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Strange Animals Podcast

Strange Animals Podcast

Di: Katherine Shaw
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A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals! Scienza Scienze biologiche
Episodi
  • Episode 506: The Beast of Buderim

    Episode 506: The Beast of Buderim
    Oct 12 2026
    Photos of a mangy fox that make it look like it has stripes: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Buderim is a small city in Queensland, Australia, right on the coast but extending up the side of a small mountain. It looks like an especially beautiful place in a beautiful part of the world, but in the 1990s it was in the news due to sightings of a strange animal. The animal was dubbed the Beast of Buderim by reporters. It all seems to have started in 1993 when a local artist was driving with her husband and saw a striped animal run across the road. She thought for certain it was a Tasmanian tiger, more properly called a thylacine. When she got home, she drew what she’d seen. It looks like a foxlike animal with black stripes, a long whiskery muzzle, and a long thick tail. In March of 1995 a local dentist and his ten-year-old daughter saw the animal while driving along the edge of the local rainforest one evening. It was dark but his headlights lit it up and he was able to give a good description of it. He said it was medium-sized, presumably meaning about the size of an average dog, and had stripes that were sort of like a tabby cat’s markings but somewhat like a brindled dog’s markings. He described its coat as goldy in color. He also said it had a pronounced bump above its eyes, although I’m not sure if he meant it had a bumped-up forehead or if he was referring to a brow ridge of some kind. The animal was standing on the road, but when the car approached, it arched its back and then ran into the trees. Another sighting occurred in August of 1995, but not near Buderim. A man in Bundaberg, a city over 130 miles away from Buderim, or 210 km, was driving at night and had to brake hard to avoid hitting a gray kangaroo as it bounded across the road. A moment later a large animal leaped onto the road after the kangaroo. In the glare of the headlights, the man reported that the animal was sandy in color with stripes that started about halfway down its back, and that its eyes glowed green-yellow. It was big too, four or five feet long, or 1.2 to 1.5 meters, not even counting its long, thick tail. It also had long jaws that the man said reminded him of a crocodile’s when it snarled at him. It made another huge leap and disappeared into the brush. Plenty of other sightings have been reported from around Buderim and other parts of Queensland, with the most recent in 2014 turning out to be a mangy fox. This is the same area where a different striped animal, usually called the Queensland tiger, was first reported in 1871 and occasionally spotted afterwards. Sometimes people confuse the Beast of Buderim and the Queensland tiger. We talked about the Queensland tiger in an episode a long time ago—I don’t remember which one, but I do remember there not being much evidence that it was a real animal. Some people think the Queensland tiger is a descendant of an extinct animal called Thylacoleo [thyla-CO-leo], while the Beast of Buderim is supposed to be a thylacine. Thylacoleo is sometimes called the marsupial lion, although it looked much different than a lion. It had a strong kangaroo-like tail that it could use as a balance to help it stand on its hind legs. Its front legs were extremely strong and it actually had a semi-opposable thumb that helped it grab onto prey. Its front claws were retractable like a cat’s claws too, an excellent example of convergent evolution. All these traits also meant that Thylacoleo could climb extremely well. It might not have been a very fast runner, though, and some researchers think it was an ambush predator, possibly dropping down from trees onto its prey. The largest species, Thylacoleo carnifex, stood over two feet tall at the shoulder, or 71 cm, and was heavy for its size. Not only that, Thylacoleo had massive jaws with huge weird teeth. Its cheek teeth were enormous, basically just one giant tooth on each side. Its other teeth were much smaller in comparison and not very strong, but those giant cheek teeth and its strong jaws meant that Thylacoleo could bite right through meat and bones with no problem. We don’t know for sure what Thylacoleo looked like, but we do have two separate pieces of rock art that probably depict it. They show it with pointed ears instead of rounded ones and stripes on its back. Thylacoleo was an apex predator in the food web of Australian megafauna during the Pleistocene, and like many of the megafauna predators in other parts of the world, Thylacoleo required giant prey. When its prey started to go extinct due to climate change toward the end of the ice age, along with the arrival of humans who hunted megafauna efficiently, eventually Thylacoleo didn’t have anything to eat. It was too well adapted for killing large prey to switch over to smaller prey, and more nimble small predators out-competed it. We’re not sure when it went extinct, but the best guess right now is about 30,000 years ...
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    15 min
  • Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman

    Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman
    Oct 19 2026
    Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Monster month is upon us, and to kick us off I’ve got a fun episode about a supposed Bigfoot discovery called the Minnesota Iceman. It happened in 1968, although the iceman had been around for a while as part of a traveling exhibition. But in 1968 a zoologist named Terry Cullen saw it at a livestock fair in Chicago. Curious and excited, Cullen talked to the owner of the exhibition, named Frank Hansen. Hansen said he wasn’t actually the iceman’s owner but that he was taking care of it for the owner. Cullen contacted two cryptozoologists and urged them to look at the iceman, author Ivan Sanderson and zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Both wrote several influential books and basically founded modern cryptozoology, which of course is the study of animals that might or might not actually exist. Ivan Sanderson comes up in the podcast occasionally because he was everywhere back in the day, managing to have all sorts of sightings of mystery animals with absolutely no proof except for his own say-so. But the iceman was clearly a real thing, because there it was. This is a good time to describe it, huh? It wasn’t a living animal but a dead one preserved in a block of ice. It was apelike but much larger than most apes with human-like proportions, and would have stood about six feet tall when alive, or 1.8 meters. The iceman’s face was somewhat flat in shape with pronounced brow ridges and a short snub nose. It had dark fur and enormous hands and feet, and while the ice obscured a lot of the details, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson got a good close look at it in Hansen’s home that December. The exhibition was on its winter break and Hansen kept it at his house in a refrigerated case. The body itself showed signs of injury, including a possibly broken arm and an eyeball dislodged from its socket. Both Sanderson and Heuvelmans took photos and made careful drawings of the iceman. Heuvelmans, who was a zoologist, published a description of it in a Belgian scientific journal in 1969. He first suggested it was a new species of human that he named Homo pongoides, but later he changed his mind and decided it was probably more closely related to Neandertals. Sanderson, meanwhile, was active in drumming up media interest. He also was sure it was a new species, but instead of Homo pongoides, he chose to call it Bozo. Yeah, Bozo. Sanderson published an article about the iceman in a 1969 issue of Argosy science fiction magazine, where he was an editor. In that article he suggests the iceman was the missing link between humans and apes. Remember what I’ve said about people claiming they’ve found the missing link? They either don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s a hoax. Sometimes both. Sanderson also contacted John Napier, a primatologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institution and had a longstanding interest in the Yeti and other Bigfoot-type creatures, and suggested he investigate. Napier and the Smithsonian’s director, S. Dillon Ripley, also a Yeti enthusiast, were both interested. But when they asked to see the iceman, suddenly Hansen said nope, the iceman’s actual owner didn’t want anyone else looking at their…sideshow exhibit. Later Hansen said Napier and Ripley could see it after all. But when they did, it was clear to them that it wasn’t a real animal. Napier said it looked like a latex model. Hansen promptly said that he’d hidden the original, worried that he would get in trouble if it turned out to be a type of human, and that Napier had actually viewed the model he’d replaced the actual iceman with. Sanderson and Heuvelmans did say that the photos Napier took looked different from their own photos and what they remembered. But Hansen wouldn’t let anyone see the original iceman, so the scientists’ interest waned and that was pretty much it. So where did the iceman come from and where is it now? Surely by now some museum or university has bought the actual specimen and thawed it out to examine, right? Where’s the genetic profile? Why isn’t this thing in textbooks? Soooo, well. Let’s start with where it came from. Hansen said the body had been discovered in Siberia by seal hunters, floating in a block of sea ice just off the coast. But he also said it had been found not by Russian seal hunters but by Japanese whalers. Okay, well, maybe he couldn’t remember exactly who found it. But wait. He also said it had been shot by a hunter in Minnesota. And he also said it was killed in Vietnam and smuggled into the United States during the war in a body bag. And he also said someone discovered it in Hong Kong in a deep freeze after it was confiscated by authorities from the seal hunters or possibly whalers. In other words, Hansen was clearly just making all this up. But maybe he didn’t know where it came from. After all, he always said he wasn’t the iceman’s owner, although he wouldn’t say ...
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    10 min
  • Episode 503: The Mystery of Typhloesus

    Episode 503: The Mystery of Typhloesus
    Sep 21 2026
    Further reading: A possible home for a bizarre Carboniferous animal: is Typhloesus a pelagic gastropod? Typhloesus An artist’s rendition of what Typhloesus might have looked like [pic taken from the Nix Illustration link above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. I recently discovered the excellent Nix Illustration blog, which is about scientific illustration and palaeontology. I’m finding so many fun topics that I keep going back to it, so I hope you don’t mind another invertebrate mystery I learned about from the site. There are links in the show notes if you want to read the original blog posts. This month’s mystery is Typhloesus wellsi, sometimes referred to as the “alien goldfish” because of its shape and its peculiar anatomy. It definitely wasn’t a fish. It lived around 324 million years ago and was first discovered in the early 1970s in Montana, in the middle of North America. It grew up to four inches long, or 10 cm, and was shaped not like a real goldfish but kind of like a goldfish cracker. Its body was roughly cylinder-shaped, and it had a vertical tail fin and a pair of fin-like lobes on its sides that are referred to as keels. But it didn’t have eyes or, as far as scientists can determine, an anus. It did have a mouth and gut cavity–but it also had something truly unexpected and mysterious in its body, a pair of disc-shaped organs that contained a lot of iron but whose function is completely unknown and unlike anything scientists have ever seen. Those initial specimens also contained lots of conodont teeth, which led scientists to hope they’d finally discovered the conodont animal. We’ve talked about conodont teeth before, but it’s been quite a while ago. Conodont animals were incredibly common for around 300 million years, and their teeth are found throughout the world. Technically they’re not teeth but tooth-like structures called conodont elements, some of them microscopic, some of them almost an inch long, or 2 cm. Each animal had three types of conodont elements, and they interacted in a way that we don’t fully understand since they were completely different from modern animal mouthparts. Until the 1980s, no one knew what the conodont animal looked like. The only fossils we had were the tiny teeth. Then some body impressions of the conodont animal were discovered. Now we know it was shaped like an eel and grew up to 20 inches long, or 50 cm. We also know it had large eyes, a notochord (or primitive spine), and fins on the tail end. It was probably related to hagfish and lampreys and may have looked similar, although not everyone agrees with this classification. Whatever the conodont animal was related to, Typhloesus definitely wasn’t one. It turns out that the conodont teeth associated with Typhloesus fossils were actually in its gut, after the alien goldfish ate a conodont animal. So scientists were back to square one. What was Typhloesus? In 2022, a study of several specimens revealed a clue. Typhloesus had a radula. That’s a mouthpart that resembles a tooth-studded tongue. Snails, for instance, use tiny radulas to scrape algae and other food off of rocks. True radulas are a trait of mollusks, which means Typhloesus was most likely an early mollusk, maybe even a gastropod like snails and slugs. That’s a start to classifying Typhloesus, but it doesn’t explain the pair of weird disc-shaped organs. It’s called a ferrodiscus and we still don’t know what it was for. Because of its placement just under the midgut and its high concentration of iron, which would have made it quite hard in comparison to most of the rest of its body, the ferrodiscus might have had something to do with digestion. Then again, it might have had something to do with chemoreception, which is probably how Typhloesus found its food. Some modern mollusks have a chemoreceptor organ under the radula, but it’s mainly a bundle of nerve cells and not any kind of weird iron discs. We just don’t know what the ferrodiscus was. Typhloesus probably swam around until it encountered a small animal like a conodont, and then it would stick its radula out like a spiky tongue and use it to grab the animal. Typhloesus had no anus, so after it digested its meal it just spat out the indigestible parts. It might also have been a scavenger that used its radula to pull pieces off of a dead animal to eat. Not every scientist agrees that Typhloesus was a mollusk. Only mollusks have true radulas, although not all mollusks have them, but other animals have evolved similar structures. Typhloesus is so different from known mollusks, living and extinct, that scientists can’t definitively determine what it was related to. It had no gills and no notochord, so we know it had to be an invertebrate. Some cnidarians, which include jellyfish and sea anemones, have no anus, but Typhloesus has even less in common with that phylum of animals than it has with ...
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    7 min
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