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Strange Animals Podcast

Strange Animals Podcast

By: Katherine Shaw
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A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals! Biological Sciences Nature & Ecology Science
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
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