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Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo!\n\nDon't forget the Kickstarter, as if I'd let you forget it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie\n\nOur next monster for monster month is the devil-pig! It's probably not a devil although it might be a pig.\n\nThe Asian tapir and its remarkable snoot:\n\n \n\nThe New Guinea carving:\n\n\n\nThe "gazeka" as imagined in the early 20th century:\n\n\n\nDomestic and feral hogs are common in New Guinea:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nDon\u2019t forget that our Kickstarter is still going on to fund the mystery animals book Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie! There\u2019s a link in the show notes so you can click through and look at the different tiers available. We\u2019re doing really well so far, so thanks to those of you who have already backed the project or just shared it with your friends! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/beyond-bigfoot-and-nessie\n Our next monster month episode is about a mystery animal from New Guinea. We\u2019ve learned a lot about New Guinea\u2019s birds this year, and it comes up repeatedly in other episodes too because it\u2019s such a huge island with varied ecosystems. It also has steep mountains that have hardly been explored by scientists or even locals. If you want to learn more about New Guinea itself, I recommend episode 206, which is the first of our episodes this year about strange birds of New Guinea. But this week, let\u2019s learn about the devil-pig! It\u2019s also sometimes called the gazeka, but we\u2019ll come back to that later.\nThe story starts in 1875, when a man named Alfred O. Walker sent a letter to the journal Nature about a discovery on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. It wasn\u2019t the discovery of an animal itself but a big pile of dung from an unknown animal. The dung pile was so big that the people who found it thought it must be from some kind of rhinoceros. The problem is that New Guinea doesn\u2019t have any rhinos.\nThe dung pile was discovered by a British expedition led by Lt. Sidney Smith and Captain Moresby from the ship H.M.S. Basilisk. After the report was published in Nature, a German zoologist wrote to say he\u2019d been to New Guinea too and that the people living there had told him about a big animal with a long snout, which they referred to as a giant pig. It supposedly stood 6 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and was very rare.\nIf you do a search for the devil-pig online, you\u2019ll see it called the gazeka in a lot of places. Let\u2019s discuss the word gazeka, because it doesn\u2019t have anything to do with New Guinea. In fact, it comes from an adaptation of a French musical called The Little Michus. I bet you didn\u2019t expect that. The musical is about two girls with the last name of Michu. One girl was given to the Michu family as a baby by her father, a general, who had to leave the country. The Michus had a baby daughter of the same age, and one day without thinking the father decided to give both babies a bath at the same time\u2014and mixed them up. So no one knew which girl was which, but they grew up as sisters who think they\u2019re twins and are devoted to each other. The play takes place when they\u2019re both seventeen and the general suddenly shows up demanding his daughter back.\nIt\u2019s a funny musical and was popular in the original French in 1897, but in 1905 an English translation was performed in London and was a huge hit. It ran for 400 performances and became part of the pop culture of the day. So where does the gazeka come in?\nGeorge Graves was a famous English comic actor, and he added an extra line or two to the play to get a laugh. He tells about a drunken explorer who thought he had seen a strange animal called the gazeka while under the influence of whiskey. The play was so popular, and the gazeka was considered so funny, that the idea just took off. The theater manager ran a competition for people to make drawings of the gazeka,