Episode 068: The Dingiso and the Hoan Kiem Turtle

Published: May 21, 2018, 7 a.m.

b'It\\u2019s time to look at two more supposedly mysterious, supposedly identified animals off those \\u201cTen Cryptozoological Animals That Have Been FOUND Please Click Please Click\\u201d articles.\\n\\nFirst is the dingiso, or bondegezou, which is just about as adorable as an animal can get:\\n\\n\\n\\nNext is the Hoan Kiem Turtle:\\n\\n\\n\\nDat FACE\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re revisiting those \\u201ctop ten cryptozoological animals found to be real!\\u201d clickbait articles that pop up online sometimes. In episode 24 we looked at two animals frequently found on those lists, so let\\u2019s examine two more today.\\n\\nWe\\u2019ll start in Papua New Guinea, a country that gets mentioned a lot on this podcast. I was curious, so I looked it up and now I\\u2019ve learned some geography that I desperately needed to know. Papua New Guinea is a country in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. Only Greenland is a bigger island than New Guinea, so we\\u2019re not talking a dinky little islet like the ones where cartoon shipwreck survivors end up. New Guinea has a huge mountain range, rainforests, wetlands, savannahs, coral reefs, and pretty much everything else an animal could want. More species live on New Guinea than in all of Australia. More species live on New Guinea than in all of the United States. More species live on New Guinea than in Australia and the United States combined. So it\\u2019s not surprising that new species are found there all the time.\\n\\nPeople live on the island too, of course, and have for at least 40,000 years, probably much longer. People have lived on the island for so long, in fact, that something like 1,000 different languages are spoken there among the various tribes. The first animal we\\u2019re going to learn about today was known to the Moni tribe long before any scientists got wind of it.\\n\\nThe Moni people live in the remote mountainous rainforests of Papua New Guinea. I couldn\\u2019t find much information about the Moni except through Christian missionary sites, so as far as I can tell their culture was never studied before it started being influenced by outside groups. But one thing we do know is that the Moni are familiar with a black and white animal called the dingiso, or bondegezou, which holds the spirit of an ancestor. When one is encountered, it will sit up, whistle, and raise a paw in greeting.\\n\\nNo one outside of the Moni tribe paid any attention to this story until the 1980s, when someone sent a photograph of a dingiso to Tim Flannery, an Australian zoologist. He recognized it as a young tree kangaroo, but not one he was familiar with. In May of 1994 he led a wildlife survey expedition in the area and was able to examine a dead dingiso for himself. Sure enough, it was new to science.\\n\\nThe dingiso\\u2019s fur is black with white underparts and white markings on the face. Its fur is long and thick to keep it warm in the mountains, since it lives in high elevations just below the tree line. It\\u2019s about two and a half feet long, or 75 cm, not counting its tail, which doubles its length. Its face looks something like a bear\\u2019s.\\n\\nMost of the information we have about the dingiso is based on what we know about other tree kangaroos, so may or may not be completely accurate. Females probably give birth to one baby at a time, which stays in its mother\\u2019s pouch while it grows. It eats leaves and fruit and lives both in trees and on the ground, although the Moni report that it spends most of its time on the ground.\\n\\nThe dingiso was formally described in 1995. In 2009, a BBC documentary spent eleven days searching for a dingiso with Moni tribesmen as their guides, and finally found and filmed one.\\n\\nNaturally, the Moni don\\u2019t harm the dingiso, since you don\\u2019t hurt your ancestors. That has probably saved it from extinction, since the dingiso reproduces slowly and is a docile, harmless animal. Other tribes don\\u2019t have the same restriction, though,'