Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature future production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and I like to explore the biology
Speaker 1: of animals, humans and everyone in between. Today on the show,
Speaker 1: we're talking about animals who are back from the dead.
Speaker 1: Animals who were previously thought to be gone from the
Speaker 1: face of the earth get rediscovered. Reports of these animals
Speaker 1: extinction have been greatly exaggerated. I'm joined today by a
Speaker 1: very special guest who has traveled the world looking for
Speaker 1: quote unquote extinct creatures. Then we'll talk about some animals
Speaker 1: who truly are extinct, we think, and other creatures who
Speaker 1: we hope to bring back through mad science. Discover this
Speaker 1: and more as we answer the angel question, is that
Speaker 1: a giant tooth in your face? Patrick? Are you just
Speaker 1: happy to see me? How do we know when an
Speaker 1: animal goes extinct? The truth is we don't. Obviously, we'd
Speaker 1: probably notice if a giant ground floth was hiding out
Speaker 1: in the Hollywood Hills. But sometimes animals can be more
Speaker 1: elusive in dense forests, remote wilderness, deep in the oceans.
Speaker 1: Lurk animals we thought were long dead but may still
Speaker 1: be kicking. Take for instance, the wonder Why tree kangaroo
Speaker 1: of Indonesia who hadn't been sighted for ninety years and
Speaker 1: was presumed extinct. Naturalist Michael Smith, who was looking for
Speaker 1: rare flowers, happened upon this find and snapped a photo
Speaker 1: of the reddish, brown, dog sized tree dwelling marsupial with
Speaker 1: a cute quaw like nose in a thick fluffy tail.
Speaker 1: Because this adorable critter is believed to be restricted to
Speaker 1: a small remote area of montane forests in New Guinea
Speaker 1: and may have a small population, it's no wonder it
Speaker 1: has gotten unnoticed for so long. Stumbling upon the rarest
Speaker 1: thought to be extinct creatures of the world may be
Speaker 1: an incredible, happy accident. But how do you become a
Speaker 1: biodiversity private detective tracking down ghosts of species path Joining
Speaker 1: me to answer that question is outdoor adventure biologist and
Speaker 1: post of the Animal Planet show Extinct or Alive for
Speaker 1: us Galante. Welcome, Thank you, thanks for having me. I
Speaker 1: am incredibly excited to have you on good I'm excited
Speaker 1: to be here. So first I just want to give
Speaker 1: people an understanding of what you do. What's your show
Speaker 1: about what's your mission as you travel the world getting
Speaker 1: into all sorts of interesting situations. Yeah. Sure things. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, I'm not a typical TV person by
Speaker 1: any means. In fact, I'm very little interest in TV.
Speaker 1: I am a wildlife biologist and a tracker. Um. I
Speaker 1: grew up in the southern African bush of Zimbabwe. I
Speaker 1: spent my childhood working with rare and endangered wildlife, then
Speaker 1: went to school for that, and then continued to pursue
Speaker 1: that until I landed in the job of it now,
Speaker 1: which is traveling the world searching for animals that have
Speaker 1: been deemed extinct. I believe wrongfully, and we've had some
Speaker 1: major successes and we have incredible adventures all along the way.
Speaker 1: So what started your interest in biology and biodiversity. I
Speaker 1: know you had a really interesting childhood. I did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I was the son of safari business owners in Zimbabwe, Africa. UM.
Speaker 1: I grew up barefoot on the land in the bush.
Speaker 1: Um you know, to this day, I remember my first
Speaker 1: time putting on a pair of shoes, which I don't
Speaker 1: know how many kids can say that. I was about
Speaker 1: six um and so yeah, I've just always been surrounded
Speaker 1: by wildlife, and you know, you know that feeling when
Speaker 1: you're a little kid and you flip over a log
Speaker 1: and you see an earthworm. You're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: look at that earthworm. It's so cool, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1: It's slimy and slithery. Well, most people grow out of that.
Speaker 1: I grew worse. I grew into it, you know where.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know everything about that earthworm? What makes
Speaker 1: a tick? Where does it go once it disappears from
Speaker 1: under the log? Who's eating it? Who's it eating? You know,
Speaker 1: so on and so forth, and so I just decided
Speaker 1: at a very young age that I would always pursue wildlife.
Speaker 1: I didn't know it would land me in the career
Speaker 1: i'm in now, or have the specialty that it does.
Speaker 1: But I just always been fascinated by wild animals. So
Speaker 1: why did you decide to look into to animals who
Speaker 1: are thought to be extinct or are near extinct. That's
Speaker 1: a great question. I mean, you know, growing up where
Speaker 1: I grew up in Zimbabwe, because the country went through
Speaker 1: such terrible political turmoil, I first handedly saw animals disappearing
Speaker 1: from the bush that I had loved, and I knew
Speaker 1: how horrific It was um on a on a mass scale,
Speaker 1: you know, seeing them disappear, and I also saw how
Speaker 1: elusive and clever they could be. Where I grew up
Speaker 1: on our farm, we used to have a leopard that
Speaker 1: would come and frequent and actually steal some of our livestock.
Speaker 1: But everyone in our immediate area said leopards hadn't been
Speaker 1: in that part of Zimbabwe for for thirty years. However,
Speaker 1: I caught multiple glimpses of this leopard, so I knew
Speaker 1: beyond any doubt that this animal was, you know, the
Speaker 1: world champ of Hide and Seek, you know, a master
Speaker 1: of cryptic camouflage, and that there was a leopard there.
Speaker 1: And I think little instances like that have always driven
Speaker 1: this fascination. But I think on a bigger scale, you know,
Speaker 1: it the world's a big place and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of places to hide, and just because one scientist or
Speaker 1: group of scientists haven't seen something in a long time
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean it's extinct. Yeah, when you think about
Speaker 1: the scale of our earth, especially when you look at
Speaker 1: the forests and oceans, it's there's a lot of places
Speaker 1: that we haven't gotten our grubby little hands on yet. Definitely, thankfully.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a less impressive anecdote, but I
Speaker 1: have a fish tank from my childhood. I've always loved
Speaker 1: taking care of fish. And my mom was pretty sure
Speaker 1: since the last time I had bought any fish was
Speaker 1: when I was in high school, that all the fish
Speaker 1: were dead. And she's like, well, we've got this empty
Speaker 1: fish tank, just full of gross water. I think we're
Speaker 1: going to get rid of it. I said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: empty it out. I'll take the fish tank to my
Speaker 1: new place and I'll restart up the fish tank it.
Speaker 1: So she did that and I took it and the
Speaker 1: bottom was kind of it wasn't completely drives a little murky,
Speaker 1: and I started emptying out some of the rocks to
Speaker 1: clean it out, and there are these two coolie loaches,
Speaker 1: which is a type of fish, just still in in.
Speaker 1: It's like these must be ancient, first of all, like
Speaker 1: over a decade old, and they survived for I think
Speaker 1: a month without any food and with about two inches
Speaker 1: of water, maybe one inch of water. It's so it's
Speaker 1: I believe it. I believe if a coolie loach can
Speaker 1: do it, I think most animals can do it. And
Speaker 1: think of that scale, you know, you're talking about a
Speaker 1: two foot long fish tank. Yeah, in in plain site.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so uh yeah. Just imagine I don't know,
Speaker 1: twenty billion of those fish tanks, and that's about the
Speaker 1: Earth maybe. And I think, you know, the thing is
Speaker 1: what we do, and I say we because I have
Speaker 1: to credit my team as well and myself, is it's
Speaker 1: more than just about the animals. Certainly, nobody wants to
Speaker 1: downplay the severity of extinction. It's incredibly topical, and it's
Speaker 1: incredibly important, and it's sad, but it's a It's more
Speaker 1: than just about those two loaches in the bottom of
Speaker 1: the town bank, or about the tree kangaroo that you mentioned,
Speaker 1: or some of the animals that we work on. It's
Speaker 1: about showing the world and the reason I love the
Speaker 1: media of television that I get to work in. It's
Speaker 1: about showing the world these incredible ecosystems and habitats that
Speaker 1: do still exist and all of the animals that occupy
Speaker 1: them currently and why they're worth saving. I mean, I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed that I watched the show, and I love,
Speaker 1: first of all, I love the scene where your camp
Speaker 1: gets invaded by bees. I'm sure you didn't. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you didn't enjoy it at the time. I'm sorry for
Speaker 1: enjoying your suffering, but it is pretty astounding. I love
Speaker 1: that they decided to make a home out of one
Speaker 1: of your crew members shirts. Just overnight, they they had
Speaker 1: almost completely colonized that shirt. Uh. It's it's incredible because
Speaker 1: it's nature sometimes moves so quickly. They just felt right
Speaker 1: at home. As you guys were sleeping, obviously a bit
Speaker 1: of a problem for you. You got stung up quite
Speaker 1: a bit. Uh. And also just as you were, you
Speaker 1: were looking for the Dracula monkey. Uh. That's also called
Speaker 1: the Miller's Grizzled Linger. Correct, and you just happened upon
Speaker 1: that incredible snake. What was that called the mangrove cat snake. Yes,
Speaker 1: this huge snake, beautiful bright yellow and black stripes. Uh. Venomous,
Speaker 1: but not really that doesn't necessarily correc re fang so
Speaker 1: hard to inject the venom, but still not something you
Speaker 1: want to do, something you want to like tease pretty
Speaker 1: much exactly right. But yeah, so you're you're just like, well,
Speaker 1: here's the snake. Well, you know, I'm I'm like a
Speaker 1: kid in some regards. And what I mean by that
Speaker 1: is I just helped myself. Um, even though I'm out
Speaker 1: there searching for a Miller's grizzled Langer and seeing, you know,
Speaker 1: an eight nine ft long mangrove cat snake has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with finding the monkey. That's a species. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of these species that I've wanted to
Speaker 1: encounter in the wild my entire life. I've seen them
Speaker 1: in the pet trade, I've read about them in books.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm very familiar with them, and so to
Speaker 1: be able to see one and work with it and
Speaker 1: feel it and encounter in its natural habitat, it's just
Speaker 1: I lose all concepts of everything else going on, and
Speaker 1: I'm so smitten by this gorgeous creature in front of
Speaker 1: me that I kind of forget why I'm even there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can relate, although I'm not going around holding snakes,
Speaker 1: But I do love to torture my friends by I
Speaker 1: find a cool insect and I pick it up, and
Speaker 1: it's like, look at this huge insect, and please go away,
Speaker 1: stop putting that in my face. Well, my friends are
Speaker 1: the opposite. They're like, oh yeah, let me see it
Speaker 1: next put it in my face. So what's been You're like,
Speaker 1: You're probably pretty used to seeing. I mean not I'm
Speaker 1: sure you don't get tired of it, but you're you've
Speaker 1: grown accustomed to seeing pretty incredible sites. But what's something
Speaker 1: that has really caught you off guard on your adventures,
Speaker 1: like your most jaw dropping h sighting or adventure. Good question,
Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot, and I think it depends
Speaker 1: on what uh what capacity you're speaking to. Uh some
Speaker 1: of we. I've seen horrific things that have shocked me
Speaker 1: to my core, such as witnessing the grind where they
Speaker 1: slaughter whales in the Faroe Islands. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: the Faroe Islands is one of the most strikingly beautiful
Speaker 1: scenic places. It's beyond anything in Avatar or Star Wars
Speaker 1: or anything that our imagination can even make up. It
Speaker 1: is so incredibly beautiful. And that's in one location. I
Speaker 1: had both of those experiences, and and that's just, you know,
Speaker 1: that's a micro example of what happens regularly. I go
Speaker 1: to these amazing places, and sometimes I see just the
Speaker 1: worst habitat destruction or wildlife cruelty, and yet they're just
Speaker 1: such there's such beauty within them. Still, so it's it's
Speaker 1: hard to really define one. I mean, there are there
Speaker 1: are many places that are you know, not that beautiful,
Speaker 1: not that great, and then some of them that are
Speaker 1: just so striking. I think that's a big theme that
Speaker 1: we keep touching on on this show, which is we
Speaker 1: often escape into these fantasy worlds like Star Wars and
Speaker 1: uh An Avatar, and I think it's important to remember
Speaker 1: that we actually do of in a planet that has
Speaker 1: things that are just as if not more spectacular as
Speaker 1: the you know, million dollars c g I that is
Speaker 1: on your screen. And so one of my favorite moments
Speaker 1: actually was it just loved the creativity of how you
Speaker 1: put you nailed a dog brush to a treaty to
Speaker 1: capture uh fur, and I just that came across as
Speaker 1: something which it wouldn't have ever occurred to me, like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's a that's a simple kind of little
Speaker 1: fur trap to get get some genetic material. Uh. Are
Speaker 1: there any examples of like when you've had to get
Speaker 1: really creative or kind of improv a bit to be
Speaker 1: able to find an animal or yes, Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: I don't even know where to begin. So one of
Speaker 1: the fun things about what we do is there is
Speaker 1: no formula for it, right if you there's no handbook
Speaker 1: on how to find extinct animals because until I started
Speaker 1: doing and it wasn't a thing, right. Um, And so
Speaker 1: you know, we have the luxury of yes, we follow
Speaker 1: scientific protocols, but we also incorporate hunting technologies, military grade
Speaker 1: thermal optics and drones, our own imagination, creativity, things like
Speaker 1: the dog brushes from Peco, which I've been carrying around
Speaker 1: in that pelican for about three years, knowing that at
Speaker 1: some point I'm gonna need him for a fur trap.
Speaker 1: And then it all clicked in Borneo. But um, you know,
Speaker 1: a great, a great example of something that that worked,
Speaker 1: that was totally a concoction of our imagination, but you know,
Speaker 1: grounded in scientific merit was the meat tree. Okay, and
Speaker 1: let me explain the meat tree. So we're in Zanzibar,
Speaker 1: off the eastern coast of Africa looking for a leopard
Speaker 1: deemed extinct twenty five years prior, and this creature hasn't
Speaker 1: been seen. However, locals are reporting that it could still
Speaker 1: be there. In fact, they're even saying the witch doctors
Speaker 1: used them to do evil bidding. There's a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of lore and culture associated and we're striking out left
Speaker 1: and right. You know, sometimes I get little clues that
Speaker 1: this animal could still be here because you know, this
Speaker 1: thing is happening or that thing's happening. But in this instance,
Speaker 1: we're literally just kiking out. We're not getting anything. So,
Speaker 1: because Zandy Bar is such a densely populated island, for
Speaker 1: a change, we weren't just staying intense in the middle
Speaker 1: of the bush the whole time. We were actually going
Speaker 1: to a hotel at night. So my producer and I
Speaker 1: are sitting in our hotel room feeling super deflated. We
Speaker 1: haven't had any successes with regards to finding this cat whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And he's telling me the story about how his cat
Speaker 1: is just obsessed with this like little toy tree that
Speaker 1: he has right where. He's got all these toys dangling
Speaker 1: from a piece of driftwood or something like those cat
Speaker 1: trees exactly to run around and scratch, and they have
Speaker 1: a little dangly balls and things exactly. So I think
Speaker 1: he's describing this to me, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: I turned him and I go, Patrick met tree. He says,
Speaker 1: what tells a meat tree for us? And I go,
Speaker 1: So let's make a giant cat toy out of meat.
Speaker 1: You know, we know that leopards and old cats for
Speaker 1: that matter, love these dangly toys. Right. We know they
Speaker 1: have a decent sense of smell, not the best but good.
Speaker 1: They have great visual responses. Let's go to the Let's
Speaker 1: go to the market tomorrow morning. Let's buy two hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of goat beef, you know, any meat that we
Speaker 1: can get, and go back into Josanni, the national forest
Speaker 1: where we've been working and make a make a giant
Speaker 1: cat toy. And we did this right, and it's it's
Speaker 1: the most ridiculous. If I told my advisors going you know,
Speaker 1: my old academic advisors going into the field, that I
Speaker 1: was going to make a meat tree to find an
Speaker 1: extinct leopard, they I think they'd kick me out of school.
Speaker 1: But anyway, we go and we buy this meat, and
Speaker 1: we go back into Josanni and we start hanging all
Speaker 1: these dangly bits of goat head and foot and meat
Speaker 1: and everything on this fallen over tree. And sure enough,
Speaker 1: two days later we checked trail cameras and we uncovered
Speaker 1: footage of a leopard that hasn't been seen in twenty
Speaker 1: five years. It's amazing. Now, I do want to caution
Speaker 1: our listeners not to go to www Dot meat tree
Speaker 1: dot com. That's not going to be what you're hoping.
Speaker 1: It's not going to be a leopard playing. Um, but
Speaker 1: that is that is incredible. I love how big cats are.
Speaker 1: Basically they are literally just big cats exactly right, uh
Speaker 1: quote unquote, domesticated cats. The only reason they don't kill
Speaker 1: us is they're small, and they are the same behavior
Speaker 1: as they They love to play, and it's it's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk about a couple of the
Speaker 1: animals that were thought to be extinct that you've rediscovered.
Speaker 1: So first, did you want to talk about the Fernandina
Speaker 1: tortoise that I think you found under a pile of leaves?
Speaker 1: Pretty much? Yeah? Pretty much? Um, yeah, with pleasure. You
Speaker 1: want me to just tell the story, Yeah, yeah sure.
Speaker 1: So you know when we, as I said, what we
Speaker 1: do is travel the world looking for evidence that animals
Speaker 1: believed extinct may still be out there. The reason that
Speaker 1: we do this, the overall arcing reason is for conservation.
Speaker 1: Of course, once an animals declared extinct, all funding drives
Speaker 1: up for it. Right, who's going to pay to preserve
Speaker 1: something that doesn't exist any longer. So we do this
Speaker 1: in the hopes that if we find something, we can
Speaker 1: preserve not just the species and bring it back from
Speaker 1: the brink, but also the habitat in which it exists.
Speaker 1: So that's my that's my little spiel pitch on what
Speaker 1: we do. But I say all that because when it
Speaker 1: came to the Fernandina Island tortoise, we had an animal
Speaker 1: that wasn't necessarily checking all of our boxes. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is we have a we have
Speaker 1: a very we have a checklist of variables. Right, who's
Speaker 1: seeing the animal, when was it declared extinct? How many
Speaker 1: were there, who's reporting it? Is there sufficient habitat? And
Speaker 1: a lot of these questions were coming up with nose.
Speaker 1: You know, this is an animal that lives on the
Speaker 1: second most active volcano in the world. Only one other
Speaker 1: single individual of this species has ever been found a
Speaker 1: hundred and fourteen years ago. Uh. You know, people live
Speaker 1: in the Galapagos and there's there. They have literally the
Speaker 1: world's best tortoise scientists. They're like, there's no reason that
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be able to find this animal. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't checking all of the boxes that lead us to
Speaker 1: go on an expedition. But that being said, I had
Speaker 1: a colleague at the Turtle Conservancy and he told me
Speaker 1: he'd seen bite marks in a cactus. And basically what
Speaker 1: I'm getting at is my gut instinct, which goes against
Speaker 1: scientific protocol, said to go look for this animal. This
Speaker 1: for an Indiana Island tortoise. And it was hell It
Speaker 1: was absolutely hellish. I mean, the island was boiling hot.
Speaker 1: There was heat radiating up from under the ground. Because
Speaker 1: it's an active volcano. It's literally on the equator. The
Speaker 1: average daytime temperatures were around degrees. It's a little by,
Speaker 1: little bomby. Yeah. The terrain was five foot tall shards
Speaker 1: of glass, so to speak, from lava rock. You know.
Speaker 1: We went through three pairs of boots like in a
Speaker 1: couple of days each um. It was boiling hot. There
Speaker 1: was no vegetation nowhere to hide anyway. Long story short,
Speaker 1: We get to this island, middle of nowhere, Galapagos, the
Speaker 1: most remote island in the Glapa Goes. We climb up
Speaker 1: said volcano and in the far far distance we see
Speaker 1: a single isolated green patch that looks like if there's
Speaker 1: anywhere that life could be on this island. It's in
Speaker 1: this green patch that doesn't look like the rest of
Speaker 1: the Moonscape, that is this boiling hot island. And we
Speaker 1: travel over Lava Rock for seven hours or so, and
Speaker 1: we finally get to the green patch, killing ourselves. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you see the episode, I'm bright red, I'm so sunburned.
Speaker 1: Everybody's got heat and sunstroke. Uh, it's boiling you know,
Speaker 1: we're running out of water, you name it. I feel
Speaker 1: like an island that's made out of boiling glass is
Speaker 1: like not super friendly to people now, and no one
Speaker 1: goes there of that reason, and of course the Glapacos
Speaker 1: has very strict rules. But um, anyway, we get to
Speaker 1: this little pocket of green vegetation, and after days on
Speaker 1: this island, after a hundred and fourteen years since anyone's
Speaker 1: found a specimen of the species, we find the first
Speaker 1: piece of evidence, which is towardois scat, a ga tortoise poop.
Speaker 1: And the only other animal large animal on the island
Speaker 1: are iguanas, and their scot looks very different. There long
Speaker 1: and narrow, and this is round and towards. The happiest
Speaker 1: you've ever been to sea poop, Yes, hands down, and
Speaker 1: in the episode, I pick it up, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm like, have this ridiculous smile on my face, and
Speaker 1: I'm like elated and like shouting about how happy I
Speaker 1: am at this poop in my hand. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: less an hour later we find what looks like an
Speaker 1: active betting site where an animals actually dug into the
Speaker 1: sand to try and cool down a little bit. And
Speaker 1: five minutes after that, hiding under one of the few
Speaker 1: bushes on the entire island. Uh, is this absolutely incredible
Speaker 1: large old female Glapacos towartoise. That's incredible. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: I think that really points to one of the big
Speaker 1: reasons that there are a lot of animals we think
Speaker 1: are extinct but may still be alive, is just how
Speaker 1: inaccessible they are. You have to hike across burning glass,
Speaker 1: get heat stroke. Uh, and then you finally like find
Speaker 1: an oasis of poop and then a turtle. And you
Speaker 1: know you mentioned the wonder white tree kangaroo earlier. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know the gentleman who discovered that he spent two
Speaker 1: or three weeks hacking through bamboo forest to get up
Speaker 1: into that habitat. Again talking about how impenetrable it is,
Speaker 1: it took them two weeks just to get into the
Speaker 1: correct habitat, and he wasn't even looking. He was looking
Speaker 1: for for rare plants or plants that plants exactly right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he knew when he saw it, like that's not
Speaker 1: supposed to be here, exactly right. I want to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about a few animals who were thought
Speaker 1: to be extinct or or near extinct and then they
Speaker 1: were rediscovered and they're really incredible. So uh, First is
Speaker 1: the pinocchio lizard, uh, which is one of my favorite lizards.
Speaker 1: They're also known as the Pinocchio annul or Annula's proboscis um.
Speaker 1: And I'm betting people are going to guess why they're called. So.
Speaker 1: They're from the mountainous forests of Ecuador near Mindoh. This
Speaker 1: is within the Tombez Choco Magdalena Biodiversity Hotspot. That's like
Speaker 1: it's such very rich, very similar similar in biodiversity to
Speaker 1: the Amazon, and it's got a huge range of habitats
Speaker 1: as well. There's dry wet moist forests, forests of like
Speaker 1: varying degrees of moisture um and it's was thought to
Speaker 1: be extinct since nineteen fifty three. And they're a small
Speaker 1: lizard there, about two to three inches long, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of animals that because they're small and they
Speaker 1: blend into their environment, well, it's easy to think that
Speaker 1: they're extinct because you know, they look they're about the
Speaker 1: size of a leaf, so they're really beautiful. They're green
Speaker 1: and orange. They have these enormously long, orange pointy proboscis
Speaker 1: is sprouting from the tip of its nose. It looks
Speaker 1: like it looks like a hard horn, like it would
Speaker 1: be a rhino horn, but' sexually really squishy, it'shah yeah.
Speaker 1: And so originally it was thought that it was like
Speaker 1: for sword fighting between males, but it's too it seems
Speaker 1: like it's probably too squishy to actually be a weapon
Speaker 1: of any kind. Correct. The generally accepted theory now is
Speaker 1: that it's like a peacock's tail. Yes, sexual selection, Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: look look at my giant nose horn exactly. How sexy
Speaker 1: is that? It's like it's like a squishy unicorn basically. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's since its discovery in three very few if
Speaker 1: any sightings have occurred. Um And it was thought to
Speaker 1: be extinct for over forty years, and then it was
Speaker 1: rediscovered in two thousand and five by a group of
Speaker 1: bird watchers, So again another group, who in a way
Speaker 1: does that? Like, may you really annoyed when people, uh
Speaker 1: just accidentally happen upon a thought to be extinct creature
Speaker 1: when you're like chucking through boiling glass to find that's
Speaker 1: a good question that the short answer is no. The
Speaker 1: more that people can discover and promote conservation, the better.
Speaker 1: It doesn't need to be me. I don't care who
Speaker 1: does it, um, you know, I think that's a perfect
Speaker 1: example of knowledge is power. Right, Here's a group of
Speaker 1: bird watchers and I'm guessing one of them either snapped
Speaker 1: I don't know the story of the actual discovery or
Speaker 1: at least the details of it, but I'm guessing one
Speaker 1: of them either snapped a photo or one of them
Speaker 1: had some herpetological knowledge and was like, wow, look at
Speaker 1: what this is. This is insane, right, And that led
Speaker 1: to this massive discovery, which to me is just phenomenal.
Speaker 1: Like I'll tell you why that doesn't upset me because
Speaker 1: now I don't have to go to Ecuadore and climb
Speaker 1: up the mountain forest to look for this lizard. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know, you know, about it, and and
Speaker 1: it's it's now global news. So it's great. I don't
Speaker 1: care who finds them as long as we're finding them
Speaker 1: and protecting exactly. No. I figured that was the case,
Speaker 1: but it is. It is. It's like really just happened
Speaker 1: upon the sty There's a guy who was climbing Lord
Speaker 1: Howie Island and found this giant stick insect the same way.
Speaker 1: He was just a climber and he's like, that's a
Speaker 1: cool rocket. And it's like he's like trying to hold
Speaker 1: onto a twig and it's like, whoa, this is exactly right,
Speaker 1: exactly right. Um. They obviously thought it was notable, so
Speaker 1: they took a photo sent it to herpetologist, and the
Speaker 1: herpetologists probably like freaked out, freaked out um uh. Team
Speaker 1: of researchers surveyed the area to find the lizards, and
Speaker 1: they're really difficult to spot during the day, so they
Speaker 1: waited until night and they kind of, like a lot
Speaker 1: of amphibians and reptiles, their skin kind of changes, uh uh,
Speaker 1: following like diurnal patterns, and so they kind of turned
Speaker 1: this pale ish, ghostly color and as they shone their
Speaker 1: lights up into the trees, they saw these pale, little
Speaker 1: ghostly lizards hanging out at the tips of the branches
Speaker 1: and and literally hanging out. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this, but knolls when they sleep at night, they
Speaker 1: actually go to the very end of a blade of
Speaker 1: grass or a leaf and hang can can basically climb
Speaker 1: out and reach them, right like if a snake is
Speaker 1: trying to come out and reach them, it'll fall because
Speaker 1: it's right at the very end of a thin piece down, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and so literally hanging like stillag tights might's wait, which
Speaker 1: are the ones that come down? Tights gotta be tight
Speaker 1: on the ceiling or maybe stalagmite's got to be mighty.
Speaker 1: It's a useless but regardless, you get my point. They're
Speaker 1: all they're hanging out of these trees. And that's you
Speaker 1: know I've done. I've done Cuban and null work and
Speaker 1: some other null work. And that's how you find them.
Speaker 1: You find them at night hanging and in this case,
Speaker 1: this ghostly glistening white. I mean, imagine that discovery. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it. Yeah. They were
Speaker 1: obviously very excited and so to find out what they
Speaker 1: did during the day, like scientists often are, creepy. They
Speaker 1: stocked them. That's what we do. And so they found
Speaker 1: that the lizards like to hang high in the canopy
Speaker 1: during the day and they move extremely slowly. And it
Speaker 1: makes sense that we didn't realize they were still around
Speaker 1: because they are extremely well camouflaged. They're basically moving like
Speaker 1: a sloth in a way. They're kind of similar to
Speaker 1: chameleons in terms of how they managed to remain unseen,
Speaker 1: where they're very slow moving. They have those that very
Speaker 1: ponderous kind of movement uh. And they blend in really well.
Speaker 1: It's their only defense. Being cryptic is their only defense exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so another really cool horny thought to be extinct
Speaker 1: animal that was found in Ecuador is the horned marsupial frog,
Speaker 1: which is a nocturnal amphibian beautiful, strange looking frog uh
Speaker 1: and it's got a certain uh behavior that is even
Speaker 1: more freaky than its appearance. Uh. It's also found in
Speaker 1: the Tomb Bays Choco Magdalena Biodiversity Hotspot. This is a
Speaker 1: great area for red discovering thought to be extinct animals
Speaker 1: uh in western Ecuador. It's in a tropical rainforest habitat.
Speaker 1: It's a little frog about like two to three inches.
Speaker 1: Would you say it has spiky horns above each eye flap,
Speaker 1: kind of like a weird mascarrow or like clown makeup
Speaker 1: where it's like two little triangles, just like yes, yes,
Speaker 1: maybe it's mable line. Maybe it's uh, the marsupial frog.
Speaker 1: And they have these beautiful gold eyes. H they're very
Speaker 1: they're gorgeous looking. Um it has it's like it hadn't
Speaker 1: been seen for over a decade and it had been
Speaker 1: thought to be extinct or in your extinction. And then
Speaker 1: biologists were trekking through the forest I think again on
Speaker 1: kind of an unrelated exploration. Um, but I think these
Speaker 1: were herpetologists, uh, and they heard an unfamiliar frog call,
Speaker 1: which is said to kind of sound like a champagne
Speaker 1: cork being pulled out, so I haven't, yeah, like a
Speaker 1: sort of chirping like you know, like that squeaking sand
Speaker 1: as you pulled out. And they looked up and they
Speaker 1: saw a horn frog just sitting on a palm leaf
Speaker 1: and they started jumping around and screaming. I know. So
Speaker 1: they actually found as they explored more, they found a
Speaker 1: few individuals, including a pregnant female, which was really exciting
Speaker 1: because that indicates they have it at least somewhat stable population. Yes,
Speaker 1: speaking of pregnant females, this is one of the most
Speaker 1: incredible things about this is their method of pregnancy. So
Speaker 1: a lot of frogs have really interesting reproduction strategies in
Speaker 1: terms of protecting the tadpoles and the froglets. Uh. And
Speaker 1: these frogs have a pouch on their back like a kangaroo,
Speaker 1: like a backwards frog kangaroo, and that's why they're called
Speaker 1: the marsupial frog despite not even being in the mammal family.
Speaker 1: These eggs are inside a flap of skin on their
Speaker 1: back and they will pop out of the pouch as
Speaker 1: froglets rather than tadpoles, so they look like little, tiny,
Speaker 1: fully formed frogs. Um. They look when you look at
Speaker 1: a pregnant female, it looks like a pea pod almost
Speaker 1: like you know, the lumps, or like it's got a
Speaker 1: really dread Yes, yes, it's pretty. It's a little creepy actually. Um.
Speaker 1: And inside the pouch, the embryos have these mushroom like
Speaker 1: external gills that breathe through gas exchange on the pouch wall,
Speaker 1: which sounds very science fiction e um. As many amphibian
Speaker 1: larvage small salam androids. They have that the very feathery,
Speaker 1: interesting gill structure, and so it's it's it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: because axlttles are a permanent juvenile stage of that that
Speaker 1: salman and so, but we don't get to see it's
Speaker 1: cool to see the ax lottle because we often don't
Speaker 1: get to see the sort of um these interesting developmental
Speaker 1: stages for long in these animals, and especially at that size.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes we can find, like even here where
Speaker 1: we live in California, you can go into some of
Speaker 1: our streams and find the rough skin newt larva and
Speaker 1: they look just like a perfect xlotl but there you
Speaker 1: have to look a micro scales. Once they pop out,
Speaker 1: there just these little, tiny cute frogs and they sometimes
Speaker 1: hang out for a little bit on their mother's back
Speaker 1: right after being born. So you'll see this uh mother
Speaker 1: maybe with a slightly loose skin on our back and
Speaker 1: then a bunch of these little frog let's just hanging out.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of body horror with the lumpy back,
Speaker 1: but the product is adorable, absolutely, And you know what's
Speaker 1: so wonderful about that discovery, Katie is uh amphibians worldwide
Speaker 1: are facing a huge threat with kittred fungus um to
Speaker 1: the point that they're likely the the group of animals
Speaker 1: most at risk of mass extinction. And so you know,
Speaker 1: to hear oh a frog species has gone extinct, it's
Speaker 1: almost an expectation now, and it's not necessarily it is
Speaker 1: at the hands of man, but it's it's due to
Speaker 1: this kittured fungus. And so to find that an animal
Speaker 1: like that marcipial horn frog is still in existence and
Speaker 1: either resistant to kittured fungus or hasn't been exposed to it,
Speaker 1: when either way we assume it's one or the other,
Speaker 1: we assume it has either been exposed or or is
Speaker 1: obviously not um able to tolerate the kittened fungus is
Speaker 1: a fantastic thing because it helps with our amphibian diversity
Speaker 1: which is so struggling currently. Yeah, and as we'll talk about,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the gastric brooding frog in
Speaker 1: a little bit, and that is another victim of a
Speaker 1: pathogenic fungus, and especially in this area, the Tombays Choco
Speaker 1: Magdalena ecoregion is suffering a lot of biodiversity loss um, there,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of it. There is obviously man made problems,
Speaker 1: so like deforestation, climate change is all really affecting it,
Speaker 1: and it I think it's not as I mean, we
Speaker 1: know and it's a good thing that we know about
Speaker 1: the Amazon and the importance of the Amazon, but I
Speaker 1: think this region isn't as discussed as being like here's
Speaker 1: another huge tract of rainforests that is incredibly important, holds
Speaker 1: a lot of really incredible animals, and it's disappearing really quickly.
Speaker 1: Uh So, I think it's great that we have, like
Speaker 1: when you have on the show showing people these areas,
Speaker 1: and I think it's also good to give people hope
Speaker 1: that we're not too far gone like things. Even though
Speaker 1: we are in danger of losing a lot of animals something,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not a hopeless cause, like we can
Speaker 1: we can do things now. Yeah. I I hate ecophobia,
Speaker 1: which is a term, you know, coined for the thing
Speaker 1: that we basically see every day, which is where we
Speaker 1: wake up and see the headline this has gone extinct
Speaker 1: or you know, we're all going to die because of
Speaker 1: global warming, or the sea surface levels are rising and
Speaker 1: the Maldives are going underwater. You know, we we see
Speaker 1: all these things every day, and that's ecophobia. And first
Speaker 1: of all, no one wants to listen or read that,
Speaker 1: you know, listen to it. Nobody wants to hear how
Speaker 1: the world is coming to an end. It's it's miserable,
Speaker 1: and we've become callous to it as well. We've heard
Speaker 1: it so much that we just brush it off. You know,
Speaker 1: who cares of the rhinos are going extinct? I read
Speaker 1: that three days ago, you know, so I personally, and
Speaker 1: there's a number of scientists that fall in this vein
Speaker 1: of thought. Cannot stand that ecophobia thing. So we just
Speaker 1: throw it out all all together. It's not that it's
Speaker 1: not warranted, it's it's important and significant, and there is
Speaker 1: major problems. But let's show the good side of conservation.
Speaker 1: Let's show the winds. Let's show the animals we're discussing,
Speaker 1: you know, the Lazarus tax on that have literally come
Speaker 1: back from the dead. And if these creatures are capable
Speaker 1: of hanging on by a thread, you know how much
Speaker 1: inspiration and hope does that give for the planet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think pointing out the winds, pointing out the things
Speaker 1: that people are doing that are helping is really important
Speaker 1: because I do get this sense that people think, oh,
Speaker 1: we're doomed anyways. I mean, there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: cynicism to it, to where it's like, well, if we're
Speaker 1: doomed anyways, why even bother trying? Yeah, why care? Why?
Speaker 1: And it's really not black and white. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be like an apocalyptic event like oh, we'll all
Speaker 1: be wiped out in like a week or something and
Speaker 1: then that'll be it'll be over. It's got it's a
Speaker 1: it's a what we decide to do now as a
Speaker 1: species is going to affect quality of life on sort
Speaker 1: of a sliding scale of good or bad, And it's
Speaker 1: all it depends on what we decide to do now.
Speaker 1: And I think so that's why I think it's like
Speaker 1: it's so important to like say like, no, we're not
Speaker 1: we're not doomed. In fact, things that we thought were
Speaker 1: doomed may not be. There's a chance. We just have
Speaker 1: to really uh care about it at this point. And
Speaker 1: as you said, it's it's it's a decision that needs
Speaker 1: to be made on a species level by us human beings.
Speaker 1: You know. It's it's not about one person doing conservation
Speaker 1: perfectly or doing sustainability perfectly. It's about everybody doing it imperfectly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We talked about that on our our Amazon episode where
Speaker 1: I think that people can get fatigued if you feel like, well,
Speaker 1: I can't be you know, I still use plastic as
Speaker 1: will do this thing. But you know, I try to
Speaker 1: be vegetarian, but sometimes I drink milk or something and
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you don't have to be perfect. Just
Speaker 1: do what you can do. And if everyone does that,
Speaker 1: we're in great shape. And you limit yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: think about it this way. If you're not going to
Speaker 1: drive to work and it work is where you save
Speaker 1: the planet. Who's going to do it right? You know
Speaker 1: what I mean, You've got to get there, like you know,
Speaker 1: there's it's it's everybody has to do a little bit imperfectly.
Speaker 1: Is the way to make the che if if a
Speaker 1: frog can give birth out of its back, you can
Speaker 1: do something to help the environment and you don't have
Speaker 1: to I mean, look, these frogs give birth out of
Speaker 1: their backs, but they don't kill themselves doing it. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to make a stretched metaphor about the marsupial frog,
Speaker 1: and I feel like it's working. It's working. Once we've
Speaker 1: found the surviving members of a species on the brink
Speaker 1: of extinction, is there a way to bring them back?
Speaker 1: There have been a handful of successful conservation stories. Take
Speaker 1: for instance, the Noble West Indian manatee. These beautiful, buoyant creatures,
Speaker 1: once thought to be mermaids by screwby riddled mariners, had
Speaker 1: decreased in number to only a few hundred off the
Speaker 1: coast of Florida and more endangered worldwide, but conservation efforts,
Speaker 1: coupled with improvements made to their environment brought them back.
Speaker 1: They have now been upgraded to merely threatened, and there
Speaker 1: are over thirteen thousand mermaids or manatees worldwide. And one
Speaker 1: of my favorite animals, the California condor, was almost a
Speaker 1: victim of an anthropogenic human caused extinction. New to poaching,
Speaker 1: lead poisoning, pesticide poisoning, and habitat destruction. The California condor
Speaker 1: is a large vulture with a wingspan of up to
Speaker 1: nine feet, the largest wingspan of any bird in North America.
Speaker 1: They have a fluffy black body and a bright pink
Speaker 1: naked head, all the better to dive into carrion without
Speaker 1: getting messy. They have long life spans almost comparable to
Speaker 1: a human, and they're highly social, even engaging in play behavior.
Speaker 1: They're very devoted in particular parents. They only raise a
Speaker 1: single chick at a time, making them especially vulnerable bolts
Speaker 1: of depopulation. California condors were once on the brink of extinction.
Speaker 1: There were only twenty two individual condors remaining, so the
Speaker 1: California Condor captive breeding program began. These individuals were captured
Speaker 1: and bred in order to increase the rate of breeding.
Speaker 1: They took advantage of the condora laying two eggs at once.
Speaker 1: Typically only one chick will be raised to maturity. Conservationist
Speaker 1: retrieved the other egg and raised the chick with a
Speaker 1: realistic condor puppet so they wouldn't think that humans are
Speaker 1: their mommy's. Then, slowly, as their numbers grew, they were
Speaker 1: released back into the wild. There are now hundreds of
Speaker 1: California condors, with over two hundred flying free in the wild.
Speaker 1: When we return, we'll talk about some animals who are
Speaker 1: most definitely, assuredly probably extinct. For now, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Traveling is stressful, and the worst part for me is
Speaker 1: having to look around a big cluky suitcase through an airport,
Speaker 1: so I was beyond excited when Away Suitcases sent me
Speaker 1: their carry on suitcase. My old suitcase only than one direction,
Speaker 1: so I would wipe out while trying to bank a
Speaker 1: corner to get to the gate before all the seats
Speaker 1: next to power sockets were taken so I could charge
Speaker 1: my day phone. Away suitcases are designed much more thoughtfully.
Speaker 1: They have four wheels that's been in three hundred sixty degrees,
Speaker 1: allowing me to easily glide my suitcase behind me. It's
Speaker 1: got a lightweight and durable outer shell, like a helpful
Speaker 1: armadillo that's full of all my clothes. I got my
Speaker 1: carry on with the ejectable battery so I can recharge
Speaker 1: my phone. Anyways. I'm in love with my new suitcase.
Speaker 1: It's easy to tote around, it's designed to last a lifetime,
Speaker 1: and it's cute. I think I'm going to name them Casey.
Speaker 1: He makes my traveling a lot less of a headache.
Speaker 1: He's easy to pack all my baggage in, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I'm best friends with my luggage. For listeners
Speaker 1: of Creature, feature, Way is offering twenty dollars off your
Speaker 1: suitcase for twenty dollars off of suitcase. Visit away travel
Speaker 1: dot com Slash creature and use promo code creature during checkout.
Speaker 1: That's a way, Travel dot Com Slash creature and use
Speaker 1: promo code creature during checkout. Some animals who went extinct
Speaker 1: long ago were terrifying and well pretty metal. The puris
Speaker 1: or Us was a genus of South American crocodile that
Speaker 1: included many species of giant crocs, the largest of which
Speaker 1: being Sarkas sUAS that lived around one hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1: This big boy waited at four tons and reached up
Speaker 1: to thirty feet in length. These are the stretched limas
Speaker 1: of crocodiles. Speaking of lank, the titana boa, an extinct
Speaker 1: species of snakes that slithered upon the earth about sixty
Speaker 1: million years ago, grew up to forty two ft long,
Speaker 1: so they could fit about seven average sized adult men
Speaker 1: in their stomachs. You may be grateful that these giant
Speaker 1: monsters have gone extinct, or I don't know, maybe you
Speaker 1: want to fill a park up with them and allow
Speaker 1: children to roam around unsupervised. Either way, in today's world,
Speaker 1: the animals who go extinct are typically no threat to humans, instead,
Speaker 1: they're far from it. They're priceless wanders and could in
Speaker 1: fact have helped mankind. So before I get into some
Speaker 1: of the more contemporary extinct animals, I do want to
Speaker 1: talk about Thyla Cosmolus atrox, the extinct saber tooth marsupial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the it's a metallarian saber tooth cat. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's marsupial lion is Yeah, and there it's like a
Speaker 1: it's like a sister sort of group to actually true marsupials.
Speaker 1: The metallarian saber tooth cat really sounds like a Star
Speaker 1: Wars name true um. So it's more closely related to
Speaker 1: marsupials like kangaroos and koalas than it is to placentals,
Speaker 1: which is the rest of us basically um, except for
Speaker 1: monotreams like kidnas and um. But it is not actually
Speaker 1: a feline, because a feline is a placental um. It
Speaker 1: is a uh sparso danta, which is Greek meaning tearing teeth,
Speaker 1: which is great. I love I love it when they
Speaker 1: just go all in for the super metal, gritty names.
Speaker 1: So the resemblance to it does look like a saber
Speaker 1: tooth tiger at and that's where the name comes from exactly.
Speaker 1: But this is an example of conver rgent evolution. Um.
Speaker 1: So they were about the size of a jaguar. They
Speaker 1: had really big heads relative to their body, which I
Speaker 1: suppose in some frame of mind is scary, but it's
Speaker 1: also really do feel like it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: big bubble head. Um. And maybe the dou fiest part
Speaker 1: of all, which was huge fing pockets on their lower jaw.
Speaker 1: So they basically got kind of a j Leno look going.
Speaker 1: They got this giant jaw. They had these huge two
Speaker 1: front canines, so very similar to this sabertooth tiger like
Speaker 1: huge blade like looked like mouth sides coming down. Um.
Speaker 1: And but they had a sheath on the lower jaw
Speaker 1: is this bony protrusion called the symphysical flange um. And
Speaker 1: this was uh, it would like it was a job
Speaker 1: part that was between the two teeth, so the teeth
Speaker 1: would come down. Um. Like imagine you had like two
Speaker 1: huge vampire teeth and a long job in between them
Speaker 1: to support them, but your lips didn't close over them.
Speaker 1: You look about as doofy as the thilacaus millis. Their
Speaker 1: things would self sharpened by rubbing against the lower canines
Speaker 1: shuch as a handy feature. Um. And my favorite part
Speaker 1: about them is, uh, it's sort of speculated that they
Speaker 1: probably didn't have a really crushing jaw strength. So jaguars
Speaker 1: and a lot of big cats today have really powerful
Speaker 1: jaws and they can almost like they can strangle an
Speaker 1: animal with their jaws. They can crush a skull with
Speaker 1: their jaws. Um. But with this guy, they think that
Speaker 1: maybe he would come up behind the prey, ambush predator
Speaker 1: and then like executioner style, stab them. They had really
Speaker 1: powerful strong next to support that huge head and just
Speaker 1: kind of like an like an executioner's axe. They have
Speaker 1: this huge ax like head and which is like chopped
Speaker 1: down onto the animal's neck. They look, they're they're fantastic.
Speaker 1: I think, like you said, it's a perfect example of
Speaker 1: convergent evolution. You know, Australia is completely isolated with all
Speaker 1: of the marsupials that it has there, and so it's
Speaker 1: developed creatures that we we tie parallels to, such as
Speaker 1: the wolf. You're right, we have the thyls scene, the
Speaker 1: marsupial wolf, and this this big cat which is really
Speaker 1: not a cat at all. It's another marsupial, but it
Speaker 1: looks like what we know as a cat, and that's
Speaker 1: how these creatures get named. Even though they have and
Speaker 1: they do have similar morphological variations, you know, in the
Speaker 1: way they move, in the size of their feet and
Speaker 1: their tails for balance and things like that, but they
Speaker 1: have absolutely no relationship to cats and wolves as we
Speaker 1: know it. Yeah, which I think is it's spooky and
Speaker 1: inspiring that nature was just so determined to have a
Speaker 1: big cat like animal with giant executioner jaws that it
Speaker 1: happened exactly multiple times in different places around the world
Speaker 1: without them ever connecting. Yeah. So, speaking of this, uh,
Speaker 1: this really interesting extinct animal, Uh, would you like to
Speaker 1: tie a little bit about the Thighla scene, the Tasmanian
Speaker 1: tiger that you've been hunting for not literally yes, yes,
Speaker 1: if you found one, you would not kill it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the thila scene, you know, known as the Tasmanian
Speaker 1: tiger or in some cases the marsupial wolf. Again, it's
Speaker 1: an animal that we've drawn parallels to h two animals
Speaker 1: that we know of, but it's really none of those things.
Speaker 1: It's much more closely related to a kangaroo. It is
Speaker 1: a true marsupial had a had a pouch. It's not
Speaker 1: a placental mammal, and it's an incredible looking creature. It
Speaker 1: had a canine like head um, large jaws that could
Speaker 1: open very very wide, similar to a snake's um, had
Speaker 1: stripes a bit like a tiger on its back, which
Speaker 1: is where it gets the name from, and used its
Speaker 1: tail like a rudder the same way a kangaroo does
Speaker 1: for balance. So just you know, we were talking earlier
Speaker 1: about Star Wars type creatures, this is a perfect example
Speaker 1: of you are like a Doctor Seuss animal totally. I
Speaker 1: remember seeing these pictures as a kid as an exam
Speaker 1: ample of how sad extinction is, and probably a lot
Speaker 1: of listeners have seen it too. It looks it's like
Speaker 1: a long it looks like a long dog, almost like
Speaker 1: a cross between a weasel and a dog and a tiger.
Speaker 1: And it's quite it's bigger than a dog. It's ah,
Speaker 1: what would you say, it's about the size of a wolf.
Speaker 1: It's maybe like chiot Okay, yeah, and they are they're
Speaker 1: really fabulous looking. They look like you kind of took
Speaker 1: a bunch of animals, scrambled their genetics up and popped
Speaker 1: out this really interesting, guys, So exactly, and so you're
Speaker 1: you're you're hoping maybe that they're not completely gone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So look, the animal was deemed extinct in six The
Speaker 1: last one died in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. Did
Speaker 1: this animal is very interesting and I'll explain why they're
Speaker 1: kind of the poster child for um. They're the poster
Speaker 1: child for Lazarus taxon. What a Lazarus taxon is an
Speaker 1: animal coming back from the dead, even though they've never
Speaker 1: been proven to come back from the dead. And so
Speaker 1: the Thilat scene had an immense range all the way
Speaker 1: from Papua New Guinea all the way down to Tasmania.
Speaker 1: Now they were driven to extinction in as far as
Speaker 1: we know anyway, Papua New Guinea, Australia and Avenge first,
Speaker 1: and the reason being when humans settled those regions, they
Speaker 1: brought with them dingoes dogs, and the dingoes out competed
Speaker 1: the thi La scene and wipe them out. They were stronger, better,
Speaker 1: more adaptable predators for the habitat. But dingos never made
Speaker 1: it to Tasmania, so they lasted in Tasmania up into
Speaker 1: the thirties. Like I said, which is where Westerners were,
Speaker 1: you know, settling and cattle ranching and and seeing them regularly,
Speaker 1: so much so that they were placed a bounty on
Speaker 1: the thi La scene's head um to exterminate them so
Speaker 1: they would stop killing sheep. Now, this is very confed,
Speaker 1: extremely ruined, extremely sad, and extremely controversial because they've actually
Speaker 1: never been proven that the Thila scene actually even took
Speaker 1: down any Yeah, it was mostly it was mostly understood
Speaker 1: and we only figured this out later that it was
Speaker 1: packs of feral dogs running around at night killing people
Speaker 1: sheep that belonged to the ranchers, and then the falsely
Speaker 1: accused of taking down sheep and this wasn't Was this
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds or early nine hundred hundreds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's this strange animal. We've never seen it before. Better
Speaker 1: killer and so um. To get to your question, this
Speaker 1: is funny really because I've been on I've probably spent
Speaker 1: a total of three and a half four months in
Speaker 1: the bush of northern Australia where sightings have been reported
Speaker 1: and Tasmania where sightings have been reported, and I've never
Speaker 1: had any conclusive evidence that the animal is still there.
Speaker 1: And yet I'm completely convinced that it is in very
Speaker 1: small numbers, likely functionally extinct, meaning might still be there,
Speaker 1: but is on its way out because of the numbers,
Speaker 1: and less intervention takes place. Um, And I'm just completely convinced.
Speaker 1: So I've spent a lot of time there. I've been
Speaker 1: in Tasmania. It's a very wild place with a low population.
Speaker 1: I've been in Northern Australia, very wild place with a
Speaker 1: low population density, however very heavily impacted by a base
Speaker 1: of species, which is a bit of a problem. And
Speaker 1: my next expedition to look for this exact species will
Speaker 1: take me to Papua New Guinea. Wow, Wow, excellent. I
Speaker 1: mean your gut has proven you correct before, so I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I'm really glad that you're optimistic about it. I think
Speaker 1: that's important because otherwise we would just never look anymore
Speaker 1: for these animals. I think it's you've got to keep
Speaker 1: You've got to keep a certain amount of faith to uh,
Speaker 1: to keep looking. Yeah. Yeah, it's in a sense, it's
Speaker 1: like playing the lottery, right, Like you don't you kind
Speaker 1: of expect to win because your odds are one in
Speaker 1: a zillion, But you still have to play. And you
Speaker 1: know what's interesting about the thil scene, and this is
Speaker 1: where kind of the cycle is self perpetuating, So you
Speaker 1: have to be careful and with these feedback loops. But
Speaker 1: there are so many disconnected similarities coming being reported from people.
Speaker 1: Oh I saw it at this time at night. It
Speaker 1: looked like this, it moved like this, it did this,
Speaker 1: and these people don't know each other that reporting it.
Speaker 1: That keep popping up over and over again, even so
Speaker 1: much so that the Australian government just released, i think
Speaker 1: two weeks ago, released a whole list of of sightings
Speaker 1: that they had been keeping confidential that you just kind
Speaker 1: of have to believe. But it is a feedback loop, right,
Speaker 1: because it's just like the black panther in the southeastern
Speaker 1: United States or or Bigfoot up in Oregon. Once people
Speaker 1: start hearing about and imagining it, of course, then it
Speaker 1: creates more likelihood for someone to think that they've seen
Speaker 1: that creature and report it. So it's a very delicate
Speaker 1: balance that you have to play, and you have to
Speaker 1: take all of those anecdotal observations with a grain of salt. Well,
Speaker 1: what's interesting about that is human observation is not infallible,
Speaker 1: so we do a lot our brains do a lot
Speaker 1: of interpretation. We think our eyes are sort of impartial
Speaker 1: judges of the world around us. Not true. Our brains
Speaker 1: has to go through our brains, which can often be
Speaker 1: dumb or at least prejudiced. So what's interesting to me
Speaker 1: is a lot of sort of supernatural attings like say
Speaker 1: um UFOs and stuff is or interpretation of say, sleep
Speaker 1: paralysis is very culturally dependent. So and one culture with
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis will think it's UFOs and that happens after
Speaker 1: War of the worlds, and we have this influence from
Speaker 1: our culture and another culture it's ghosts, like saying like
Speaker 1: Victorian England, sleep paralysis may have been. And so sleep
Speaker 1: paralysis for those who don't know, it's like when you're
Speaker 1: sleeping your sleep cycle is disturbed. I actually get it.
Speaker 1: Occasionally it's fun um but and so you kind of
Speaker 1: half wake up, so some of your sensory information is
Speaker 1: getting in. Maybe you can see the room, maybe you're
Speaker 1: kind of hallucinating, but your body can't move. And often
Speaker 1: a characteristic as you feel this menacing presence and something
Speaker 1: sitting on your chest, which is what I get. So
Speaker 1: I think like for me, as someone who listens to
Speaker 1: true crime. I think a serial killer is sitting on
Speaker 1: right exactly. But depending on your cultural environment, you're going
Speaker 1: to interpret it as maybe aliens, maybe as demons, maybe
Speaker 1: as a witch, maybe as ghosts. So it is a
Speaker 1: tricky thing with citing say an animal where uh we
Speaker 1: we had an episode where we talked about moth Man,
Speaker 1: where we think maybe it was a sandhill crane, maybe
Speaker 1: it was an owl. But people see these things and
Speaker 1: now they think they're moth man because that's the mythos
Speaker 1: of the area. So but then when it comes to
Speaker 1: actual real animals like the Tasmanian tiger, maybe the cultural
Speaker 1: influence of oh maybe this exists, so maybe you see
Speaker 1: an animal who's similar, and then you kind of interpreted
Speaker 1: as was like, oh, is that a stripe? Is it?
Speaker 1: Not undeniably right, but exactly a dingo with a limb,
Speaker 1: you know anything. And I don't want to get too
Speaker 1: off topic, but so much so that that it's so
Speaker 1: culturally significant and impacts our observational ideas of what we're
Speaker 1: seeing that I think a lot of people don't realize
Speaker 1: and I'll probably get angry people from listening to this,
Speaker 1: that the black panther that we you know, make movies
Speaker 1: about have this high school mascots. Doesn't exist in the
Speaker 1: United States, it's never been proven to in the Southeast.
Speaker 1: If you go to Florida and talk to people that
Speaker 1: hang out in the swamps, they'll tell you there's black
Speaker 1: panthers around. They've never been proven to exist. We've never
Speaker 1: seen a melanistic mountain lion, which is the species of
Speaker 1: panther running around the Southeast. It's never been proven to exist. Right,
Speaker 1: And black panthers are not it's not a distinct species.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a melanistic version of like of a panther,
Speaker 1: but exactly right. Yeah, and and depending on where you are,
Speaker 1: because there are black leopards, there are black jaguars, but
Speaker 1: what we have natively in the United States is the
Speaker 1: mountain lion. And there's never been a black mountain lion, right,
Speaker 1: But yeah, it is. It's it's got to be a
Speaker 1: real complication for trying to find out where an animal
Speaker 1: is based on scattered sidings. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: a lot of times if scientists don't actually listen to
Speaker 1: locals or local legends or what's considered to be a mythos,
Speaker 1: you'll miss out on important information. That actually can lead
Speaker 1: you to a discovery. Well, and everything's grounded in something right.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is even if one
Speaker 1: out of a thousand reported Thilocene sightings is accurate, that
Speaker 1: means one is accurate. Right. And so you know on
Speaker 1: my work, I two gentlemen that I've worked with. One
Speaker 1: um in Tasmania was a wildlife scientist. So this isn't
Speaker 1: you know, some crackpot hillbilly. This is a guy whose
Speaker 1: entire career, like mine, is based off of observing wild
Speaker 1: animals and identifying them correctly. He told me, looked me
Speaker 1: dead in the eye and said, I'm telling you ten
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago, I forget the timeline. I saw a
Speaker 1: thighla scene. Right. I know every single animal that lives
Speaker 1: in Tasmania. I've worked on them for twenty five years.
Speaker 1: This is what I saw. I don't have proof, but
Speaker 1: I saw it. You have to take that observational report
Speaker 1: a little bit more seriously than the guy was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I left the pub at three am when
Speaker 1: I was driving driving down this windy road and I
Speaker 1: saw one's butt go into the bushes. And another instance
Speaker 1: up in Northern Australia was a gentleman who was a
Speaker 1: a eco tourism guide, so literally same thing. All he
Speaker 1: did for a career was take people to see wildlife
Speaker 1: in northern Australia. And he told me, you know, clear
Speaker 1: his day, twenty five yards away, I watched my dog
Speaker 1: play with three of them. Literally, my dog got up,
Speaker 1: he growled, the hair on his neck stood up. I
Speaker 1: saw these sets of eyes and was like, what on
Speaker 1: earth is that? Shawn My light and my dog ran
Speaker 1: over there and was running amongst them, playing with them,
Speaker 1: and then they moved off. He's like, I couldn't get
Speaker 1: the camera out in time, blah blah. This was five
Speaker 1: years ago. You know, both these sightings, both these people
Speaker 1: were the opposite of what you'd expect. They were extremely
Speaker 1: reluctant to tell me this information at risk of being
Speaker 1: called coops. Yeah, they didn't want to be considered crack exactly.
Speaker 1: And and and that to me holds so much more
Speaker 1: weight than the guy that's jumping up and down going
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you about my sighting. I gotta tell
Speaker 1: you about my sighting. You know, that's someone who wants
Speaker 1: recognition or fame, or or has an ulterior motive. These
Speaker 1: guys were hiding that they had seen these animals at
Speaker 1: fear of being called crazy, and they themselves could barely
Speaker 1: believe that they'd seen it. It's good to be skeptical.
Speaker 1: It's good not to be completely credulous and believe everything
Speaker 1: you hear. But I think it's also good to not
Speaker 1: always dismiss information that's unexpected. So you know, if you're thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: this seems like it shouldn't be around anymore, we know
Speaker 1: we do have evidence that animals who we have thought
Speaker 1: to be extinct, and even larger animals like the like
Speaker 1: the waterway like is pretty it's you know, it's comparably
Speaker 1: sized animal um. So it's not just the little tiny
Speaker 1: insects that of course, those pop in and out of
Speaker 1: existence all the time, but yeah, it is. It's possible.
Speaker 1: So the tourists we found the animal um. And you know,
Speaker 1: what's what what my team and I do, and for
Speaker 1: anybody that's listening that has any interesting information, we take
Speaker 1: every single piece of it and compile it. You know,
Speaker 1: we have spreadsheet upon spreadsheet and we put every bit
Speaker 1: of data in and whether you're you know, the person
Speaker 1: reaching out to me seems credible or not, we still
Speaker 1: take it into account and we place it on a
Speaker 1: map where we at least the closest near area that
Speaker 1: we believe the sighting came from was regardless of what
Speaker 1: the extinct species is. So that when you know, say,
Speaker 1: the next time comes around for me to go search
Speaker 1: for the thilo scene in Tasmania. Well, it turns out
Speaker 1: since that first episode of me searching for the Tasmanian
Speaker 1: tiger and I don't know what it was, a two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen aired, I've now received seven hundred new reports
Speaker 1: of them. Well it turns out, you know, six d
Speaker 1: and fifty of them are in a completely new area
Speaker 1: and they're densely clustered in one zone. Well that tells
Speaker 1: me where to at least begin my search. Yeah. That
Speaker 1: reminds me of like you might know about the the
Speaker 1: naturalist movement, where it's getting just regular people, citizen scientists.
Speaker 1: I do not live in anywhere near nature basically lived
Speaker 1: dead in the city. I saw an alligator lizard mating
Speaker 1: on my walk, took a photo of a put it online. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's something that I think is especially with
Speaker 1: these rare animals, you know. Um. I talked to Dr
Speaker 1: Greg Paully, he's one of the herpetologists at the museum,
Speaker 1: and he got a report of this lizard that is
Speaker 1: not indigenous, that like someone just took a photo of
Speaker 1: and it turned out to be sort of a briefly
Speaker 1: invasive species that didn't it didn't actually I think that
Speaker 1: they didn't find any more specimens, but it's like a
Speaker 1: little pocket of these lizards that reproduced and lived for
Speaker 1: a little while in this one little neighborhood. So it's
Speaker 1: you never know what you're gonna find, and I think
Speaker 1: that it's great that. Yeah, of course, some people are
Speaker 1: going to be pounded back white close and going like yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw I saw a big foot, But you know,
Speaker 1: often it's it's interesting information. And by the way, that's
Speaker 1: how that, uh you said you watched our expedition to
Speaker 1: Borneo where we uncovered the evidence of the Miller's Grizzled Langer. Um,
Speaker 1: that's how that came about. And what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is there was a research group working in this
Speaker 1: region of Borneo where the Miller's Grizzled Langer had never
Speaker 1: historically been reported to be and one of the I
Speaker 1: think he was a grad student, maybe he was an
Speaker 1: undergraduate student took a photo of a monkey that he's like,
Speaker 1: that's a cool, weird looking monkey and showed it to
Speaker 1: his primatologist professor my friend Stephanie's heart and Stephanie goes,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's a screaming and exactly, and back
Speaker 1: to the cycle of crazy biologist jumping around getting excited,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, yeah, I just I think it's and
Speaker 1: I think that kind of ties into people feeling optimistic
Speaker 1: and empowered about nature rather than feeling paralyzed by oh,
Speaker 1: everything's going extinct. Like no, you can help too, by
Speaker 1: like keeping your eyes open. So now I want to
Speaker 1: talk about a species that has gone extinct more recently.
Speaker 1: Um it is the gastric brooding frog. And it is
Speaker 1: this is really sad. I this is again one of
Speaker 1: my favorite animals. Um. So these were a little frog
Speaker 1: with they had like the marsupial frog. They had an
Speaker 1: amazing breeding strategy, one of the most incredible ones I
Speaker 1: think in the world. They lived in the mountains of Queensland, Australia. Um.
Speaker 1: There were two species. They were southern and northern, very similar. Um.
Speaker 1: The southern was about it it was a little smaller,
Speaker 1: it was like about two inches long. In the northern
Speaker 1: was maybe three inches long. And they're very tiny, cute,
Speaker 1: adorable frogs, like I'm a big I think most frogs
Speaker 1: are adorable. These are some of the most adorable. They
Speaker 1: just have these big bug eyes. They're really cute. Their
Speaker 1: calls were described as sounding like m It's like it's
Speaker 1: the cutest sounding thing, like they say. It had an
Speaker 1: uptick at the end, like I just want yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I don't it's just spelled phonetically, so I'm just literally
Speaker 1: really um. So it kept its eggs in its stomach uh,
Speaker 1: and they would sort of like the most stupial frog,
Speaker 1: they would develop into froglets, and she, the female, would
Speaker 1: give live birth essentially because they would vomit up shook
Speaker 1: up their babies, which were now fully developed a little
Speaker 1: froglets up to twenty five at a time, which is insane,
Speaker 1: it's incredible. So they lay eggs um and then it
Speaker 1: would swallow its eggs and then that would keep them
Speaker 1: safe as they're developing. So in order to prevent getting digested,
Speaker 1: the eggs were covered in prostaglandin, which is a chemical
Speaker 1: that would signal the mom to stop producing gastric acid
Speaker 1: in her stomach and then once they developed into the tadpoles,
Speaker 1: they'd hatch and just continue developing in her stomach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, their gills were covered in mucus that would
Speaker 1: protect them from stomach acid. But to be frank, we
Speaker 1: don't know everything about how this worked. We didn't get
Speaker 1: a chance to study them as long as would have
Speaker 1: been helpful. And it's a new biological process that we're on.
Speaker 1: We really don't understand, not just on this species level,
Speaker 1: but on any level, how exactly that it works, right exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the gastric brooding frog mom would stop eating
Speaker 1: we don't know how um, and her stomach would expand,
Speaker 1: so her lungs would collapse under the pressure of all
Speaker 1: of these babies. And then she would breathe through her skin,
Speaker 1: which is a trick that amphibians can do. But uh,
Speaker 1: then she would exorcist style vomit up her babies through
Speaker 1: what's called propulsive vomiting, which is the cutest and yet
Speaker 1: more most horrifying like Russian nesting doll frog situation. As
Speaker 1: you can imagine, this is an incredible way to give birth. Uh.
Speaker 1: And very sadly they went extinct about thirty years ago.
Speaker 1: So I don't think we know exactly the single cause
Speaker 1: for why they went extinct. We do know that human
Speaker 1: encroachment into their habitat probably didn't help. So like logging, uh,
Speaker 1: feral pigs, uh weeds, and water flow problems were all
Speaker 1: thought to have contributed to their extinction, but also the
Speaker 1: pathogenic fungus, which is responsible for the deaths of many
Speaker 1: many adorable amphibians. I it makes me sad because I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, as someone who's stomach is not always great
Speaker 1: at functioning, so like getting stomach aches. It's like, hey,
Speaker 1: if even if their story isn't doesn't capture your affection,
Speaker 1: which I think it should, and you don't want them
Speaker 1: back just because they're amazing, it's we could have learned
Speaker 1: a lot from them for human medicine, so um, stomach cancer, um,
Speaker 1: you know, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, all these things that
Speaker 1: have to do with the hormone causing like overproduction of
Speaker 1: stomach acid, all these we could have learned so much
Speaker 1: from them undeniably. And I you know, I think I
Speaker 1: don't want to get two grandiose, but I think there's
Speaker 1: something we can still learn from them, and that is
Speaker 1: that you know, we made that mistake in a time
Speaker 1: and place where perhaps we didn't realize we were making it.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't think we knew that they were
Speaker 1: going extinct when they went extinct thirty years ago, but
Speaker 1: we do know that now about some of the species
Speaker 1: that we are driving towards extinction, and we can correct
Speaker 1: before it's too late. You know, Let's learn from this
Speaker 1: exact species and our mistake that we made, you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that we've missed out on what could be
Speaker 1: a world changing discovery being you know, the gastric brooding
Speaker 1: frog stomach anatomy. Let's learn from that and realize that
Speaker 1: there's a lot we don't know and that things are
Speaker 1: worth saving because you never know what can come of it.
Speaker 1: You know how Gretted Tunberg says we're entering a mass
Speaker 1: extinction event, Well she's not wrong. A scientific analysis published
Speaker 1: in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found
Speaker 1: that in recent decades there has been a global massive
Speaker 1: loss of wildlife that they call quote a biological annihilation. Well,
Speaker 1: not to scare you too much, so not only are
Speaker 1: animals going extinct at faster rates, but even animals not
Speaker 1: yet considered endangered are losing their populations at much faster rates.
Speaker 1: So this sounds kind of psychop hathic to ask. But
Speaker 1: why should we care? Obviously, if you listen to the show,
Speaker 1: you probably care just for the sake of animals, bio diversity,
Speaker 1: and the protection of the planet. But say, hypothetically there
Speaker 1: are people out there who don't care about the environment,
Speaker 1: who would be like that. I don't know, But honestly,
Speaker 1: the more selfish you are, the more alarms you should
Speaker 1: be about the current crisis. When humans go extinct, it's
Speaker 1: very likely that life on Earth will continue. Life finds
Speaker 1: a way even in the wake of devastating natural disasters.
Speaker 1: Will it be the same kind of life we have now?
Speaker 1: Probably not. I mean, look at what happened after the
Speaker 1: mass extinction of dinosaurs. Of course, if we unique the
Speaker 1: entire planet, the only kind of life that might come
Speaker 1: back for a while maybe creepy crawley extremophiles in bacteria,
Speaker 1: but life in some form will probably march on. It's
Speaker 1: just that it's up to us to decide whether we
Speaker 1: humans want to continue on or if we're happy to
Speaker 1: drive ourselves to extinction while dragging plenty of other animals
Speaker 1: down with this. But like we've talked out before, we
Speaker 1: actually have a choice in whether we want to do this.
Speaker 1: We're not helpless victims of our circumstance. When we return,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about bringing animals back from the dead using
Speaker 1: mad science. Is this a good thing or is this
Speaker 1: a quote? Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or
Speaker 1: not they could they didn't stop to think if they should.
Speaker 1: Situation so clones, let's talk about cloning. Even if we
Speaker 1: drive animals to extinction, can't we just bring them back
Speaker 1: through the miracle of science. Well, as you probably know
Speaker 1: from the acclaimed documentary Jurassic Park, the answer is a
Speaker 1: bit more complicated. First, the science of bringing species back
Speaker 1: from the dead is complex. You need a viable DNA
Speaker 1: sample from a specimen, and you need a related, compatible
Speaker 1: surrogate species egg in which to implant the DNA. But
Speaker 1: even if you have all the ingredients necessary, it's still
Speaker 1: difficult to create a viable embryo. Gene splicing is another
Speaker 1: technique with similar challenges, and reverse engineering an extinct animal
Speaker 1: from their closest living relatives through selective breeding is possible,
Speaker 1: though it won't really quote bring the original species back
Speaker 1: to life, but create a sort of effect simile. Even
Speaker 1: once we reach the point where we can bring species
Speaker 1: back from preserved specimens or mosquitoes trapped in amber, should
Speaker 1: we is dead sometimes better? Well, there are arguments for
Speaker 1: and against the extinction. Proponents site the importance many extinct
Speaker 1: species have environmentally and for biodiversity. Skeptics warns that this
Speaker 1: may have unintended consequences. Loss of habitat and changes in
Speaker 1: the environment make reintroduction of dead species a challenge and
Speaker 1: could potentially lead to unforeseen negative interactions with other living species.
Speaker 1: We could also, I don't know, accidentally bring back dangerous
Speaker 1: retroviruses hiding in extinct animal genomes. There's also the argument
Speaker 1: that spending money to resurrect extinct creatures means less money
Speaker 1: to help save animals that are not white yet extinct,
Speaker 1: but soon could be. So let's take a look at
Speaker 1: some of this weird science, and then we'll talk to
Speaker 1: Forest about his non laboratory approach to finding nearly extinct creatures.
Speaker 1: So I gotta kind of make a just a catch
Speaker 1: all statement. I'm not an expert on this, so I
Speaker 1: can only make a judgment on whether it's good or not.
Speaker 1: To bring back species based on my opinion, which is
Speaker 1: take it for what it's worth. And it's a really
Speaker 1: complicated moral and ethical issue that I think is I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's one really distinct answer of whether
Speaker 1: it's good or bad. I think it's very contextual, but
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not like, oh, obviously it's good to
Speaker 1: to use science to bring something back, because there could
Speaker 1: be as any time when we try to do things
Speaker 1: as humans, we try to kind of maybe play god
Speaker 1: a little bit, sometimes we can do go really wrong.
Speaker 1: Um So remember our friend the gastric rooting frog. How
Speaker 1: could you forget? A team of researchers at University of
Speaker 1: New South Wales is trying to bring it back from extinction.
Speaker 1: So they've inserted the DNA of the southern gastric brooding
Speaker 1: frog into the egg of a barred frog, which is
Speaker 1: a very close relative. They were able to successfully grow
Speaker 1: it into an embryo, but then it's self terminated so
Speaker 1: they weren't able to develop it further. It's uh. This
Speaker 1: is called, as we mentioned, de extinction or resurrection biology,
Speaker 1: which sounds a lot more magical, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: literally bringing an animal back from the dead. I think
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is I kind of fall sort
Speaker 1: of uh somewhere on the edge of like, I don't
Speaker 1: know if like, just bringing back a mammoth is such
Speaker 1: a good idea because the world has changed so drastically.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's even fair to the mammoth
Speaker 1: because where would you put them? He As we know,
Speaker 1: elephants are highly social, highly intelligent. Would a mammoth be
Speaker 1: able to have a family with elephant or would it
Speaker 1: feel weird and lonely because it's the only hairy eleve
Speaker 1: in our hown? Um. But you know, I have heard
Speaker 1: interestingly compelling arguments about like, say, the passenger pigeon, which
Speaker 1: is a somewhat recently extinct bird that UM had a
Speaker 1: lot of impact on the environment UM and is a
Speaker 1: candidate for it because we do have living relatives and
Speaker 1: we have so many specimens of it, there's plenty of DNA.
Speaker 1: The passenger pigeon went extinct in nineteen fourteen. About UM,
Speaker 1: it's called an anthropogenic extinction. So that's when we we
Speaker 1: screwed it up. Basically, humans humans were the jerks who
Speaker 1: did it. The pigeons look a little bit like mourning doves,
Speaker 1: though they're not related at all. Um the males had
Speaker 1: a reddish orangey pink chest and blue gray backs. Um
Speaker 1: they so Revive and Restore is a conservation organization whose
Speaker 1: mission statement is to quote apply biotechnology to bio diversity challenges.
Speaker 1: They say that the passenger pigeons are a good candidate,
Speaker 1: as we have plenty of specimens, we've got its closest relative,
Speaker 1: and that they would be useful to bring back. They
Speaker 1: say it would help conserve Eastern America's woodlands. And to
Speaker 1: kind of see what their side of the argument is,
Speaker 1: we kind of have to look at the history of
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons and what they are. So passenger pigeons used
Speaker 1: to be so numerous in Eastern US that they would
Speaker 1: completely black out the sky. And if you can't imagine,
Speaker 1: you can imagine bird flocks and with the murmurations which
Speaker 1: is where they kind of shift direction, and you see
Speaker 1: this sort of like weird strobing effect of the birds.
Speaker 1: It must have been really spectacular to see unless you
Speaker 1: were you know, like a like an eighteenth century nineteenth
Speaker 1: century guy who's like, oh, these these birds are pests, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they were considered agricult trill pests because a flock
Speaker 1: of them could. To be fair, they were good at
Speaker 1: destroying crops because there were so many of them, but
Speaker 1: I mean they kind of came first, so we hunt them,
Speaker 1: we did. We hunt the numbered in the billions can
Speaker 1: be wiped out so quickly, exactly. So they were highly social,
Speaker 1: so that's why they had such enormous flocks, and they
Speaker 1: were had kind of a pigeony utopia because they wouldn't
Speaker 1: really fight with each other. There was maybe some arguments,
Speaker 1: but there was very little violence. They were very pro social,
Speaker 1: kind of like there's a lot of bat species now
Speaker 1: that have these huge flocks, big big colonies, even with
Speaker 1: like different kind of species all hanging out, and they're
Speaker 1: pretty chill. It's kind of amazing. Uh. This is part
Speaker 1: of the reason they may have been so big, as
Speaker 1: a survival technique called predator saturation, and that's where there's
Speaker 1: just too many of too many to pick from. Your
Speaker 1: chance of being one out of like a flock of
Speaker 1: ten thousand is pretty pretty small, exactly. So they were
Speaker 1: doing really well until humans, specifically European settlers, because for
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years their population was stable in the US,
Speaker 1: which included the time that Native Americans lived and hunted
Speaker 1: the pigeons, but they just didn't hunt them in the
Speaker 1: volume that European settlers did well. And European settlers began
Speaker 1: hunting them as commercial food. Yes, yes, especially once the
Speaker 1: railroads came in and we could ship huge amounts of
Speaker 1: dead birds. So, uh, they were very easy targets because
Speaker 1: they were not used to being shot at with guns,
Speaker 1: and they their whole strategy was just like, there's lots
Speaker 1: of us and we're pretty chill. You know, you cannot
Speaker 1: possibly kill all of us. And then uh, in America
Speaker 1: we were like, in America, we can do anything. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's sad. They were almost not even considered game foul
Speaker 1: because they were so easy to shoot, so easy to catch,
Speaker 1: these poor little sweeties. They could be caught in vast
Speaker 1: numbers with large nets just draped cross a few trees
Speaker 1: and they would just fly right in and you'd get
Speaker 1: like several hundred of them at a time. Stool pigeons.
Speaker 1: So this is an interesting etymology lesson. So stool pigeons
Speaker 1: were pigeons who had their eyes sown shut, so they
Speaker 1: were blind. Really nice thing to do. Um. And then
Speaker 1: when a flock of these pigeons would fly by, they
Speaker 1: were shoved off the stool, so it looked like they
Speaker 1: were they found some food on the ground, right exactly,
Speaker 1: and that was used as bait because the other the
Speaker 1: other pigeons, being highly social, look at the queue of
Speaker 1: this pigeon, They're like, oh, there must be food there, um,
Speaker 1: And then they flocked down and then we kill all
Speaker 1: of them. And so that's where the term stool pigeon
Speaker 1: comes from, as being sort of like someone who's going
Speaker 1: to lead you to the rest of the flock. Hunters
Speaker 1: would even use alcohol soaked grain to drug the birds.
Speaker 1: Real real nice nice move there. And in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the passenger pigeon hunting reached a fever pitch as railroads
Speaker 1: allowed for mass commercial transportation of dead pigeons. Just cars
Speaker 1: and cars of trains chock full of dead pigeons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One hunter actually was alleged to have shipped three million
Speaker 1: dead birds to the city like on his own, which
Speaker 1: is insane. The just the just like, yep, this seems
Speaker 1: like an okay thing to do. The mass pigeons slaughter, um,
Speaker 1: people weren't too concerned about it. They thought they were pests.
Speaker 1: They thought it was impossible to kill them all, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we did it. Interestingly enough, there's actually evidence to support
Speaker 1: that the passenger pigeon was around. The last pair was
Speaker 1: around about twenty years after they're declared extinctions. The way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. By the way, let me preface this by saying,
Speaker 1: I'm no expert of the extinction either. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: a tracker and a wild life biologist. I'm a field guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what you do is very fundamentally different. Exactly that being said,
Speaker 1: I certainly have a stance on it, and I think
Speaker 1: it's a stunts. I think it's a very clear middle
Speaker 1: ground stance that I imagine most people would take. And
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what it is. Do I think that
Speaker 1: we should be creating Jurassic Park and bringing back mammoths
Speaker 1: and dinosaurs. Absolutely not that it was as cool and
Speaker 1: interesting as it would be. That's a waste of resource
Speaker 1: dollars that could go towards viable conservation. Do I think
Speaker 1: that we should right our wrongs that humanity have committed,
Speaker 1: such as bringing back the passenger pigeon, replacing the thile
Speaker 1: scene in an environment that's absolutely overrun by meso predators
Speaker 1: and smaller marsupials to the point that disease is becoming
Speaker 1: a massive problem. And the list goes on and on
Speaker 1: and on and on and on and on and on. Yes,
Speaker 1: I do now. I think one thing that we haven't
Speaker 1: mentioned today in our discussion is that this technology does
Speaker 1: not exist yet. It's great in theory. There are people
Speaker 1: working on it, and I'm very grateful that they are
Speaker 1: because I'd love to see the Thile scene back. I'd
Speaker 1: love to see the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon. And again,
Speaker 1: the list goes on. But this technology, it doesn't actually exist.
Speaker 1: I mean, the closest we've gotten so far has been
Speaker 1: that gastric brooding frog experiment where they just started to
Speaker 1: get an embryo and then it's self terminate heartbeat right now,
Speaker 1: heartbeat didn't didn't last very long. But it's it's an
Speaker 1: encouraging step. That's not to demean what they're doing. It's
Speaker 1: very impressive. But yeah, like you said, it is not
Speaker 1: we can't just like, like, you know, take a dead
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon, like get a syringeful of genetic material and
Speaker 1: plug it into their closest living relative, you know. But
Speaker 1: it's it is possible. It's just I think it is
Speaker 1: important to stress that we cannot like it's it is
Speaker 1: still a huge deal when an animal goes extinct, because
Speaker 1: we cannot just snap our fingers and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: we'll use science to bring it back to life, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of complications even once we get the technology.
Speaker 1: Reintroducing an animal, especially when is highly social as a
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon, is really complicated because they may not know
Speaker 1: even how to act because uh, animals, they do. They
Speaker 1: are often born with a lot of instincts, that's true,
Speaker 1: but they also learn, Like birds are very social, they learn.
Speaker 1: That's how bird's song has learned. They have a Chris
Speaker 1: stilization period as juveniles where they learned songs and they
Speaker 1: incorporated into their lexicon. You know, if you it, it's
Speaker 1: sort of be like if you if humans went extinct
Speaker 1: and you just dropped off a bunch of babies and
Speaker 1: be like, well, you got your fig um. And not
Speaker 1: only that, but my understanding and this could be wrong
Speaker 1: because again I'm not an actual expert in the genetics
Speaker 1: of the extinction, is that you know, all of these
Speaker 1: double helix, all the DNA degrade over time, so when
Speaker 1: we're trying to bring an animal back. Say it's the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon, right, we look at our double helix and
Speaker 1: there's these little pieces missing from it. So in order
Speaker 1: to create this animal, we have to pull those little
Speaker 1: pieces from its closest living relative and plug it into
Speaker 1: that DNA sequence, right into that double helix. And then
Speaker 1: the offspring. Although this is the case in nature because
Speaker 1: nothing is ever the same, right, No two organisms are identical.
Speaker 1: The offspring isn't a true passenger pigeon, nor is it
Speaker 1: you know, it's closest living relative. It is a slightly
Speaker 1: warped version similar. Yeah, it's a fact similar of the
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon. It's very very close. It might be physically identical,
Speaker 1: but it's it will never be the truest form of
Speaker 1: what the animal wants was. And then we have sort
Speaker 1: of the problem of genetic bottleneck, where once we bring
Speaker 1: back one, what next? How do we how do we
Speaker 1: get a thriving population from one sort of embryo and
Speaker 1: then like create enough genetic diversity that it isn't just
Speaker 1: wiped out by a virus as soon as we get
Speaker 1: like ten individuals going, and we see that, you know,
Speaker 1: we see that genetic bottlenecking as an issue in wildlife
Speaker 1: sciences today, like before, trying to bring it back from
Speaker 1: one species that we're cloning. So um, it is a problem.
Speaker 1: Uh you know that being said, if we get to
Speaker 1: the point where the technology allows us to bring species
Speaker 1: back from the dead, we can probably tweak them enough
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of them and a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, who knows it's got there's gotta be some
Speaker 1: way we can figure out how to overcome that those problems.
Speaker 1: But again it's it's not it seems like we're really close.
Speaker 1: But the more you think about all of the problems,
Speaker 1: the more you kind to realize how much technology has
Speaker 1: to advance for us to get there. And one of
Speaker 1: the reason the passenger pigeon may be important to bring
Speaker 1: back is that they are engineers of the environment. So
Speaker 1: by pooping, eating seeds and breaking branches by mass roosting,
Speaker 1: they actually are sort of gardeners of these these American forests.
Speaker 1: So um, there they kind of it's like a wildfire
Speaker 1: or a storm where you you know, it's it's a
Speaker 1: little counterintuitive maybe, but you have there has to be
Speaker 1: some destruction of vegetation and of force in order for
Speaker 1: it to keep growing. It's called the intermediate disturbance hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And what that means is a place that stays exactly
Speaker 1: static has very low diversity. Right. Take tide pools for instance.
Speaker 1: If you're a tide pool in an area where no
Speaker 1: waves ever hit it, one type of algae takes over
Speaker 1: the whole tide pool, one species. If you're in a
Speaker 1: tide pool area an inner title zone where the waves
Speaker 1: are pounding it all day every day, nothing can live there, right,
Speaker 1: it's too much disturbance. But if you're in the middle
Speaker 1: there where sometimes you have a great tide pool and
Speaker 1: sometimes it gets a little hammered by waves, but new
Speaker 1: species can come in and colonize it and change the environment.
Speaker 1: You have massive, rich diversion species diversity. And that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the intermediate disperse That's a great metaphor for how
Speaker 1: I interact with my own anxiety, where a little bit
Speaker 1: is great, keeps me motivated too much and I just
Speaker 1: lie on my bed. Yeah. So these pigeons are basically
Speaker 1: you know, poopin roost in gardeners of the forest. Also,
Speaker 1: they're massive piles of guano, which is bird poop. Um
Speaker 1: as fertilizer creates these little microbiomes for decomposers. Uh, they
Speaker 1: provided a lot of meat for predators. They have provided
Speaker 1: meat for humans as well, And I mean we coexisted
Speaker 1: with them for twenty thou years. And before we get
Speaker 1: into that, I mean, I think you know you you
Speaker 1: said earlier, at some point during our discussion, you said,
Speaker 1: why care? Right, it's a cynical look, But why care? Well?
Speaker 1: I think this is the fundamental thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of people don't digest and absorb is everything has a
Speaker 1: place in the ecosystem. Nothing evolves for no purpose. Right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't come into the sphere this environment without a purpose,
Speaker 1: and everything is balanced within that. The passenger pigeon, as
Speaker 1: you're explaining, is a perfect example. But when it was here,
Speaker 1: things were better because it was here, because of its presence,
Speaker 1: because of its being a docent of the forest, so
Speaker 1: to speak, and it's fertilizer that it created, and it's
Speaker 1: breaking the branches and it's intermediate disturbance. It created a healthier,
Speaker 1: better ecosystem. So why should we care? Why should we care?
Speaker 1: If the thylo scenes gone from Tasmania, if the passenger
Speaker 1: pigeons gone from North America, and the list goes on,
Speaker 1: because these creatures are meant to be here for the
Speaker 1: health of our environment, and that that goes, you know,
Speaker 1: it goes much further than we even understand. There's a
Speaker 1: reason the gastric brooding frog was here, you know, more
Speaker 1: so than us discovering it's it's possible cure for stomach cancer.
Speaker 1: It may have played an incredibly vital role in its
Speaker 1: ecosystem that we don't even know about yet that could
Speaker 1: be leading or at least contributing to collapse. I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the sad things as there's there are animals
Speaker 1: who will probably go extinct that we don't even know existed,
Speaker 1: who go extinct that we have no idea what they were,
Speaker 1: what they did, and then we may there may be
Speaker 1: some ramification that we're like, why is this happening, and
Speaker 1: we'll have no idea it's too late. Yeah. Uh. And well,
Speaker 1: one of the direct things that may possibly have resulted
Speaker 1: from the passenger pigeon going extinct is the prevalence of
Speaker 1: lime disease because they I mean, this is a counterintuitive
Speaker 1: thing again, because their existence um decreased the white footed
Speaker 1: mouse's population, not because they were predators, but because they
Speaker 1: were competitors, they kept the white footed mouse population in check.
Speaker 1: And so after the passenger pigeons when extinct, the white
Speaker 1: footed mouse population kind of exploded, and then they are
Speaker 1: carriers of lime riddled ticks. And now lime disease is
Speaker 1: a much, yes, much more prevalent, much bigger problem in lyme.
Speaker 1: Disease is awful for he is awful for animals as well.
Speaker 1: But that's a I mean, and that's just the extremely direct,
Speaker 1: easily identifiable problem that happens, and there are so many
Speaker 1: other It's like a Jenga tower made out of animals
Speaker 1: where you take one block out and like it looks
Speaker 1: like the tower is fine. You're like, it's fine, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's still standing. But the more you take out and
Speaker 1: then suddenly it's just like this class That is a
Speaker 1: wonderful analogy. I'm going to steal that. I've never thought
Speaker 1: of it as a Jenga tower. That's so clever, and
Speaker 1: I've tried to explain this to so many people how
Speaker 1: important each pieces, and the Jenga tower is the perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: It's a It's great because from my childhood of never
Speaker 1: winning Jenga is has inspired me to be educate people
Speaker 1: via the metaphor of Jenga. That's great. So I want
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about some of the animals
Speaker 1: that you're trying to rediscover. One of them is okay,
Speaker 1: So a lot of these I don't actually know that
Speaker 1: much about some something you can tell me. The dwarf
Speaker 1: hippo is the one. I mean, I've seen chures of them.
Speaker 1: They're cute. So you've seen pictures of the pigmy hipp
Speaker 1: the pigmy hippo, hippo, different species, right, where is this
Speaker 1: this little hippo found? So the pigmy hippo is a
Speaker 1: very tiny species of hippo that's kind of hybrid between
Speaker 1: a pig and a hippo that occurred in Central Africa.
Speaker 1: The I say pig and a hippo because of the
Speaker 1: size and behavior still looked like a hippo. And you said,
Speaker 1: as you said, you've seen pictures. It's not an actual
Speaker 1: like it's not an actual cross breeding with no. No, no, no, no, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: let me be clear. No, no, it behaves a bit
Speaker 1: more the way that a pig would, but it's just
Speaker 1: a tiny hippo. Now, the Southern African hippo, the hippo
Speaker 1: that we all know and think of as hungry hungry hippos.
Speaker 1: They had an offshoot of their species, the same way
Speaker 1: many many animals had offshoots of their species on the
Speaker 1: island of Madagascar. And this was the pig, sorry, the
Speaker 1: dwarf hippo. And that was literally a dwarfed African hippo.
Speaker 1: So imagine your African hippo, the one that we all
Speaker 1: know that just got shrunken down through insular dwarfism. Now,
Speaker 1: insular dwarf is um is a ace where animals get
Speaker 1: stuck on an island. There's not enough resources for them
Speaker 1: to be the size that they've historically been, so over
Speaker 1: generations of you know, restricted diets and small habitats, they've
Speaker 1: got smaller and smaller and smaller. The opposite of deep
Speaker 1: sea gigantism, exactly, that's exactly right. It is the opposite
Speaker 1: of deep sea gigantism insular dwarfism. There's also insular gigantism,
Speaker 1: but we won't talk about that right um anyway. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So on the island of Madagascar, the theory is that,
Speaker 1: you know, many many years ago, when sea levels were lower,
Speaker 1: a couple of hippos made the long swim across the
Speaker 1: channel from Mozambique to Madagascar, got stuck there. Um started reproducing.
Speaker 1: Found out, Hey, this isn't a really great place to
Speaker 1: be a hippo, and I'm pretty hungry. So I'm getting
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller and getting more and more terrestrial, staying
Speaker 1: out of the water, especially because the western coast of
Speaker 1: Madagascar where they first populated, was very dry. There wasn't
Speaker 1: a lot of rivers and streams. Anyway, this is a
Speaker 1: long winded way of explaining how they got to Madagascar.
Speaker 1: I got to Madagascar and a big shiny metal bird
Speaker 1: called airplane to go and search for them. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not gonna say whether we were successful
Speaker 1: or not or not. Gonna have to watch the show.
Speaker 1: You guys, You're gonna have to watch. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a very difficult expedition in a very remote, very harsh region. Um.
Speaker 1: We have some close calls, and we do uncover some
Speaker 1: very interesting science. Yes, I mean this. I'm I'm very
Speaker 1: excited about your new season because there are so many
Speaker 1: really interesting animals that you guys are looking at. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, I know the outcome of the Fernandina tortoise
Speaker 1: and the Dracula monkey. But there's so many you're looking
Speaker 1: for cape lions, the Caribbean monk, seal, the ivory build woodpecker. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there's and species I've never heard of, like the
Speaker 1: southern rocky mountain wolf. Uh, the selo, which is some
Speaker 1: we love cute deer on this show cut deer like
Speaker 1: or or any kind of cute tiny ungulate. We we
Speaker 1: have a running thing where it's like we like dick
Speaker 1: Dick pick picks here. Um, So I really I'm I'm
Speaker 1: wishing the best of luck to you to find Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you. And I'm just I'm just curious because of
Speaker 1: what you've been through with getting stung by bees and
Speaker 1: climbing up trees in a gilly suit for hours. Uh,
Speaker 1: what's like the most danger you've been in during your
Speaker 1: explorations of the world, Like my goodness, heat stroke when
Speaker 1: you're on Glass Island. No, I mean that sucks, but
Speaker 1: I never thought we were going to die. You know
Speaker 1: the scar right here that's from a shark by the
Speaker 1: show this year. Um, you know. But the thing that
Speaker 1: I tell people, and keep in mind, I've been in
Speaker 1: two plane crashes, I've been bitten by a shark, stung
Speaker 1: by man of war, jellyfish, stung by a stingray. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the list goes on, and on Mobbi line,
Speaker 1: the list goes on. I've had a lot of these
Speaker 1: run ins. But the thing that I try and tell
Speaker 1: people is the wildlife fest of all is never to blame.
Speaker 1: But secondly, is not the dangerous thing. The dangerous element
Speaker 1: is the people in some of these places. And a
Speaker 1: perfect example of that is Uh. In April of this year,
Speaker 1: we charted a to World War two d C three
Speaker 1: cargo plane to lie into a private cocaine dealer's airstrip
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Colombian Amazon, interesting to hide
Speaker 1: from the FARC rebels who are fighting the Colombian government,
Speaker 1: to search for an extinct crocodilian. So you know, am
Speaker 1: I worried about the anacondas we encountered, or the Cayman
Speaker 1: species that we were targeting that that have not taurus
Speaker 1: or have historically, and people not even a little bit.
Speaker 1: My mind was on the FARC rebels that grow and
Speaker 1: and smuggle cocaine out of the jungle, and how they
Speaker 1: have made a lot of their money on kidnapping and
Speaker 1: the last expedition of Westerners to go into their thirty
Speaker 1: years ago all got kidnapped. So to me, the dangers
Speaker 1: come from the human element, not from the wild element.
Speaker 1: In a way, animals I think are a little more
Speaker 1: predictable than humans. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad, glad, you're
Speaker 1: all right. I think that people think about animals as
Speaker 1: being scary, like a shark being terrifying. But I mean
Speaker 1: I that Scar, it's it's pretty cool, Scar, But you're fine.
Speaker 1: But you're fine. And I think that it's you know,
Speaker 1: we're not only more of a threat to each other,
Speaker 1: we're much more of a threat to the animals than
Speaker 1: they ever are to us, million times over. So what's uh,
Speaker 1: Just as we conclude here, what's an animal that you
Speaker 1: wish more people knew about that you want to tell
Speaker 1: my listeners about. Well, you mentioned the sala. This is
Speaker 1: a fascinating species, so let's do it. Because they love
Speaker 1: they love cute deer, We love cute deer. Let's get
Speaker 1: a mental pick pick of this non dick dick um. So, okay,
Speaker 1: the sala is a fascinating animal. It's the most recently
Speaker 1: discovered large animal. It was only discovered in double check that.
Speaker 1: But it is known as the Asian unicorn. And the
Speaker 1: reason it's no the Asian unicorn is it has such
Speaker 1: a striking symmetrical profile. Then when looking at it sideways,
Speaker 1: the horns visually merge into one to look like it
Speaker 1: has a single horn like a unicorn. This is an
Speaker 1: incredible animal. It's abovid, meaning a family member of the
Speaker 1: cattle family, only, like I said, recently discovered in in
Speaker 1: Laos and Vietnam in the Ammonite mountains, which is incredibly
Speaker 1: rich biodiverse. Ere a huge animal, you know, talking about
Speaker 1: a hundred plus pound creature, and it's got a fascinating
Speaker 1: story about the only one that was ever captured. It
Speaker 1: was captured alive for a Leo is crazy wealthy la
Speaker 1: Ocean king who was a collector of wild animals, and
Speaker 1: when it died they ate it. They didn't even preserve
Speaker 1: the specimen. I mean, just the story is it's mind blowing.
Speaker 1: Where it lives is insane. And I think more importantly,
Speaker 1: aside from it being an incredibly beautiful, unique creature, it's
Speaker 1: its own genus, meaning it doesn't even really have any
Speaker 1: close relatives except for the cattle. The bovid family, has
Speaker 1: sink glands on its face that it rubs on the trees.
Speaker 1: I mean, just such a unique creature. But it it
Speaker 1: lives in an area that is desperate for conservation and
Speaker 1: the ala Osian Mountains on the border of Vietnam, where
Speaker 1: everything's on the menu for human beings, and it's been
Speaker 1: war torn for a number of years, and it's it's
Speaker 1: just not only is it a beautiful animal, not only
Speaker 1: is it recently discovered it could be extinct. I don't
Speaker 1: believe that it is, but it's an animal that lives
Speaker 1: in an area that needs attention and exposure. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a really beautiful animal. It looks I only speak
Speaker 1: in terms of the vocabulary of animals that I know,
Speaker 1: so it looks like a mix between like an ibex
Speaker 1: uh cow and a deer that's pretty accurate with with
Speaker 1: painted markings that don't resemble anything, with white spots on
Speaker 1: its face, which are curious. I wonder what those are for.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we don't exactly not do um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they're beautiful kind of mahogany color. They're gorgeous. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: please please do look up pictures of these. It's the
Speaker 1: soula salula sala um and they are They're gorgeous, so
Speaker 1: that's another They're not a deer, but they are an ungulate.
Speaker 1: They are a cute ungulate to uh, to include into
Speaker 1: our library of cute ungulates that we love on this show. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me today. This has
Speaker 1: been in ubibly illuminating. I am just so I love
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Uh, and guys, please do
Speaker 1: check out the show. It's called Extinct or Alive? Right,
Speaker 1: and where where can they catch that? Extinct or Alive?
Speaker 1: Currently airing on Wednesdays on Animal Planet at nine pm,
Speaker 1: Super family friendly. You know, there's nothing bad in it.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's very adventure driven. It follows me on
Speaker 1: these journeys as I get stung by bees, bitten by sharks,
Speaker 1: flying in World War two planes to look for these
Speaker 1: animals that I believe have been wrongfully deemed extinct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's fascinating and it is really it's it's really
Speaker 1: intense because I love watching you as you're like going
Speaker 1: through all of your forest cams looking for and you're
Speaker 1: just on the edge of your seat hoping that that
Speaker 1: you get that get that siding can people find you
Speaker 1: online or yeah, yeah, I have you know, all the
Speaker 1: regular social channels. My name Forest Galante its force with
Speaker 1: two rs g A l A N t E. I
Speaker 1: have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and and I you know, I
Speaker 1: see everybody's messages. I really do. I look at every
Speaker 1: things people are sending me instances of rare animal sighting.
Speaker 1: So by all means, please follow me, hang out. I'd
Speaker 1: love to chat with you about wildlife. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: if you see something, say something especially to Forest here. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can find us as always on the internet, uh
Speaker 1: www dot Now I'm not going to do Creature feature
Speaker 1: pod dot com, Creature feature Pod on Instagram where you
Speaker 1: can mostly see pictures of my dog, Creature feet pod
Speaker 1: on Twitter, that's f e A T f e E
Speaker 1: T is something very different. You can find me at
Speaker 1: Katie Golden on Twitter, and I am also at pro
Speaker 1: bird Rites, where I advanced the cause of birds throughout
Speaker 1: the Greater United States. Uh and mostly advocate poor Avian
Speaker 1: complete control of the world. But anyways, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a good good activism. Burn Overlord, burn over
Speaker 1: all arts. I mean, I for one, welcome them. Thanks
Speaker 1: to the Space Classics. For their totally tubular tune. X
Speaker 1: Alumina Creature features a production of I heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. See you next Wednesday, m