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Strange Animals Podcast

Strange Animals Podcast

Auteur(s): Katherine Shaw
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 A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals! Nature et écologie Science Sciences biologiques
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  • Episode 482: Smoky Mountain Mystery Animals

    Episode 482: Smoky Mountain Mystery Animals
    Apr 27 2026
    I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the world’s continents crunched together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The southern Appalachians formed separately and later than the northern Appalachians, around 270 million years ago. The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies or Himalayas, but by the time the dinosaurs went extinct, they had eroded down to the mountain cores. Sediment weathered from the peaks and filled in valleys. But during the Pleistocene, when massive glaciers covered the northern parts of North America, the weight of the ice pushed the North American plate down, causing the southern part of the plate to rise. Eventually the ancient mountains’ roots were a thousand feet (300 m) above sea level again. Rivers that once flowed east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the remains of the shallow Western Interior Seaway shifted their courses to flow northward. Streams that once meandered across the land now plunged down steep slopes and dug gorges into the rock. And over thousands of years, animals and plants retreating from the ice migrated southward along the mountain range. When the climate warmed some 11,000 years ago and the ice age glaciers melted, many cold-adapted species were trapped in the peaks of the southern Appalachians. One of the highest peaks is Mount LeConte, with its highest point, High Top, measured at 6,593 ft, or 2,010 meters. I hiked Mount LeConte on 7 May, 2016 when the weather in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee was a warm 82 Fahrenheit, or 27.8 Celcius, but there was snow on the mountain that morning. I wrote my name in it. A spruce-fir forest grows on the upper slopes, a remnant of forest that grew throughout the mountains during the last ice age. The climate at the peak of Mount LeConte is more like that of southern Canada than the warm, humid southeastern United States. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in 1934 to protect the mountains along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. No one lives in the park’s 800 square miles (2,072 square km), which receives up to 90 inches [2.29 m] of rain a year, some of it from hurricanes that sweep up from the southern Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. Large tracts of old-growth forest still remain in the park too. So as you can see, the Smokies are a biodiversity hotspot. In 2018, the park announced its 1,000th species discovered that is new to science, which by July 2020 had grown to 1,025. Overall, 20,000 known species live in the park as of 2019 and scientists estimate that up to 100,000 more are yet to be discovered. The Smokies are heavily forested, of course, but some mountain summits and crests have no trees. Instead, native grasses and shrubs grow. They’re called grassy balds and no one is sure why they exist. The prevailing theory is that Pleistocene megaherbivores opened the forests for grazing, and after their extinction, the balds remained open due to bison, elk (wapiti), and deer. When white settlers moved into the area, they used the balds to graze cattle and other livestock. Remains of mammoth and mastodon, musk ox, ground sloth, and other megaherbivores have been excavated from various balds throughout the park. Amphibian enthusiasts call the Smokies the Salamander Capital of the World, with 30 known species. Largest of these is the hellbender, which we talked about in episode 14, a giant salamander that can grow nearly 2 ½ feet long, or 74 cm, and which lives in swift-moving mountain streams. It’s most closely related to the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders, which can grow over twice as long as the hellbender. Twenty-seven of the salamanders found in the Smokies are lungless, in the family Plethodontidae. Instead of breathing with lungs or gills, the lungless salamanders absorb oxygen through their skin. Of these, the red-cheeked salamander is endemic to the Smokies—that is, it’s found nowhere else in the world. The red-cheeked salamander lives in forests in high elevations. It can grow up to seven inches long, or 18 cm, and is gray or black with bright red patches on its face. It spends the day in a burrow, then comes out at night to find insects in the leaf litter. But it’s hard to tell apart from the imitator salamander, although the imitator only grows a little over four inches long, or 11 cm. The imitator has red cheeks but its body is patterned black and brown instead of solid gray or black. Sometimes its cheeks are yellow, too, while the red-cheeked salamander only ever has red cheeks. Another animal found only in the Smoky Mountains, although it may also be present in mountains outside of the park, is a ...
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    18 min
  • Episode 481: The Pictish Beast

    Episode 481: The Pictish Beast
    Apr 20 2026
    This week we’ll learn about a long-forgotten animal of folklore! Further reading: https://www.anomalist.com/ The Pictish Beast: A dragonesque brooch: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Picts were a population of Celtic people who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland between around the third and tenth centuries. They had their own language, which is lost to time except for a handful of place-names, and made beautiful rock carvings and metal art, but we know very little about them even though their descendants still live in Scotland today. Vikings conquered the area, which led to upheavals among the many small kingdoms, so that by the 11th century, all the Picts had been absorbed into the greater Scottish population and had completely forgotten their heritage. The carvings are what we’re interested in today. The Picts carved lots of different animals along with more abstract designs, and although the carvings are often stylized, we generally know what animals they represent. There are roe deer, red deer, dogs, boars, horses, cattle, salmon and other fish, otters, eagles, and more. But there’s one animal no one can identify, referred to as the Pictish Beast. The Pictish Beast isn’t rare, either. One estimate is that 40% of all the animal carvings depict the Pictish beast, so it was obviously important. That makes it even more baffling that we don’t know what it is. There are variations, but generally the Pictish Beast has a long snout or beak with a line showing that the mouth was long too. There’s a horn-like design that emerges from the top or rear of the head and bends backwards, with a little curl at the end. The body looks superficially doglike, with a little curled dog tail, but the legs don’t resemble any real animal’s legs. They appear stiff, not jointed, and often bend backwards slightly. The feet are simplified designs that curl backwards in a little spiral. The head is usually bent as though it’s staring downward. It has no ears or nostrils. Naturally there are lots of theories as to what the Pictish Beast represents. One theory is that it’s not a real animal at all but a type of dragon. Specifically, some experts consider it to be a version of a design called dragonesque brooches. These were pieces of jewelry made throughout southern Scotland and northern England during the first and second century. They were roughly S-shaped, made to look like a double-headed animal with a curly nose and distinctive round ears. Instead of dragons, though, the dragonesque brooch animals were probably actually stylized rabbits or hares. They were also popular at least 200 years before the Pictish Beast started being carved so often, so while there is a superficial resemblance, it’s not a perfect match by any means. Then again, there is one stone, called the Mortlach 2 stone, that depicts both a Pictish Beast and what seems to be a simplified version of the dragonesque brooch design. Some researchers think the artist was depicting what was at the time the modern Pictish Beast and the old-timey dragonesque brooch that inspired it. One suggestion is that the beast was inspired by the dragonesque brooch, but isn’t otherwise related. Remember that the brooches would have been considered super old at the time and were probably rare even then as a result. Think about how many pieces of jewelry you own that are several hundred years old. If an artist saw one of the brooches and thought it looked neat, but had no idea what it was supposed to represent, they might have recreated it with details that made sense to them, trying to imitate what they saw. But that doesn’t explain why the design became so incredibly popular. There are other suggestions, of course. Sometimes the beast is depicted vertically, which makes it look superficially like a weird seahorse. Seahorses do live off the coast of Scotland, but that doesn’t explain why the Pictish Beast has large legs and such a little tail. Most of the time the beast is shown horizontally, legs down. Sometimes the beast is referred to as an elephant, but knowledge of elephants in the British Isles over a thousand years ago was unlikely at best. And the beast has zero resemblance to an elephant so I don’t know who came up with that idea but let’s just set it aside and move on. Because of the horn-like appendage on its head, some people suggest the beast might depict a stylized deer. That’s more likely than an elephant but Pictish carvings of deer exist and are obviously deer. That doesn’t mean the beast couldn’t have started out as a deer that took on more and more stylized and exaggerated components until no one remembered it was actually a deer, but that could be said about any animal, not just a deer. Another suggestion is that it’s supposed to be a water animal of folklore, possibly a kelpie, or water horse, or a water bull. Both creatures were supposed to lure ...
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    9 min
  • Episode 480: Old, Old Life

    Episode 480: Old, Old Life
    Apr 13 2026
    Let’s learn about some of the oldest life ever discovered! Further reading: Microbiologists Find Living Microbes in 2-Billion-Year-Old Rock Chart of life extended by nearly 1.5 billion years Show transcript: Back in episode 168 we talked about the longest-lived organisms known, and finished the episode by discussing endoliths. I’ll quote from that episode as a refresher. An endolith isn’t a particular animal or even a group of related animals. An endolith is an organism that lives inside a rock or other rock-like substance, such as coral. Some are fungi, some lichens, some amoebas, some bacteria, and various other organisms, many of them single-celled and all of them very small if not microscopic. Some live in tiny cracks in a rock, some live in porous rocks that have space between grains of mineral, some bore into the rock. Many are considered extremophiles, living in rocks inside Antarctic permafrost, at the tops of the highest mountains, in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and at least two miles, or 3 km, below the earth’s surface. Various endoliths eat different minerals, including potassium, sulfur, and iron. Some endoliths even eat other endoliths. We don’t know a whole lot about them, but studies of endoliths found in soil deep beneath the ocean’s floor suggest that they grow extremely slowly. Like, from one generation to the next could be as long as 10,000 years, with the oldest endoliths potentially being millions of years old—even as old as the sediment itself, which dates to 100 million years old. That episode was almost five years ago, and in October of 2024 some new information was published. The study mentions the 100-million-year-old limit known so far, where living microorganisms were indeed discovered in geological layers below the ocean floor. But what they found was even older. The scientific team analyzed rock samples from northeastern South Africa, specifically rock that formed when magma cooled below the surface of the earth. It’s called the Bushveld Igneous Complex and is very large, very old, and very stable. The team drilled core samples of the rock from 50 feet down, or 15 meters, and cut it into thin slices to examine. To their surprise, they discovered microbial life in the rock’s cracks, which were sealed tightly with clay so that nothing should be able to get in or out of the rocks. To be sure the microbes hadn’t been introduced during the drilling or preparing process, they used infrared spectroscopy to compare the proteins in the microbes with the proteins caught in the clay. They matched, meaning the microbes had been there as long as the clay had been there, which was basically almost as long as the rocks had been in place. They were also able to verify that yes, the microbes were definitely alive. So, how old are the rocks? TWO BILLION YEARS OLD. Billion with a B! While the individual microbes probably aren’t actually that old, the population of microbes has been living in those cracks far within the rock for two billion years. Scientists are excited to learn more about them, because by studying organisms that have been separated from all other life for that long, they can learn about how early life on earth evolved. Even more exciting, at least if you’re me, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars is going to be bringing some rocks back to earth that are about 2 billion years old. Scientists are really excited to see if there is any evidence for microbial life inside the Martian rocks! I know I won’t live long enough to see the first macrobial life from another planet, but I really hope I’m alive when we discover the first microbial life. I don’t think life is rare on other planets, it’s just that the distances are so enormous that getting to another planet and sending information back home is an almost insurmountable problem right now. The closest planets to us are Mars and Venus, and these days Mars just doesn’t seem like it would be very habitable for anything but microbes. But microbes can live just about anywhere! Also in 2024, a team from Virginia Tech has put together a chart marking when various life forms started appearing in the fossil record and when they also stopped appearing in the fossil record. Versions of this chart of life have been made before, but they typically only go back to about half a billion years ago, around the time of the Cambrian. Before that, life was much less likely to fossilize, or the rocks containing the fossils have been worn away. The team gathered fossil data from scientists and institutions around the world and compiled it into a chart of life that extends back two billion years. The farther back you look, the less changes there are among the type and differences in species. There’s even a huge stretch of time called the boring billion where things really weren’t changing much at all, at least not according to the fossil record we have available. It wasn’t until the earth’s climate became...
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    8 min
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