• Strange Animals Podcast

  • 著者： Katherine Shaw
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Strange Animals Podcast

著者： Katherine Shaw
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  • A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!
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A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals!
博物学 生物科学 科学 自然・生態学
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  • Episode 431: The New Dire Wolf

    Episode 431: The New Dire Wolf
    2025/05/05
    Thanks to Jayson for suggesting this week's topic, the new "dire wolf"! Also, possibly the same but maybe a different Jayson is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team, who are on their way to the Science Olympiad Nationals! They're almost to their funding goal if you can help out. Further reading: Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction The story of dire wolves goes beyond de-extinction These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals Dire Wolves Split from Living Canids 5.7 Million Years Ago: Study This prehistoric monster is the largest dog that ever lived and was able to crush bone with its deadly teeth – but was wiped out by cats "Dire wolf" puppies: An artist's interpretation of the dire wolf (red coats) and grey wolves (grey coats) [taken from fourth link above]: The "mammoth fur" mice: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Jayson, who wants to learn about the so-called “new” dire wolf. Before we get started, a big shout-out to another Jayson, or maybe the same one I’m honestly not sure, who is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team. They’ve advanced to the nationals! There’s a link in the show notes if you want to donate a little to help them with their travel expenses. This is a local team to me so I’m especially proud of them, and not to brag, but I’ve actually met Jayson and his sister and they’re both smart, awesome kids. Now, let’s find out about this new dire wolf that was announced last month. In early April 2025, a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences made the extraordinary claim that they had produced three dire wolf puppies. Since dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago, this is a really big deal. Before we get into the details of Colossal’s claim, let’s refresh our memory about the dire wolf. We talked about it in episode 207, so I’ve taken a lot of my information from that episode. According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. Sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North American population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and some of those eventually migrated into North America too. By the time the gray wolf and coyote populated North America, a little over one million years ago, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, the species avoided each other and didn’t interbreed. We’ve talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at that point. The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn’t have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals. The dire wolf went extinct around 13,000 years ago, but Colossal now claims that they’re no longer extinct. There are now exactly three dire wolves in the world, two males and a female,
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    10 分
  • Episode 430: The Fake and the Real Coelacanth

    Episode 430: The Fake and the Real Coelacanth
    2025/04/28
    This week we examine two recent articles about coelacanth discoveries. Which one is real and which one is fake?! Further reading: Fake California Coelacanth First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia A real coelacanth photo: A fake coelacanth photo (or at least the article is a fake) [photo taken from the first article linked above]: A real coelacanth photo [photo from the second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I had another episode planned for this week, but then I read an article by geologist Sharon Hill and decided the topic she researched was so important we need to cover it here. No, it’s not the dire wolf—that’s next week. It’s the coelacanth. We talked about the coelocanth way back in episode two, with updates in a few later episodes. Because episode two is so old that it’s dropped off the podcast feed, and to listen to it you have to actually go to the podcast’s website, I’m going to quote from it extensively here. In December of 1938, a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay Lattimer got a message from a friend of hers, a fisherman named Hendrick Goosen, who had just arrived with a new catch. Lattimer was on the lookout for specimens for her tiny museum, and Goosen was happy to let her have anything interesting. Lattimer went down to the dock. Then she noticed THE FISH. It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, blueish with shimmery silvery markings, with strange lobed fins and scales like armored plates. She described it as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. She didn’t know what it was, but she wanted it. She took the fish back to the museum in a taxi and went through her reference books to identify it. Imagine it. She’s flipped through a couple of books but nothing looks even remotely like her fish. Then she turns a page and there’s a picture of the fish--but it’s extinct. It’s been extinct for some 66 million years. But it’s also a very recently alive fish resting on ice in the back of her museum. Lattimer sketched the fish and sent the drawing and a description to a professor at Rhodes University, J.L.B. Smith. But Smith was on Christmas break and didn’t get her message until January 3rd. In the meantime, Lattimer’s museum director told her the fish was a grouper and not worth the ice it was lying on. December is the middle of summer in South Africa, so to keep the fish from rotting away, she had it mounted. Then Smith sent her a near-hysterical cable that read, “MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS.” Oops. Smith got a little obsessed about finding another coelacanth. He offered huge rewards for a specimen. But it wasn’t until December of 1952 that a pair of local fishermen on the island of Anjuan, about halfway between Tanzania and Madagascar, turned up with a fish they called the gombessa. It was a second coelacanth. Everyone was happy. The fishermen got a huge reward—a hundred British pounds—and Smith had an intact coelacanth. He actually cried when he saw it. Most people have heard of the coelacanth because its discovery is such a great story. But why is the fish such a big deal? The coelacanth isn’t just a fish that was supposed to be extinct and was discovered alive and well, although that’s pretty awesome. It’s a strange fish, more closely related to mammals and reptiles than it is to ordinary ray-finned fish. The only living fish even slightly like it is the lungfish, which we talked about in episode 55. While the coelacanth is unique in a lot of ways, it’s those lobed fins that are really exciting. It’s not a stretch to say its paired fins look like nubby legs with frills instead of digits. Until DNA sequencing in 2013, many researchers thought the coelacanth was a sort of missing link between water-dwelling animals and those that first developed the ability to walk on land. As it happens, the lungfish turns out to be closer to that stage t...
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    11 分
  • Episode 429: Foxes!

    Episode 429: Foxes!
    2025/04/21
    Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week's topic, foxes! Further reading: Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox The red fox: A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]: The extremely fluffy Arctic fox: The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we’ll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee. Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they’re not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that’s called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically. The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It’s common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It’s also been introduced in Australia, where it’s an invasive species. It’s a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle. There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It’s smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick. The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it’s one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50. For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It’s fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow. Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox’s muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat. During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it’s white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it’s rare. The Arctic fox’s fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet. The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what’s left from a polar bear’s meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes,
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    7 分

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