whales swimming together between Hokkaido, Japan and the Kuril Islands. The scientists recognized that these were unusual whales and they were able to get a small skin sample from one. Genetic testing confirmed that they were indeed Sato’s beaked whales. Researchers think the whales may spend at least part of the ...
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    7 mins
  • Episode 495 The Koao

    Episode 495 The Koao
    Jul 27 2026
    Further reading: Gauguin’s Magical Mystery Koao Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The French painter Paul Gauguin moved to the island of Hiva Oa in 1901, less than two years before he died. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a volcanic archipelago in Polynesia in the South Pacific. It’s extremely remote, only slightly closer to Mexico than it is to New Zealand, although Hawaii is even closer. During his short time on Hiva Oa, Gauguin produced quite a few paintings, including a famous one whose title translates to “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.” It depicts a dancer and magician named Haapuani and represents the fast-vanishing local culture. One of the details of the painting is a bird on the ground next to a small dog. But no one can identify the bird in the painting. The bird is mostly blue but with green face and wings, and the small dog appears to be biting its wing or back. It’s about the size of a chicken, although details aren’t especially clear due to Gauguin’s painting style. The bill is a brownish-red and is thick and pointed. The eye is the same brown-red. No one paid much attention to the bird in the painting until a man named Thor Heyerdahl published a book about the Marquesas in 1974. He was most well known for his adventures sailing a balsawood boat, the Kon-Tiki, from South America to the Polynesian islands in 1947. In 1937, though, the most notable thing Heyerdahl did was see an unusual bird that he mentioned in his book. He wrote that the bird had no wings and ran extremely fast when he startled it. It vanished into a thick bank of ferns and although he tried to catch another glimpse of it, it was gone. He later said it was about the size of a long-legged gull. A French explorer also wrote about this bird in 1957, although he didn’t see it himself. He said the people who lived on the island called the bird koao, which meant “burrow bird” since it was supposed to hide in burrows. It was about the size of a rooster, purplish in color with a yellow bill, and while it only had little wings, its legs were long and it was a fast runner. By 1979, researchers investigating the koao were told that it had gone extinct from overhunting, specifically by the French colonizers of Hiva Oa. Other researchers learned that the bird was supposed to have red eyes and was the size of a duck. The ornithologist Jean-Jacques Barloy thought the bird sounded like a type of rail. Rails are relatively small birds that mostly stay on the ground. Even rail species that can fly are weak flyers, while many species are flightless. The family is a large one and includes birds like the American coot, the takahē of New Zealand, the common moorhen that lives throughout much of western Europe, South Asia, and parts of Africa, and the spotless crake that’s common throughout much of the South Pacific. Barloy suggested in 1979 that the koao might be a spotless crake. The spotless crake is bluish-gray with reddish-brown back and wings, a black bill, red eyes, and pale orangey legs that are long for its size. It’s shy and mostly crepuscular, but when it’s out in daylight it never goes far from vegetation where it can hide. It prefers freshwater wetlands but will also live in forests as long as it has plenty of groundcover for shelter. It eats insects, worms, crustaceans, and even carrion, as well as plant material like seeds and fruit. It can fly but it would much rather run away from danger. This doesn’t really fit with what we know of the koao. For one thing, the spotless crake is much smaller than a duck or rooster, smaller even than a crow. It doesn’t match the size or coloration of Gauguin’s mystery bird or the reports of the koao. Even Barloy later decided he was wrong and suggested the koao might be a different type of rail, maybe even an unknown species of takahē. The takahē is dark blue with a greenish back, and its heavy beak and strong legs are red. This is much more similar to the bird Gauguin painted. The takahē was considered extinct until a small population was rediscovered in 1948, and while it’s flightless, its ancestors weren’t. Like New Zealand, many remote islands–including Hiva Oa–have no native mammals except bats. As a result, many island birds don’t need to fly because their predators are other birds like eagles. It’s easy to hide from an eagle if you’re foraging under cover of thick plants. Without the bird itself or its remains, identifying it was impossible. Gauguin was a post-Impressionist painter who influenced later artists of the avant-garde movement, so his paintings aren’t photo-realistic. He was just making art, not illustrating a scientific treatise. The details of his painted bird might not be totally accurate and aren’t specific enough to help with an identification. All we know is that the koao looks like a type of rail and doesn’t match any known species of bird. So we’re...
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    8 mins
  • Episode 496 Two Mystery Invertebrates

    Episode 496 Two Mystery Invertebrates
    Aug 3 2026
    Further reading: How did a tiny bee get to French Polynesia? Eight new species help solve a scientific mystery Secrets in the canopy: Scientists discover 8 striking new bee species in the Pacific Canopy specialist Hylaeus bees highlight sampling biases and resolve Michener’s mystery Scientists discover endoparasitic marine tapeworm trapped in Cretaceous amber Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for August 2024! It’s the start of Invertebrate August, so we have two invertebrate mysteries to discuss today, one mostly solved and one not. Let’s start with the solved mystery, about a tiny bee. In 1934, three tiny bee specimens were collected in French Polynesia, specifically on a particular type of flower in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The bees really were tiny, only 4 mm long. They weren’t described until 1965, when they were placed in the genus Hylaeus. This is a really big genus with over 500 species that live throughout the world, but the species most closely related to the newly described Tuamotu’s masked bee lives in Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. In case you’re kind of hazy on geography, like me, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand are part of what’s called Oceania, a giant chunk of the Pacific Ocean where there’s not a whole lot of land. I mean, except for Australia, which is big. The Tuamotu Archipelago is also part of Oceania, and part of French Polynesia, but it’s really remote. It consists of a spread-out collection of 78 low islands, many of them too tiny to support humans, none of them with a source of fresh water except for rain. They’re tropical and quite beautiful, with many unique animals and plants living on and around them. They’re also almost 2,500 miles, or 4,000 km away from the places where the tiny bee’s closest relatives live. Even in 1965, scientists had questions about the tiny bee. How did 4mm bees get to such remote islands, and were they even still around? The bees hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1934. Since the Tuamotu Archipelago has suffered from European explorers and missionaries bringing invasive species to some islands, colonization by France, and nuclear weapons testing, scientists worried the bee had gone extinct and that they would never solve the mystery of how it got there in the first place. Bees are attracted to flowers, and the three 1934 specimens were discovered on flowers, so naturally scientists had been looking for the bees on flowers. But it turns out that in the Polynesian islands, bees mostly hang out in the treetops. Once scientists figured this out, they began discovering new species of bee—eight of them in fact, collected between 2014 and 2019 from various islands in Fiji, Micronesia, and French Polynesia. All eight species are closely related to Tuamotu’s masked bee, so scientists now have a pretty good idea of how it traveled thousands of miles to get to its French Polynesian home. Its ancestors island-hopped. There are more than 1,700 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of them barely known to humans. Researchers think there are probably a lot more species of bee to be discovered in the treetops of Pacific islands, now that they know where to look. With luck, they’ll be able to find Tuamotu’s masked bee too, quietly living out its bee life above the scientists’ heads. Next, let’s discuss our unsolved mystery. Amber, which is fossilized tree resin, is the gift that just keeps on giving to the scientific world, and our mystery involves a flatworm found in amber. The amber comes from Myanmar and dates to about 99 million years ago. In addition to bits of inorganic matter like tiny pebbles and sand grains, most organisms found in amber from this site are insects and roundworms, animals you’d expect to find on and around trees. The team examining this particular piece of amber found lots of interesting things, but then they discovered this one. The flatworm is about 10mm long and it’s beautifully preserved, which means the scientists were able to compare it to modern flatworms to see what it might be most closely related to. It’s most similar to a parasitic flatworm found in shark intestines. You know, an animal not typically found in trees. (I stole that joke from paleontologist Kenneth De Baets, by the way. Credit where credit’s due.) It isn’t a complete worm but a partial one, basically a tentacle with little hooks to keep it in place in the host animal’s digestive system. The modern worm is classified as a type of tapeworm, and tapeworms are distressingly common parasites. If you’ve ever adopted a rescue cat or dog, you’ve probably had to have it treated for a tapeworm infestation. Luckily, tapeworms are also very specific about which species they parasitize, so you can’t get tapeworms from a pet. (It’s still icky.) Fish get tapeworms too, after eating marine invertebrates carrying various kinds of tapeworm larvae. The question is, how...
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    8 mins
  • Episode 497 Megarachne

    Episode 497 Megarachne
    Aug 10 2026
    Megarachne as we know it now: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Megarachne is only known from two specimens, neither of which is complete, which adds to the confusion. It lived around 300 million years ago in what is now South America. It was described in 1980 from the first specimen discovered and was named Megarachne, which means big spider. The scientist who described it thought it was a type of primitive spider related to modern tarantulas, but much bigger. He estimated its legspan was 20 inches, or 50 cm, with a body length of just over 13 inches, or 34 cm. That made it the largest spider ever known by a lot. Other palaeontologists, especially arachnologists who specialize in spiders and their relations, weren’t convinced Megarachne was a spider. But it wasn’t until 2005 when a more complete specimen was discovered that anyone could say for sure what it was. The second specimen made it clear that it wasn’t a spider at all but a sea scorpion, or eurypterid, and not an especially large one compared to some. It probably grew to 21 inches long, or 54 cm. But by then, Megarachne had gotten really popular as a giant spider. It was in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters, although the producers changed its name to Mesothelae right before it aired, which was just after the new findings about Megarachne came out. Mesothelae is a suborder of big spiders from parts of Asia that retain many traits of ancestral spiders. It was a valiant attempt by the BBC to make the documentary less incorrect, but of course the spider they were talking about still wasn’t a spider and no spider known has ever grown that large. But while Megarachne isn’t a giant spider, and isn’t even a very big eurypterid, it is important since not very many eurypterids are known from South America. It also appears to be closely related to Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, similar-looking euripterids from North America and Europe. But some researchers think it’s not as cut and dried as it sounds. Instead of three similar creatures living in different areas, they think there’s something else going on. Eurypterids were arthropods, the phylum that includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, among others. Arthropods have an exoskeleton that they molt periodically as they grow, and many arthropods have complicated life stages compared to other animals. When a shark hatches, it looks like a miniature adult and just grows larger as it gets older, but when an arthropod hatches, it usually doesn’t look anything like its adult form. Some arthropods go through many stages of life before reaching the adult body plan. Crustaceans have numerous larval stages, for instance, that often look very different from the adult. Some researchers think that Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus were all the same animal, and that the differences are due to it being in three different stages of development when it died and was preserved. We don’t have any way to know if this was correct, of course, not until we hopefully find more fossil remains. Other eurypterids did appear to go through some physical changes during maturation, as far as researchers can tell with the remains we have, but Megarachne, Mycterops, and Woodwardopterus belonged to a different family from other eurypterids and are much rarer. They might have been quite different developmentally. We can also look at the living relations to see how likely it is that eurypterids had different larval stages where they looked different from the adult form. Eurypterids were probably most closely related to horseshoe crabs, although not everyone agrees. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years and are really neat animals that we’re lucky to still have in the world. The horseshoe crab hatches into a larva that looks a lot like a trilobite. It does indeed go through physical changes as it grows and molts over the course of three years, so it’s reasonable to assume that eurypterids did too. On the other hand, some researchers think eurypterids were more closely related to modern scorpions. Scorpions actually give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs, and the female carries the babies on her back for several days up to several weeks, depending on the species. Once the babies have their first molt they look a lot more like miniature adults and pretty soon are able to leave their mother and hunt on their own. So again, it’s possible that eurypterids had a system more like this instead of like the horseshoe crab’s. While we’re talking about scorpions, did you know that scorpions glow blue-green in ultraviolet light? The scorpion’s exoskeleton contains fluorescent chemicals, but we’re not sure why. Scorpions do have incredibly light sensitive eyes, and can navigate at night using only starlight. Their eyes can’t form sharp images like ours can, though. And scorpions have a lot of eyes. Spiders have four pairs of...
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    8 mins
  • Episode 498: Octopolis

    Episode 498: Octopolis
    Aug 17 2026
    Further reading: https://sharonahill.substack.com/ https://metazoan.net/54-octlantis/ https://metazoan.net/109-octopolis-and-octlantis/ Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses The gloomy octopus [photo by Niki Hubbard – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/118664956, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123044473]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like April Fools Day, which is April first. I especially don’t like it when someone makes an April fools day post online and just leaves it there afterwards. It’s too easy for other people to stumble across it and think it’s real. This goes double for strange animal and cryptid reports. I subscribe to geologist Sharon Hill’s Pop Goes the Cryptid articles, and on March 31 she talked about a hoax called the North American Pine Squid. It got popular around Halloween of 2024. It’s said to be a black squid or octopus that lives in pine trees in remote, heavily forested places like the Pacific northwest and the Appalachian mountains. Most of the time it eats small animals like birds and squirrels, along with pine cones, but if someone walks underneath its tree, the pine squid grabs the person, pulls them up into the tree, and they’re never seen again. But you don’t have to worry, because the pine squid isn’t a real animal. It’s also not even a new story. It’s based on another hoax called the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, which dates back to 1998. In the case of the tree octopus, it wasn’t created as a hoax or an April fool’s joke but as a study about whether children can tell if a website is reliable or not. The researchers made a page with information about a type of octopus that lived in the ocean but that also climbed trees. Then they asked several classrooms of children around age 11, from different schools in different countries, to read the page, look at the pictures provided, and answer some questions. The study found that most of the children thought the page contained reliable information. Only a few figured out that the tree octopus wasn’t real. The study has been used repeatedly to argue that children need more lessons in how to evaluate a website to know if it contains reliable information, and of course that’s always a good thing. But it makes me a little angry too, because how were the kids supposed to know that octopuses can’t climb trees? There are so many amazing and strange animals out there, a tree octopus sounds perfectly normal if you don’t know very much about octopuses. So I argue that kids should be taught about everything, and taught in as interesting a way as possible so that they remember it better. The same goes for adults. But this episode isn’t actually about April fools day, tree octopuses, or pine squids. It is about a type of octopus, and what I’m going to tell you is so weird that I have to reassure you that it’s actually true. It’s not a hoax or an April fools joke or anything like that. It’s about the gloomy octopus and the underwater cities some populations have created, referred to as Octopolis and Octlantis. I swear I’m not making this up! The gloomy octopus lives off the eastern coast of Australia and the northern coast of New Zealand. It’s mainly brown and gray, but it has orange on the undersides of its arms, and it’s covered in little bumps that help camouflage it. Its eyes are white. On average, it has an armspan of about 6 ½ feet, or 2 meters, with females generally larger than males. Like many other octopuses, when the female lays her eggs, she stops eating completely and protects the eggs until they hatch. After they hatch, she dies. The gloomy octopus lives in shallow warm water and especially likes places with lots of rocks, seagrass, reefs, and other places where it can hide. It spends a lot of time in a den it digs into the sea floor, only coming out at night to hunt. It especially likes scallops, but it will eat pretty much anything it can catch, including sea snails, crabs, seahorses, and even other gloomy octopuses. It usually brings its food back to its den to eat. The gloomy octopus was thought to be a solitary animal until 2009. That’s when a biologist named Matt Lawrence was exploring Jervis Bay in New South Wales. In this particular part of the bay, the sand is silty and there are a lot of predators, so it’s not great for the gloomy octopus. But not only did Lawrence find a gloomy octopus there, he found 16 of them living in close proximity. The octopuses’ dens were very close to each other, surrounding a human-made object that’s so encrusted with sea life that it can’t be identified. Scientists think it was a piece that fell off a boat at some point. Even more interesting, there are so many shells around, especially scallop shells, that instead of making dens in the sand, the octopuses are basically making ...
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    10 mins
  • Episode 499: The Mystery of Amiskwia

    Episode 499: The Mystery of Amiskwia
    Aug 24 2026
    Further reading: Cambrian Explosion Month #18: Stem-Gnathifera Ambiguous Amiskwia Amiskwia, possibly [picture taken from above link]: Show transcript: Welcome to the Patreon bonus episode of Strange Animals Podcast for May 2025! We’ve talked about a lot of strange and mysterious animals from the Cambrian in past episodes, especially episode 69, but I don’t think we’ve learned about Amiskwia yet. For a long time it was another mystery animal from the Burgess Shale and a few other places, dating back as much as 518 million years ago, but as of only a few years ago the mystery seems to be solved, at least mostly. Amiskwia grew about an inch long, or 2.5 cm, which actually made it one of the larger animals that lived in the Cambrian. It probably looked superficially like a slug, with a slightly flattened body and a pair of short tentacles on its head. It had a paddle-shaped tail and two flaps on its sides that probably acted as fins to help it swim. Its mouth was on the underside of its head and was surprisingly complicated, with two pairs of plates with little spikes on them. We even know about its internal anatomy, since some of the Amiskwia fossils are so well preserved that its insides can be studied too. It had a brain and a simple digestive tract. Amiskwia was described in 1911 by Charles Walcott, who described a lot of the Burgess Shale fossils. Walcott classified it as a type of arrow worm. When scientists gave it a closer look later, not everyone agreed it was related to modern arrow worms. Some suggested it might be a type of ribbon worm, or maybe an early mollusk, while others argued that it was so different from known animals that it belonged in its own phylum. A 2019 study suggested that Amiskwia’s weird mouth plates matched up with the mouth plates in a living animal, and a 2022 follow-up study confirmed the 2019 findings. Not everyone agrees, but as of now, Amiskwia is considered an ancestral gnathiferan. There! Mystery solved! Wait, what do you mean you don’t know what a gnathiferan is? As everyone knows, especially me, I definitely didn’t just learn about this type of animal myself just now, gnathiferans include a lot of different animals with complex jaws—not like your own jaws, but with little plates and spikes and moving parts made of chitin. Most gnathiferans are tiny, microscopic or barely a few millimeters long, so Amiskwia was a giant in comparison. Arrow worms are also generally considered to be gnathiferans, so Wolcott wasn’t too far off in his description of Amiskwia. We don’t know what Amiskwia ate, but it could probably swim pretty well and most likely hunted other animals or scavenged already dead ones. Scientists think it probably spent most of its time swimming well above the sea floor, which is why it’s a relatively rare fossil. Another Cambrian mystery animal that lived even earlier than Amiskwia, around 520 million years ago, and which is probably related to it, is Timorebestia. Its fossils were discovered in Greenland and only described in 2024. It had a pair of long tentacles or antennae, a rounded paddle-like tail, and fins on each side of its wide, flattened body. Its tentacles were around half the length of its body–and if Amiskwia was a giant compared to modern gnathiferans, Timorebestia was a colossus! It grew almost 8 inches long, or over 20 cm, not even counting its tentacles! Some Timorebestia specimens are so well preserved that scientists can identify what they ate right before they died, and it looks like they mostly ate small arthropods. Timorebestia was probably the biggest and strongest predator in the area when it was alive, one of the earliest apex predators discovered. Another similar animal was Nectocaris, which has been discovered in the Burgess Shale of Canada and other Cambrian fossil sites in China and Australia. It was flattened and had a pair of tentacles on its head, and a fin on both sides of its body–but it had a lot of features not found in Amiskwia and Timorebestia, including eyes. It also seems to have had a tube or funnel of some kind that emerged from the underside of the body near the head. It might have been a proboscis of some kind, but some scientists think it was a funnel like the ones found in modern squid, used to jet through the water quickly. Many scientists even think Nectocaris was a precursor to squid and other cephalopods, but other scientists disagree. Some specimens are about one inch long, or around 3 cm, while others are around 4 inches long, or about 10 cm. This might mean there were two species, or that the small ones were juveniles, or that males and females were different sizes. We just don’t know. Small animals, especially ones with mostly soft bodies, don’t fossilize as often as larger and more robust animals. We’re very lucky that we have so many beautifully detailed Cambrian fossils, since so many modern gnathiferans and their close relations aren’t otherwise found in the fossil ...
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    6 mins