Episodes

  • Episode 491: The Jumar

    Episode 491: The Jumar
    Jun 29 2026

    Further reading:

    http://messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-equines.htm

    Show transcript:

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

    I stumbled across an interesting mystery animal recently and thought it would make a great topic for a Patreon episode. It’s supposed to be a hybrid animal, but as we’ll soon learn, it can’t possibly be what it’s said to be.

    The animal is called a jumar or jumart, or sometimes a kumrah. The oldest record of a jumar dates to 1546 but there are many other accounts up to the beginning of the 20th century. The jumar is supposed to be the hybrid offspring of a horse and a cow, usually a bull and a mare. Sometimes it was supposed to be the offspring of a bull and a donkey mare.

    Whatever its supposed origins, the jumar was said to look like a horse except for cow-like hindquarters and head, although with no horns. The hooves were usually solid like a horse’s hooves but occasionally cloven. A jumar was supposed to be stronger but smaller than an ordinary mule, which is a cross between a horse and a donkey.

    There are plenty of reports of jumars, including individuals examined by naturalists, so it’s obviously a real animal. Could it really be a horse-cow hybrid? How closely related are horses and cows, anyway?

    Not closely related AT ALL. The horse is almost as closely related to whales as it is to cows. They belong to totally different orders, and if you remember from the hybrids episode, it’s unusual for a hybrid to result from animals that share a genus, but extremely rare for animals that only share a family. Order is a step above family. There is literally no way that a horse and a cow could crossbreed successfully, but if somehow they did, the baby would not survive long enough to be born.

    So the jumar can’t be a horse-cow hybrid, but at the same time, the jumar was a real animal. So what was it?

    The first hint of a solution came from a French naturalist who lived in the 18th century. He wrote in 1771 about two dead jumars he bought and dissected. Both of them turned out to be ordinary mules. Specifically, they were hinnies, which are the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Most mules are offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.

    Part of the reason that the hinny is a less common hybrid is because of the differences in chromosomes between horses and donkeys. Horses have 64 chromosomes, donkeys have 62. Mules and hinnies have 63 and are almost always sterile. In the case of a pair of animals with mismatched chromosomes, a baby is more likely to result when the father has the lower chromosome count, as is the case with the male donkey. A male horse has more chromosomes than a female donkey, so it’s less likely that a baby will result. Hinnies are almost always smaller than horses or mules because the mother donkey is a smaller animal than the mother horse.

    Like any other animal, mules are sometimes born with genetic issues that may affect their appearance. One relatively common issue is a type of dwarfism that can affect certain bones in the body, which makes the animal’s conformation look different from an ordinary mule’s. A disorder called chondrodysplasia, which can have a number of different causes, results in the upper portion of the animal’s skull being underdeveloped. This means its face appears dished like a cow’s face, its upper jaw may be much shorter than its lower jaw, and its eye sockets and forehead may look more cow-like too.

    It’s most likely, then, that jumars are just horses, mules, or hinnies with a genetic abnormality. That would also explain why no one talks about jumars anymore. These days if a weird-looking foal is born, the owner calls the vet, who recognizes a genetic issue right away. In the olden days people didn’t know what caused genetic issues and assumed it had something to do with parentage. If a mare had a baby that looked a little bit like a cow in some ways, that must be because its father was a bull.

    If you remember the Patreon episode we had a long time ago about horses with extra hooves on one or more feet, it’s probable that this is the trait leading to reports of jumars with cloven hooves. We even have one account from 1830 by a veterinarian who examined a jumar who had three legs with ordinary horse hooves but one leg with a cloven hoof that looked like a cow’s.

    That’s pretty much it for the jumar, but a quick reminder as we finish talking about hybrid horses and donkeys, if you cross a zebra with a donkey, the resulting offspring has stripes and is called a zedonk, my favorite word.

    Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!
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    6 mins
  • Episode 490: Ipnops and Other Deep-Sea Fish

    Episode 490: Ipnops and Other Deep-Sea Fish
    Jun 22 2026
    Further reading: Faceless Fish and the deep-sea voyages that found it Long-Lost ‘Faceless’ Fish Shows Up Near Australia Ipnops: The faceless cusk [photo taken from the second article linked above]: A tripod fish: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s a fish episode! These are also deep-sea fish, and you know how much I love deep-sea animals. Let’s talk first about some fish in the family Ipnopidae, including one deep-sea fish with the pleasing name of Ipnops. We know of three species of ipnops so far, but there may be more that scientists just haven’t found yet. Some scientists think there’s actually only one species, since all three species look almost identical but just live in different parts of the deep sea. Ipnops is sometimes called the grideye spiderfish. If you don’t know what it looks like, you may think the word spider in its name is the weird part. It’s not, and in fact I’m not sure where that comes from. It could be that the fish’s transparent fins look kind of like spiderwebs. Other fish in its family are called spiderfish too but are also sometimes called lizardfish. It feels like someone was in a goofy mood when naming these fish and just started saying random animal names. Ipnops only grows a little over 6 inches long at most, or 16 cm. It’s slender for its size, although its head is wider than its body. Its head is black but the color fades on the body until the tail is light gray. No, the weird thing about ipnops is its eyes. It doesn’t precisely have eyes, certainly not eyeballs. Instead it just has a thin layer of retinal cells spread across a divot in the top of its head, also called a photosensitive membrane or plate. These plates show up as yellow against the black head. Researchers think the fish can’t see the way we think of seeing, but it can probably sense bioluminescent light. Since it lives at the bottom of the deep sea where little to no light penetrates from the surface, it makes sense that ipnops doesn’t really need eyes. We still don’t know very much about ipnops or most of its relatives. It eats small crustaceans and all individuals produce both eggs and sperm. Ipnops eggs hatch into tiny larval fish that live near the surface of the ocean and have extremely large ordinary eyeballs. How these eyeballs transform into a retinal membrane is a mystery known only to ipnops. The family that ipnops belongs to, Ipnopidae, includes many species that are called tripod fish, and tripod fish are very weird too even though they have regular eyeballs, usually tiny ones. There are quite a few tripodfish known, many of them only discovered recently by deep-sea rovers. Most are no larger than ipnops, but some have fins that are much longer than their body. This is the case for the tripod spiderfish—look, it’s another spiderfish—that lives at the bottom of the deep sea in many parts of the world. It’s been found at a depth of almost 3 miles, or 4,700 meters, which is so deep that it’s also sometimes called the abyssal spiderfish, although that’s also a name given to a different type of tripod fish that’s closely related. It’s big compared to many of its close relations, up to 17 inches long, or 43 cm, but its fins can grow over a yard long, or about a meter. Its tail and pelvic fins have elongated rays that allow it to stand on the bottom of the ocean, and since the bottom of the ocean is usually pretty oozy and muddy, it needs the fins to be really long so it doesn’t end up sinking into the ooze. It also has little pads on the end of the fins that help keep it from sinking. Scientists think the struts that lengthen the rays can be stiffened so that the fish can stand on them for long periods of time, but when the fish needs to swim, it can loosen the struts so they’re flexible. If you’re not familiar with the word tripod, it means ‘three feet’ or ‘three legs.’ You’ve probably seen one before because that’s the thing that people use to prop up a camera. A camera tripod has three long legs that you can adjust so that your camera sits at just the right height to take good pictures, and it’s sturdy so the camera won’t shake. This is exactly how the tripodfish uses its elongated fins except that it’s not taking pictures. It’s just trying to find food. It stands motionless facing into the current, and spreads its pectoral fins out. It can’t see in the darkness of its deep-sea home, but it feels small fish or crustaceans that come near and stumble into its fins. It uses the pectoral fins to guide the animal toward its mouth, and then it goes chomp with its needle-like teeth. Like ipnops, the tripodfish produces both eggs and sperm and can fertilize its own eggs if it can’t find a mate. This is important in the deep sea, especially when your main way of finding food is standing completely still for very long periods of time. Another weird fish isn’t related to the ...
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    9 mins
  • Episode 489: Animal Artists

    Episode 489: Animal Artists
    Jun 15 2026
    Further reading: https://elephantartgallery.com/blogs/meet Desmond Morris with his favorite Congo painting: Peter/Pierre Brassau and some of his paintings: The so-called donkey painting, and I described it wrong in the episode: Pockets at work: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Back in the early days of the podcast I did an episode about animal musicians, which for a long time was my favorite episode. Today let’s visit a similar topic, animals who are visual artists. Back in the 1950s through the 60s, researchers studying how humans make art studied monkeys and apes who were taught how to use a brush and paints. The studies caught the public’s fancy and it became something of a fad to own a piece of art created by an animal—whether it was a monkey or ape, an elephant, or some other animal. One of the earliest big name animal artists was a chimpanzee named Congo. Zoologist Desmond Morris, who was studying creativity in apes and humans, and who was also an artist himself, offered Congo a pencil and paper when he was two years old in 1956. Congo enjoyed drawing and especially liked to draw circles. When Morris eventually gave the chimp paints, Congo was even more enthusiastic. But while he was considered a novelty, he only had one art exhibition while he was alive, a 1957 event arranged by Morris. It wasn’t until 2005 that the remaining paintings were exhibited, along with the art of some other apes, and some of them sold for thousands of dollars. A new exhibit appeared in December of 2019 in the Mayor Gallery in London. One interesting thing is that Morris worked with several apes to see how they drew and painted, but only Congo showed enthusiasm and skill for art. Congo died of tuberculosis in 1964 when he was only ten years old. Also in 1964, a French avant-garde artist named Pierre Brassau exhibited four of his paintings at an art show in Sweden. No one knew who Brassau was, but his paintings were critically acclaimed—except for one critic who wrote, “Only an ape could have done this.” Ahem, yes. That is correct. The artist turned out to be a West African chimpanzee named Peter who lived in a zoo in Sweden. The whole thing started with a Swedish journalist who apparently wasn’t much of a fan of modern art. The journalist persuaded a zookeeper to give Peter a canvas, paints, and brush. At first Peter just ate the paint, but eventually he started making marks on the canvas. The journalist ultimately chose four of the paintings and submitted them to the exhibition under the name Pierre Brassau. One of the paintings sold for the equivalent of about $750 today. But animal artists making modern art isn’t limited to the 1950s and 60s. In 1905 a painting by an unknown artist, J.R. Boronali, went on display in a Parisian salon. It didn’t cause any kind of stir, though, because it was nothing special, until 1910 when word got out that the painting had been made by a donkey. According to the story, an art critic tied a paintbrush to the donkey’s tail and fed the donkey carrots, which made it wag its tail, which dabbed paint on a canvas. I’ve seen the painting, though, and it seems clear that a human artist prepped the canvas by slapping a coat of background paint on it that resembles a red sea and blue sky. There are some dabs and blobs of paint over that in yellow and red, presumably from the donkey. In this case, of course, the donkey wasn’t trying to paint a picture and didn’t even know what was going on behind it, just that it was getting lots of carrots. An avant-garde Russian school of art named itself The Donkey’s Tail in 1912 as a result, though, so that’s pretty neat. More recently, a capuchin monkey named Pockets has become a big-name artist in the animal world. Pockets was donated to a Canadian animal sanctuary after his owner finally realized that capuchin monkeys are wild animals and don’t actually make very good pets. One of the volunteers at the sanctuary gave Pockets the nickname Warhol because of his white hair, which reminded her of the artist Andy Warhol. That gave her the idea to give Pockets some paints and see what he would do with them. It turns out that Pockets really likes to paint. In 2011 the sanctuary held an exhibit of his paintings to help raise money, and since then his paintings have been exhibited in art shows around the world. He’s collaborated with a human artist, who basically paints something and then gives the canvas to Pockets to add to it. His art recently appeared on the cover of an album released by a member of Depeche Mode too. Not all animal artists are apes or monkeys, though. Bini the Bunny stars in a lot of videos where he plays basketball, dances, plays the guitar, and does a lot of other things you would not expect a bunny to do. He also paints. Bini, of course, has been trained to make certain movements, including picking up a paintbrush in his mouth and moving it upward with ...
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    11 mins
  • Episode 488: The Java Tiger Mystery

    Episode 488: The Java Tiger Mystery
    Jun 8 2026
    Further reading: Is the Javan tiger Panthera tigris sondaica extant? DNA analysis of a recent hair sample The Sunda tiger [photo by Alfonsopazphoto – Own workAnimaisFotos, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16029853]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re going to learn about a mystery tiger this month, but first we have to learn about the place where it’s supposed to live. Java is a large island that was formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago, and it’s been home to humans and our ancestors for over a million years. Its soil is rich and the climate is tropical, but the island’s ecosystems include tall mountains, savannas, rainforests, and mangrove forests. Naturally, lots and lots of animals live on Java that are found nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people live on Java too, which means that many animals and their habitats are threatened by habitat loss and pollution. Many animals have gone extinct in the last few hundred years. That includes the Java tiger. The Java tiger was small compared to tigers in other areas, although even a small tiger is a big animal. A big male tiger can grow about ten feet long, or 3 meters, and the Java tiger could grow about 8 feet long, or almost two and a half meters. The Java tiger was lightly built, though, and rarely weighed much more than 300 pounds, or about 140 kilograms. Despite its relatively small size, it was extremely strong and had paws as big as the much larger Bengal tiger. It also had lots of thin stripes. Originally scientists thought the Java tiger was a separate subspecies of tiger, but in 2017 it was reclassified as a population of Sunda tigers that have only been isolated from other populations for around 12,000 years. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important, though. It showed differences from other Sunda tigers that weren’t yet significant enough to warrant it being a separate subspecies, but which definitely indicated it was on its way to evolving into a separate subspecies. Unfortunately, the Java tiger’s habitat was largely destroyed to make way for farming and logging, and as a result its usual prey animals became rare or went extinct. People would also poison or shoot any tiger they could. It only survived in a few small nature preserves, but the last tiger footprints were spotted in 1989 and since then, no tigers have been officially seen on Java. A 1999 expedition that set up camera traps in hopes of spotting a few tigers mostly got photos of poachers hunting in what was supposed to be a protected area. The Java tiger was declared extinct. Rumors persisted that tigers still lived on Java, though. Sometimes I think people claim to see recently extinct animals as a way to feel less guilty about humans having driven an animal to extinction. But in 2019 someone saw a tiger outside a village in western Java and reported the sighting to some local foresters. The foresters investigated and discovered footprints, claw marks, and a single hair on a fence. The foresters collected the hair carefully and gave it to a team of geologists who were working in the area. The geologists sent it to the West Java Nature Conservation Authority, which sent it for genetic analysis. They also sent some tiger hairs from other types of tigers to compare it to, including hairs from a museum specimen of a tiger killed on Java in 1930. The hair discovered in 2019 was definitely from a tiger, and its genetic signature most closely matched the genetic signature of the 1930 Java tiger specimen. This doesn’t 100% mean the Java tiger isn’t extinct, but it does mean that there’s hope that it’s still around. Java is part of Indonesia these days, and a few days ago as this episode goes live, the Indonesian government announced a plan to search for signs of the tiger, with an expedition getting underway soon to place camera traps. Conservationists are hoping that the tiger is discovered, which will allow it to be protected. The Sunda tiger is critically endangered, only surviving in the wild on the island of Sumatra, with possibly fewer than 400 of them left alive. Another population of Sunda tigers, the Bali tiger, was declared extinct in the 1940s. A few hundred captive tigers living in zoos around the world show congenital health issues as a result of inbreeding. If the Java tiger is still alive, it could mean the difference between extinction and survival of the entire Sunda tiger subspecies. Fingers crossed that the camera traps reveal a healthy, safe population of tigers on Java! Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening!
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    6 mins
  • Episode 487: Animals and the Sense of Taste

    Episode 487: Animals and the Sense of Taste
    Jun 1 2026
    Further reading: What gives bees their sweet tooth? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Right before I left on my trip to Belize a few months ago, my aunt Janice gave me a magazine to read on the plane, the Autumn 2021 copy of LivingBird. It’s about birds and birdwatching. I actually forgot to take it with me and it was in my car the whole time I was gone, but when I got home I took it in to read. One article caught my eye, titled “Investigating the Sweet Tooth of Songbirds.” Literally the same day that I read that article, I stumbled across another article on ScienceDaily titled “What gives bees their sweet tooth?” And a podcast episode idea was born! You may have heard that domestic cats can’t taste sweetness, and that’s true. When your pet cat wants to drink the milk in a bowl of sugary cereal, it’s not the sugar they care about because they can’t taste it. Also, milk isn’t good for cats and even if they can’t taste the sugar, it can end up giving them cavities. The question is, why don’t cats taste sweetness? And what other animals can’t taste it either? Carnivores like cats don’t need to taste sweet flavors because it’s just not present in meat, which is what carnivores eat. You can test this easily if you put two saucers on the floor for your cat, one with a small amount of unseasoned chicken and a sugar cube in the other. I guarantee you the cat will eat the chicken and play with the sugar cube, which will get sugar all over the floor so maybe don’t do that after all. This is where I share with you, for no reason, that when I was in elementary school I used to eat sugar cubes while pretending I was a horse. Horses can taste sweet flavors like sugar because they’re herbivores. Herbivores eat plants, and in fact herbivores have a whole lot of taste buds so that they can easily tell what kind of plants they’re eating. Bitter tasting plants might be toxic while sweet ones provide lots of energy. Herbivores are also keenly attuned to the taste of salt since their diet is typically low in salt and they need to seek it out. Humans are omnivores, and omnivores eat pretty much anything. Like our great ape cousins, we also evolved to eat a lot of fruit. Ripe fruit tastes sweet so we really like our sweet foods. Omnivores like dogs, pigs, and bears also like sweet foods because they’re high in calories and therefore provide a lot of energy. But how does an animal lose an entire sense of taste? It’s not like all tigers woke up one day and boom, the ability to taste sweetness was gone. It happens gradually as the genes responsible for an animal’s sense of taste mutate over many generations. Let’s take as our example the bottlenose dolphin. The ancestors of the dolphin and other cetaceans were terrestrial animals related to the ancestors of modern even-toed ungulates like hippos, camels, deer, and pigs, and were probably either herbivores or omnivores. But as the dolphin’s ancestors evolved over millions of years, they shifted to a fully marine lifestyle and a fully carnivorous diet. Over the thousands and thousands of generations, the genes that control the ability to taste sweetness mutated so much that they’re now useless, but since the dolphin doesn’t need to taste sweetness the mutations don’t matter. In the case of the bottlenose dolphin and other cetaceans, in fact, they also can’t taste bitterness or umami. Umami is what helps you taste the difference between chicken and turkey, steak and pork, tuna and trout. Basically it’s the flavor of meat or savory foods, including cheeses. You can taste the difference between cheddar and Swiss because of the umami receptors in your taste buds, which are determined by genes. But the dolphin eats nothing but meat! Why would it lose the ability to taste meat? Researchers think it’s because the dolphin swallows fish and other animals whole, without chewing. Cetaceans and other marine carnivores like sea lions that swallow their food whole actually have almost no taste buds at all. If you’re wondering what happens when an animal that can’t taste sweetness has to adapt to a diet where tasting sweet foods is important, that’s exactly what happened with songbirds. The ancestors of birds lost the ability to taste sweetness millions of years ago when they were dinosaurs. Then, well, you know what happened to the non-avian dinosaurs. Suddenly the ancestors of modern birds had a lot of available ecological niches to take advantage of and they evolved rapidly to fill them. This included small birds who eat berries and nectar. Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of songbirds regained the ability to taste sweetness around 30 million years ago in Australia. The same thing happened in hummingbirds at about the same time. In both cases, the genes that control the ability to taste umami evolved to taste sweetness instead—but songbirds and hummingbirds adapted ...
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    9 mins
  • Episode 486: Two Rediscovered Birds

    Episode 486: Two Rediscovered Birds
    May 25 2026
    Further reading: https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html The black-naped pheasant-pigeon: Confuciusornis: Show transcript: We’re going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately. The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to the back of the neck, and this bird does have a black neck. It’s a dark blue-black all over, in fact, with reddish-brown wings, a red bill, red eyes, and long yellow legs. It looks almost identical to the other three species of pheasant-pigeons known, although some scientists think they’re subspecies. Those three are the white-naped, the green-naped, and the grey-naped pheasant-pigeons, and if you’re wondering if the spot of color on the back of the neck is the easiest way to tell these birds apart, you are exactly right. All four species are native to parts of New Guinea or small islands nearby. Pheasant-pigeons look a lot like pheasants and are about the size of a chicken, although they’re actually pigeons. They live in forests and eat seeds and fruit, and while they can fly they spend almost all of the time on the ground. We don’t know a whole lot about them because they’re so secretive and hard to spot in the wild, although the white-naped and green-naped birds are sometimes kept in zoos. In the case of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, all scientists knew about it was from two specimens collected in 1882. It hadn’t been seen since…until September of 2022. A team of scientists visited Fergusson Island off the east coast of Papua New Guinea in September, as part of a worldwide collaboration of scientists called The Search for Lost Birds. This is similar to the Search for Lost Frogs that has been active for over a decade, discovering lots of new amphibians and rediscovering even more. The 2022 search was actually a follow-up to a 2019 expedition that had failed to find the bird, although it did make other discoveries. In 2022, the team brought more people and equipment, determined to make the best effort possible to find the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. They consulted with local hunters to find the best places to search, and talked to lots of residents to see if anyone had seen one, and spent day after day hiking through forested mountains. For weeks they had no luck. Then, in a remote mountain village, they finally met some people who were familiar with the bird. One man led them to the right part of the forest and they set up camera traps, but at that point they only had a few days left before they had to leave the island. When they checked the pictures captured by the camera traps, though, they’d found it! Two of the cameras had taken pictures and video of what were definitely black-naped pheasant-pigeons, and since the cameras were several kilometers apart the pictures were probably of different individuals. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon wasn’t extinct, which means it can be protected. Habitat loss, especially from commercial logging, and feral domestic cats are the two main threats to birds in the area. The other bird we’re going to talk about today hasn’t been seen in even longer: 119 million years, in fact. The article about this fossil was only released a few days ago as this episode goes live. You can check the show notes for links to this article and a good one about the pheasant-pigeon too. Paleontologists discovered the bird’s fossil remains in northeastern China, in fossil beds that contain incredibly well-preserved animals and plants. The Jiufotang Formation in China dates to the early Cretaceous, between about 122 and 119 million years ago, and researchers think it’s from an area that was once a shallow lake surrounded by forests. Every so often, a nearby volcano would erupt and the resulting ash would fall into the lake, causing anoxic conditions that helped preserve animals that died and sank into the mud at the bottom of the lake. There are lots of fish, pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs among the fossils discovered, most of them small but a few quite large. This includes a type of tyrannosaur that probably grew around 33 feet long, or 10 meters. A few early mammals have been discovered too. In one case, the remains of 40 individual birds were found on one big slab of stone, and scientists think an entire flock of birds was killed by a volcanic ashfall or poisonous gases from the volcano. The newly described fossil we’re talking about today was almost complete and almost completely articulated, preserved with the impression of feathers around its body. The bird has been named Confuciusornis shifan and was a little smaller than a modern crow. It had a toothless beak and a short tail, although it probably had long tail feathers. Other Confuciusornis species have been discovered with the impressions of long tail plumes. All of the Confuciusornis fossils ...
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    8 mins
  • Episode 485: Cryodraken’s Very Bad Day

    Episode 485: Cryodraken’s Very Bad Day
    May 18 2026
    Further reading: Rare pterosaur fossil reveals crocodilian bite 76m years ago Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a type of pterosaur that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now Canada, and we’ll specifically learn about an individual young pterosaur that had a very bad day, a bad day that’s preserved in the fossil record. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, but weren’t actually dinosaurs. Some of them got as big as small airplanes while some were barely the size of chickens. Cryodrakon was one of the biggest ones, with an estimated wingspan of 33 feet, or 10 meters, for an adult animal—maybe even bigger. We don’t know the adults’ size for sure because we only have a few fossils of adult Cryodrakons, and those are incomplete. Mostly we have fossils of young individuals. The older juveniles had a wingspan of around 16 feet, or 5 meters, which is still pretty darn big. Cryodrakon was the first pterosaur discovered in Canada, with fossils found in Alberta in 1972. Since then more fossils have been discovered in the same province, especially in what’s called the Dinosaur Park Formation. Like other pterosaurs in the family Azhdarchidae, Cryodrakon had long legs and a very long neck with long jaws. Most scientists think it spent a lot of time on land, hunting small animals. It could fold the longest part of its wings up out of the way in order to walk on all fours. A flying animal’s wing, whether it’s a pterosaur or a bird or a bat, is a modified arm. Insects are different because they’re invertebrates. In bats, the fingers are elongated with strong skin stretched between them to form a wing. In birds, the fingers are fused into a sort of stump and most of the flying surface is feathers. In pterosaurs, one or two fingers were elongated like a bat’s, but the other fingers were short and blunt. These are the fingers that azhdarchids could walk on when the rest of the fingers, and therefore the wing, was folded up so it wouldn’t get in the way. We know it’s possible for a winged animal to walk this way because vampire bats do it just fine, and they’re able to run around quite fast on the ground. An adult Cryodrakon walking on all fours would have been about as tall as a modern giraffe because of its long neck. Its neck was strong and its head large, so it could easily grab a little running dinosaur and swallow it whole, maybe giving it a good chomp with its toothless jaws first. While azhdarchids probably couldn’t run, because the hind legs weren’t very strong and the feet were small, it could probably walk pretty quickly. And, of course, it could fly extremely well. Scientists think it launched into the air by pushing off the ground with its wings, not its back legs. In older episodes we’ve talked about some other species of pterosaur from this same family, especially Quetzalcoatlus, a genus of exceptionally large pterosaurs discovered in North America. The largest individuals may have had a wingspan potentially more than 36 feet, or 11 meters. But in 2002 a remarkably complete pterosaur fossil was discovered in Romania, and while we don’t have the complete wing bones, estimates suggest this new species might even be larger than Quetzalcoatlus. Some estimates put its wingspan at 39 feet across, or 12 meters. It had a shorter neck than other azhdarchids but a massive head. Its neck was about 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, while its skull was at least that long and possibly as much as 8 feet long, or 2.5 meters. The Romanian specimen was named Hatzegopteryx but the specimen has been nicknamed Dracula (also the name of my cat). Some scientists initially argued that Dracula was just an especially big Quetzalcoatlus, but while it was probably a close relative, it’s too different to be the same species. Despite their huge size, pterosaur bones were delicate because the animals had to be light enough to fly. That means they had air pockets or spongy internal structures in their bones, and that means their bones were much less likely to preserve. The most likely reason we have so many more fossils from young pterosaurs than old ones is because many species of pterosaur appear to have nested together. It’s a sad fact of life for wild animals that many young ones don’t survive, so the fossils of young pterosaurs probably come from nesting areas. And that brings us to our young Cryodrakon who had a terminally bad day. In 2023, researchers found a neck bone of a cryodrakon that had a puncture right through it. The hole in the bone is about 4 mm across and circular, and the scientists who examined it think it’s from a crocodilian tooth. We don’t know if the baby pterosaur was chomped to death by a crocodilian or if it was already dead and the crocodilian was scavenging it. That’s not even the only Cryodrakon fossil that shows tooth marks. In 1995 the fossils of a young animal ...
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    7 mins
  • Episode 484: The Sewellel and the Superflea

    Episode 484: The Sewellel and the Superflea
    May 11 2026
    The sewellel is a little rodent: The superflea is a big flea (left, compared to a regular flea, right): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Let’s learn about a rodent you may never have heard of, unless you live where it does, and a parasite that makes that rodent its host. It’s not an ordinary parasite, but don’t worry, it’s not icky. You can continue to snack. The rodent is called the sewellel, Aplodontia rufa. It’s also called the mountain beaver even though it doesn’t always live in the mountains and it isn’t a beaver. It doesn’t even look like a beaver. For one thing, it only has a little nub of a tail and it only grows around 20 inches long, or 50 cm. It has small eyes and ears, short legs, a chunky body, and long claws. This body shape should give you a hint about its lifestyle: the sewellel is a digger, although it can also swim just fine and can even climb small trees to eat young twigs and leaves. The sewellel is an aplodont, a large group of rodents that have been common in Europe, Asia, and North America for 40 million years. But it’s the only one left. All the other aplodonts went extinct several million years ago at least. We’ve actually talked before about one of the sewellel’s extinct relations, the horned gopher (which was not a gopher), in the Patreon episode about animals with nose horns. The sewellel itself hasn’t been around all that long, only appearing in the fossil record a few million years ago. It lives in a small area of northwestern North America, in parts of British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon, and a few parts of California. It lives in forests where it doesn’t get too cold in the winter, since it doesn’t hibernate and isn’t as good at keeping itself warm as other rodents are. It also needs to drink more water than other rodents and prefers to live in wet climates as a result. In fact, the sewellel is sometimes referred to as a living fossil since it lacks many features that all other living rodents have. Its teeth resemble a simpler version of squirrel teeth, so some researchers think it may be most closely related to squirrels, but even if that’s the case, it isn’t very closely related. The sewellel’s ancestors were more adapted to live in trees and a study published in 2018 determined that it had a larger brain than the sewellel. Since the sewellel is nocturnal and spends most of its life underground, it doesn’t need to see very well, and the part of the brain that processes vision is much smaller than in its ancestors. The sewellel mostly eats ferns, although it also eats other plants, and some of its favorite plants are toxic to other animals. It’s a solitary, mostly nocturnal animal that digs deep, complex burrows, and it stays as close as possible to the burrow entrance so it can hide easily if it needs to. Everything eats the sewellel, from owls to coyotes to bobcats to eagles. And that brings us to the parasite associated with the sewellel. Many animals have parasites that are specific to that particular species. The Patreon episode about whale lice has some information about how specific this can get. The male sperm whale has a different species of louse than the species that lives on female sperm whales, for instance. Also, the whale louse isn’t a louse, it’s a type of crustacean. The sewellel’s parasite is a type of flea. Big deal, you say, fleas are all about the same. Are they, though? Because the sewellel’s flea is actually kind of a big deal. It is, in fact, the largest flea known, called the superflea. It can grow up to 8 mm long (and possibly longer, reports vary). I just measured, and that’s the length of my little fingernail, from the base to the quick. Most species of flea are 3 mm long at most. The superflea is only found on the sewellel. It looks like an ordinary flea except for its size, meaning it’s laterally flattened with legs that allow it to jump long distances. So why is it so big compared to other fleas, especially considering that it lives on an animal that’s about the size of a chonky cat? No one knows. No one has even the slightest idea why this flea is so big. There used to be even bigger fleas, some up to two cm long. That’s 20 mm, or just a little more than twice the length of the superflea. Of course, those 20 mm fleas lived 165 million years ago and probably lived on dinosaurs. Also, they couldn’t jump and instead of being flattened laterally, or side to side, like modern fleas, they were flattened dorsoventrally, or top to bottom. So they weren’t very much like modern fleas. That’s all we know about the superflea, but let’s have one last sewellel fact before we go. With all this talk of the sewellel being a primitive rodent whose closest relations are all extinct, you might think there’s nothing really special about it beyond its giant fleas. You would be wrong, though, because the sewellel’s front paws have ...
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    8 mins