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This week's almost late but NOT LATE OKAY episode is about the Chinese ink monkey! A pygmy tarsier, probably not an ink monkey: Further reading: The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker Further listening: Relic: The Lost Treasure Podcast - I'm a guest in episode 15 but all the episodes are great! Bonus episode since this one is so short (click through and hit play) Episode transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week’s episode was supposed to be about animals that were saved from extinction by human intervention, but between National Novel Writing Month, the Thanksgiving holidays, and the release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp I didn’t get the research completed. So that episode will run in a week or two and we’ll learn about something else this week. Something short, because it’s Sunday and I need to get this episode edited and uploaded so you can listen to it first thing Monday morning. But first, I want to tell you about an awesome podcast who had me as a guest last week. If you don’t already listen to Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast, I highly recommend it. It’s family friendly and a great take on an aspect of history that doesn’t always get the in-depth research it deserves. In between regular seasons, the host, Maxwell, releases roundtable discussion episodes with different people to cover topics that maybe aren’t exactly about lost treasure, but close. I appeared in episode 15, called “Back from Extinction,” where we discussed animals that were declared extinct but have been rediscovered, although not without controversy. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can go check that one out. I’d planned my own saved from extinction episode as a sort of follow-up, but time got away from me. So what are we talking about today? In honor of the end of National Novel Writing Month, which is kicking my butt this year, we’re investigating a mystery animal called the Chinese Ink Monkey. The story goes that in antiquity, as far back as 2,000 BCE, a tiny primate known as an ink monkey was frequently the pet of scholars and scribes in China. It wasn’t just a cute little pet, it was useful. It was intelligent and could be trained to prepare ink, which back in those days came in blocks and had to be ground into powder and mixed with water to the right consistency. It would turn book pages so the scholar could read hands-free, it would hand pens and other items to the scholar, and it was small enough to sleep in the scholar’s brush pot or desk drawer. Such a useful little creature was highly sought after, but was supposed to have gone extinct at some point centuries ago. According to a book of Chinese lore called The Dragon Book, published in English in 1938, the ink monkey was only around 5 inches long, or 13 cm. Its sleek fur was black and soft and it had red eyes. It was also supposed to drink any ink remaining at the end of the day as its preferred food. Since ink in those days was frequently made with precious materials like sandalwood, crushed pearls, musk, rare herbs, and even gold, and those things are not just valuable, they’re not all that nutritious, ink monkeys probably didn’t actually drink ink. But was it even a real animal or just a legend? In April of 1996, the ink monkey story got media attention when a press release from the official New China News Agency announced its rediscovery in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian Province. The press release didn’t have many details at all. It basically just reported that the animal was mouse-sized and had been found. The smallest monkey alive today is the pygmy marmoset from South America, which is about 10 inches long, or almost 26 cm. But there is another animal that looks like a monkey but which is no more than about six inches long, or 15 cm, not counting its tail. The tarsier is a nocturnal primate with huge round eyes, mouse-like ears,