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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! Nature & Ecology Science
Episodes
  • Episode 504: The Mystery Roar

    Episode 504: The Mystery Roar
    28 Sep 2026
    Further reading: Wolves on rise in France as bears wreak mountain havoc Can Brown Bears Survive in the Pyrenees? Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. On the evening of August 4, 2019, two hikers set up camp in the Pyrenees Mountains. Laurent and Frédéric were familiar with the area and had plenty of experience hiking and camping. Once their camp was ready for the night, they took off their boots and socks and sat down to eat dinner and relax at a small campfire. If you’ve ever camped after a long hike, you’ll know that this is the best time of the day, when you can rest and air out your boots. After only a few minutes, though, the two heard grunts and growls in the darkness not far from their camp. They were concerned, but they had a fire and most animals won’t approach a fire. But the sounds got closer and closer. Then the animal roared—and it sounded like it was much closer than before. Laurent and Frédéric remembered that bears have become more common in the Pyrenees in the last few decades, and rather than take their chances with a hungry bear, they decided it was time to go. They shoved their bare feet into their boots, left everything behind, and raced back down the trail. It was late when they made it to the village of Germ so the hikers took refuge in a church where they spent the night. In the morning they hiked back up to their campsite to retrieve their belongings, expecting it to be trashed by a bear hunting for food. But everything was where they’d left it. Some people assumed the hikers had panicked over nothing, but the men were adamant that they’d heard something roaring as it came closer. In a news interview they said the final roar, the one that made them grab their boots and run, lasted several seconds and was so loud they could actually feel it in their chests. Brown bears were once fairly common in the Pyrenees but by 1991 they had all been killed, mostly by hunters. Habitat loss was also a factor as people built more roads and houses in the mountains. In 1995 a conservation program brought three bears from Slovenia to start a reintroduction program, and the way people acted, you’d think someone had released a thousand rabid weasels into their homes. Sheep and cattle farmers, and people who think the wilderness belongs to humans and humans only, protested the reintroduction of the bears, and one of the bears was shot and killed. This is despite the fact that farmers whose livestock are killed by bears get paid a lot of money by the French government. Approximately 1,000 sheep a year are killed in the Pyrenees—not by bears, but by pet dogs running loose. Conservation efforts continued despite protests and finally, by 2020, there were 64 bears living in the Pyrenees Mountains. The number may be a little larger—some estimates are as high as 100—but conservationists have difficulty counting the bears properly because protesters threaten them and in one case actually set a conservationist’s car on fire. The Pyrenees mountain range more or less divides France from Spain. It’s older than the Alps and especially known for its spectacular waterfalls. Many plants and animals that live in the Pyrenees are found nowhere else in the world, but unfortunately hunting and habitat loss have driven many of them to extinction. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of wild goat, went extinct in the year 2000. Conservationists have introduced a related animal, the western Spanish ibex, to help keep the mountain ecosystems healthy. The bears now living in the mountains are similarly important to the ecosystems. Conservationists are frustrated by protesters who don’t want bears in the mountains at all, especially considering that the Great Pyrenees dog was developed in the area to protect livestock from bears and other predators. Some shepherds in British Columbia, Canada, where both black bears and grizzlies live, successfully use Great Pyrenees dogs to guard their flocks from bears. Grizzlies are a subspecies of brown bear. But let’s go back to Laurent and Frédéric’s scary camping trip. Did they really encounter a bear or could it be something else? Bears are generally quite shy animals who avoid people when they can. Unlike black bears, which don’t growl, brown bears do make growling and grunting sounds occasionally. Males will growl or even roar at other males during mating season in spring and early summer, signaling aggression and the willingness to fight. A brown bear will sometimes growl or roar at a person to warn them away too. So it’s possible the hikers heard a bear who wasn’t interested in their food but just wanted them out of its territory. There’s another possibility, though, and it’s an animal that’s much more common in the Pyrenees Mountains than bears are. The wild boar lives throughout the Pyrenees, especially in forested areas and meadows. It’s mostly nocturnal and is usually shy of humans, and its ...
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    9 min
  • Episode 505: Three Animal Mysteries

    Episode 505: Three Animal Mysteries
    5 Oct 2026
    Further reading: Scientists solve a shark murder mystery Stone Age Animal Urine Could Solve a Mystery about Technological Development South African rock art possibly inspired by long-extinct species The porbeagle shark [photo by Andy Murch, taken from this site]: Dicynodont fossils and their possible art interpretation by the San people: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s finally monster month, and I’m looking forward to sharing lots of fun mystery animals and animal mysteries over the next four weeks. Our first mystery is from an article titled “Scientists solve a shark murder mystery.” The word solve is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this case, but let’s find out what happened to the shark. The shark in question was a porbeagle shark, a type of mackerel shark that can grow as much as 12 feet long, or over 3.5 meters, and is gray and white in color. It lives in cold water in the North Atlantic and around Antarctica, and it eats fish and cephalopods like squid. It hardly ever bothers people although people like to eat it, and in some regions it’s been so overfished that the species is listed as endangered. The porbeagle is especially unusual because it’s able to thermoregulate to some degree, like the basking shark and some other sharks that we talked about in episode 353, about warm-blooded fish. The porbeagle is actually really good at keeping its brain, eyes, and internal organs warm, which is why it’s so successful in cold water. It can live to be at least 65 years old. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the porbeagle, including where exactly it lives and how far it migrates throughout the year. A team of scientists has been tagging porbeagle sharks with little transmitters, like shark Air Tags, to find out where the sharks travel and other information, like how deeply they dive and what the water temperature is. The transmitter is attached to a shark’s fin and is designed to stay in place for a year, then detach and transmit all the information it’s gathered as soon as it floats to the water’s surface. In October 2020, the scientists captured an 8-foot, or 2.5 meter, female porbeagle and fitted her with a transmitter before releasing her again. They were especially happy to see that she was pregnant, partly because the porbeagle is endangered and reproduces slowly, partly because they were interested to find out where a pregnant shark traveled. About six months later, in April 2021, the tag began to transmit its information. It was too early for it to have detached on its own, but sometimes something happens to a tag and it ends up removed from the shark before it’s scheduled to. The team’s lead scientist, Brooke Anderson, examined the transmitter’s information and knew something weird had happened to the shark. Everything seemed normal until about a week before the tag began to transmit, when the tag indicated a slight but steady increase in the temperature of its surroundings, even though it was still deep underwater. Anderson suspected that the shark had been killed and eaten at that point, and the tag ended up inside the body of another animal that was able to thermoregulate. When the transmitter was expelled from the predator’s body, it floated to the surface and did what it was designed to do, transmit its saved information. But while the porbeagle isn’t a huge shark, it’s still big and dangerous. It’s also a fast swimmer. Something really big had to have attacked the shark. The first thing Anderson suspected was an orca, but she and her team immediately rejected that theory. Orcas are mammals, which means an orca’s internal temperature is much higher than the tag had recorded. That narrowed the suspects down to another shark that’s able to thermoregulate, but it also had to be a really big shark. They decided in the end that the porbeagle was probably eaten by a great white. Next, we need to learn a little about the rock hyrax, because a deposit of ancient rock hyrax urine is helping scientists learn more about our own prehistoric ancestors. The rock hyrax looks like a weird rodent but it’s actually more closely related to dugongs, manatees, and elephants. I’m literally not even kidding. Hyraxes are native to Africa although the rock hyrax also lives in parts of the Middle East. It’s also called the dassie. It’s a chonky animal with a short tail and thick fur, small rounded ears, and nails instead of claws. Even a big male rock hyrax grows less than two feet long, or 50 cm, about the size of a small marmot or groundhog, which it resembles superficially. It eats plants. The rock hyrax lives in family groups of one male and several females, along with their young offspring. It doesn’t dig a burrow but lives in holes and shelters it finds already dug, including caves, and that brings us to the sort-of mystery. Like many animals, the rock hyrax tends to pee in the same place every ...
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    11 min
  • Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman

    Episode 507: The Minnesota Iceman
    19 Oct 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
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