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Strange Animals Podcast

Strange Animals Podcast

De : Katherine Shaw
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A podcast about living, extinct, and imaginary animals! Nature et écologie Science
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  • 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 min
  • 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 min
  • 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 min
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