Episode 167: Animals That Just Look Wrong
b"Thanks to Sam for this week's topic suggestion and animal suggestions! This week we're looking at some animals that just look...weird? And wrong? And not what you expect?\\n\\nLike the gerenuk:\\n\\n \\n\\nAnd the Tibetan fox:\\n\\n \\n\\nAnd the maned wolf:\\n\\n\\xa0\\n\\nAnd the proboscis monkey:\\n\\n \\n\\nAnd the bald uakari:\\n\\n \\n\\nFurther watching:\\n\\nShani the baby gerenuk (so cute!)\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week the theme and many of the animals we\\u2019ll cover are a suggestion by Sam. We were chatting on Twitter earlier this week and they linked me to an animal called the gerenuk, and it was just all weird from there. So thank you to Sam who jumpstarted what has turned out to be a really fun episode, Animals That Look Wrong.\\n\\nThe gerenuk is an antelope, but not one that I\\u2019d ever heard of before. My life is better now that I know it exists. It lives in East Africa and is a member of its own genus, but is probably most closely related to the springbok.\\n\\nThe gerenuk is a slender antelope that grows around three and a half feet tall at the shoulder, or 105 cm. It has a very long neck and long thin legs, and the male has a pair of black horns that can grow around 18 inches long, or 45 cm. It\\u2019s reddish-brown on the back and lighter on the belly, with a pale stripe across its sides. It also has a white patch around each eye that makes its large eyes look even bigger. Its tail is short.\\n\\nThis doesn\\u2019t sound too weird, right? It\\u2019s just a small, slender antelope. But the gerenuk\\u2019s legs are really remarkably thin, even for an antelope. They\\u2019re practically like sticks with hooves, especially the front legs. The gerenuk stands on its hind legs and stretches its neck upward to reach leaves that other animals can\\u2019t, and it uses its front legs to help it pull branches down closer to its mouth. This means that it sometimes folds its long, incredibly thin legs in ways that look like it shouldn\\u2019t be possible.\\n\\nThe gerenuk usually lives in small groups of maybe half a dozen animals at most. Usually a group is either all males or all females, and each group has a small territory. The territory of a female group will overlap with the territories of male groups. The female gerenuk can have a baby at any time of the year instead of having a particular birthing season. Male calves stay with their mothers longer than females, so if a gerenuk has a male calf she won\\u2019t have another baby for two years, but if she has a female calf she will usually have another baby the following year. The gerenuk lives in fairly dry areas and eats all kinds of plants, although it prefers acacia.\\n\\nJust think of them out there right now, gerenuks folding their impossibly thin legs back so far you would swear they were part grasshopper. They\\u2019re eating acacia leaves right now while you listen to me talk about them. It\\u2019s blowing my mind. Perhaps I have been in quarantine too long.\\n\\nOkay, moving on. Next up is the Tibetan fox. This is not the same animal as the Corsac fox we talked about in our bonus Mongolian episode a few weeks ago, even though the Corsac fox is sometimes called the Tibetan fox, and sometimes both animals are called sand foxes. The Tibetan fox is a species of fox that lives in semi-arid grasslands in high altitudes in Tibet, parts of China, and surrounding areas. It\\u2019s brown and gray with a brushy tail like other foxes, although it has relatively short legs.\\n\\nWhen you get a mental picture of a fox, you probably think of the common red fox with a long, slender muzzle. But the Tibetan fox does not look like this. Sam referred to it as the fox that looks like it got stung on the face by a bee, and that\\u2019s a really good description. It has a large, blocky head with a short, thick muzzle and yellow eyes that see you and immediately dismiss you as unworthy.\\n\\nThe Tibetan fox mostly eats pikas, a rodent-like mammal common throughout its range, but it also eats other small animals like marmots and h..."