Episode 077: The Tratratratra, Lemur of Mystery!
b"I swear I didn't make up the word tratratratra! It's a real word for an animal that was probably real, although it may be extinct now. Let's learn about this Lemur of Mystery and some of its friends!\\n\\nA mouse lemur:\\n\\n\\n\\nAn indri:\\n\\n\\n\\nKing Julian:\\n\\n\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nLemur News\\n\\nThe Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re looking at an animal with a name I swear I\\u2019m not making up, the tratratratra. Seriously, it\\u2019s a real name. The animal itself\\u2026well, we\\u2019re not exactly sure.\\n\\nTratratratra is the name of an animal that was supposedly common in Madagascar when the Malagasy people settled there around 2000 years ago. It was described as a lemur about the size of a calf with a human face but hands more like a monkey\\u2019s. Supposedly it still lives on Madagascar in remote, hard-to-reach areas.\\n\\nMadagascar is a big island off the coast of East Africa, with smaller islands around it. It has been isolated from both Africa and Asia for 88 million years, so many of its plants and animals are found nowhere else on earth. Lemurs are one example. There are over 100 known species and subspecies of lemur on Madagascar, but lemurs are found nowhere else in the world. Even more species of lemur have gone extinct since humans settled on the island, including one that might be the tratratratra.\\n\\nFirst of all, what\\u2019s a lemur? If you\\u2019ve seen the movie Madagascar, you have a pretty good idea of what a lemur looks like, although you may overestimate the amount of dancing they do.\\n\\nTechnically the lemur is a primate, although it doesn\\u2019t look much like other primates at first glance. Different species can look radically different, of course, but in general they\\u2019re long-bodied animals with long tails and monkey-like hands and feet with nails instead of claws. They\\u2019re mostly social animals who eat plants and fruit, although some eat insects, arthropods, and other small animals. Most lemur societies are female-led. All are endangered due to habitat loss, poaching, and the illegal pet trade.\\n\\nWhile we tend to think of apes and monkeys when we hear the word primate, the primate order contains many other types of animal. Lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini suborder, which includes bushbabies, pottos, and lorises. Apes and monkeys belong to the Haplorhini suborder, along with tarsiers. Researchers think that the ancestors of lemurs migrated to Madagascar from Africa about 50 million years ago on rafts of vegetation. This sounds ridiculous since Madagascar is more than 300 miles, or 500 km, away from Africa at its closest point, and the prevailing winds and ocean currents push floating logs and other vegetation away from the island. But 60 million years ago the currents flowed the other way. By 20 million years ago, continental drift had pushed Africa and Madagascar farther north so that the currents changed to what they are now, which helped isolate the island even further.\\n\\nThe smallest lemur species is the mouse lemur, which is only 11 inches long including its tail, or 27 cm. The largest is the indri, which is a black and white animal with long legs but no tail, which grows to almost 2 \\xbd feet long, or 72 cm. In other words, even the biggest lemur alive today isn\\u2019t all that big. But that didn\\u2019t used to be the case.\\n\\nWhen humans first settled on the island, there were three kinds of giant lemurs. Let\\u2019s take a quick look at them.\\n\\nMonkey lemurs went extinct around 1500 years ago and probably spent most of their time on the ground. They weren\\u2019t huge, probably not any bigger than the indri. We don\\u2019t have very many monkey lemur remains so we don\\u2019t know much about it, but researchers think it primarily ate seeds, although it might have also eaten grass and leaves. Its limbs were short and powerful with short hands and feet. It had a heavy skull with big molars for grinding plant material."