BONUS Q&A Episode!
It's our bonus question and answer episode, which turned out to be ridiculously long but hopefully interesting!\n\nFurther listening/watching:\n\nThe Axolotl Song\n\n~~~Buy my books!~~~\n\nWhiskers used to have two eyes and a nose. In the background, Dracula (left) and Poe (right):\n\n\n\nBlack squirrel!\n\n\n\nKing cobra!\n\n\n\nPufferfish, puffed:\n\n\n\nDog nose:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to the bonus Q&A episode of Strange Animals Podcast! I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw, and this is a little extra episode where I answer listener questions. So let\u2019s jump right into it.\nTo start us off, Simon and Thia wanted to know how I first became interested in animals. I really don\u2019t know! When I was little, I didn\u2019t want to play with dolls, I wanted to play with my stuffed animals. I actually have a toy cat named Whiskers who I\u2019ve had since I was four. Whiskers is older than all my teeth! I especially loved horses as a kid and since my family couldn\u2019t afford to buy me a horse, I took riding lessons and read everything I could find about horses, fiction and nonfiction. All that reading about horses led to reading about other animals, and the more I read, the more interested I became in animals of all kinds.\nNext, Melissa of the awesome podcast Bewilderbeasts asked, \u201cWhat was the fact or episode that really slapped you out of left field, like, \u2018I didn\u2019t see that coming AT ALL\u2019?\u201d\nOH MY GOSH, how many times has that happened to me? The most astounding fact I can think of isn\u2019t actually about an animal at all but about trees. While I was researching the Temnospondyl episode, which had a related Patreon episode that ran at about the same time, I came across the fact that when trees first developed, nothing could break down the tough compound called lignin that hardens a tree\u2019s cells to make wood and bark. When a tree died, its trunk just stayed where it fell forever, and this happened for at least 50 million years and possibly 100 million years. 100 million years of tree trunks just lying all over the ground! You wouldn\u2019t be able to walk anywhere! You\u2019d have to climb over hundreds of millions of fallen tree trunks, although naturally as the years passed the older ones would get buried deeper and deeper in the earth. But there would always be more!\nThis blew my mind, and later I came back to it, determined to do more research and make sure it was accurate. I did a whole lot of research, because it just didn\u2019t seem possible, and that information ended up in episode 214.\nAs for an animal that blew my mind, I still have trouble believing ice worms are real. They\u2019re worms that live in snow and ice! We covered them last August in episode 185 and I\u2019m still reeling.\nNext, Llewelly asks what my favorite extinct animal is, or animals. Why would you make me choose? This is so hard. Okay, fine, I\u2019ll narrow it down to hoofed Pleistocene megafauna like the giant deer and elasmotherium and so many other animals with weird horns and ossicones and things like that. What really gets me is that they lived so recently! Many of them only died out 11,000 years ago, and some were probably around much more recently in a few isolated areas. It also really reminds me to appreciate the megafauna that\u2019s still around. We live at the same time as giraffes!\nNext, Richard E. asked, \u201cDoes your job involve the study of animals and/or is the pod something that you really wanted to do?\u201d Tracie also asked what my background is, if I\u2019m a professor or zookeeper or something similar. Helenka also asked my background and how I got interested in strange animals.\nI\u2019m kind of embarrassed that I never have pointed out that I\u2019m not an animal expert, to steal a phrase from the awesome podcast Varmints! I actually work as a test proctor, AKA invigilator, in a large community college, so my work doesn\u2019t have anything to do with animals. My background is in elementary education although I didn\u2019t teach long. Basically I got my K-8 teaching certification and M.Ed.,