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To donate to help victims of Hurricane Helena:
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\nIt's the big 400th episode! Let's have a good old-fashioned mystery episode! Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting two of our animal mysteries today.
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\nFurther reading:
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\nA 150-Year-Old Weird Ancient Animal Mystery, Solved
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\nThe Enigmatic Cinnamon Bird: A Mythical Tale of Spice and Splendor
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\nFirst ever photograph of rare bird species New Britain Goshawk
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\nScientists stumbled onto toothy deep-sea "top predator," and named it after elite sumo wrestlers
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\nBryde's whales produce Biotwang calls, which occur seasonally in long-term acoustic recordings from the central and western Pacific
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\nA stylophoran [drawing by Haplochromis - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10946202]:
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\nA cinnamon flycatcher, looking adorable [photo by By https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilorlandodiazmartinez/9728856384, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30338634]:
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\nThe rediscovered New Britain goshawk, and the first photo ever taken of it, by Tom Vieras:
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\nThe mystery fish photo:
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\nThe yokozuna slickhead fish:
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\nThe Biotwang maker, Bryde's whale:
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\nShow transcript:
\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.
\nWe\u2019ve made it to the big episode 400, and also to the end of September. That means monster month is coming up fast! To celebrate our 400th episode and the start of monster month, let\u2019s have a good old-fashioned mysteries episode.
\nWe\u2019ll start with an ancient animal called a stylophoran, which first appears in the fossil record around 500 million years ago. It disappears from the fossil record around 300 million years ago, so it persisted for a long time before going extinct. But until recently, no one knew what the stylophoran looked like when it was alive, and what it could possibly be related to. It was just too weird.
\nThat\u2019s an issue with ancient fossils, especially ones from the Cambrian period. We talked about the Cambrian explosion in episode 69, which was when tiny marine life forms began to evolve into much larger, more elaborate animals as new ecological niches became available. In the fossil record it looks like it happened practically overnight, which is why it\u2019s called the Cambrian explosion, but it took millions of years. Many of the animals that evolved 500 million years ago look very different from all animals alive today, as organisms evolved body plans and appendages that weren\u2019t passed down to descendants.
\nAs for stylophorans, the first fossils were discovered about 150 years ago. They\u2019re tiny animals, only millimeters long, and over 100 species have been identified so far. The body is flattened and shaped sort of like a rectangle,