Strange,
animals,
podcast.
Welcome to strange animals podcast.
I'm your host. Kate Shaw.
Every so often I get an animal suggestion
that I'm positively we've already covered, but then
I'm fl acid and when it turns out
we haven't.
That's the case for the animals will learn
about this episode. With thanks to Jackson and
Lorenzo.
A while ago, Jackson left us a nice
review and suggested we talk about Wall.
I was
convinced. We'd talked about the Wall repeatedly, but
I think I was thinking about the womb
bat. We've hardly ever mentioned the Wall, and
it's such a great animal.
The Wall is a mars
that basically looks like a miniature kangaroo
Although some species grow pretty large. The resemblance
make sense because kangaroo and wall bees are
closely related. But everything else about the Wall
family tree is confusing.
That's because there are a lot of animals
called Wall that aren't Actually, the same type
of animal. Wall is just a catch all
term used by people to describe any animal
that looks kind of like a miniature kangaroo.
Wall are native to Australia and New Guinea,
but various species have been introduced to other
places. Where they're invasive,
including New Zealand, France,
England, Scotland, and Hawaii. Most of these non
native
populations happened by accident wim pets or zoo
animals escaped into the wild, but some were
introduced on purpose by people who didn't know
they were causing damage to the local
ecosystems.
1 thing everyone knows about kangaroo, which is
also true for wall,
is that they hop instead of running.
Their hi legs are extremely strong with big
feet and in fact, the name of the
family they share, macro pod
means big feet.
So, you know, big foot exists. But maybe
doesn't look like most people think. The animal
hops by leaning forward and jumping with its
big hi feet leaving the ground at about
the same time and landing at the same
time too before it bounces again. It's big
tail helps it balance.
But there's a lot more to this hopping
than you might think.
While the wall or Kangaroo has strong leg
muscles, what's even more important is that it
has very strong Very elastic tendons in its
legs. These basically act like massively strong rubber
bands.
When you stretch a rubber band, it stores
energy that it releases when you let go
of it and it snaps back and whips
you in the thumb and you wonder why
you did that, because it hurt. The tendons
in the wall b's legs store energy when
it hops. And when it lands, the energy
releases and helps bounce the animal right back
into the next hop. Once it gets going,
its muscles are only doing a fraction of
the work to keep it hopping at high
speed.
Even better for the animal, a lot of
its breathing is regulated by its movements when
it's hopping. So it always has plenty of
oxygen to power its body while moving fast.
When it lands after a bounce, the impact
pushes its breath out of its lungs. But
the action of bringing its legs forward helps
suck fresh air in. It's an incredibly efficient
way to move. And allows the animal to
travel long distances to find food and water
without spending a lot of energy. W easy
plants. And naturally, the bigger species can eat
bigger puffer plants than smaller species.
The exception is the dwarf rock wall.
According to a study published in March of
20 24.
There are over a dozen species of rock
quality, But in general, they live in small
groups in rocky areas.
They're nocturnal and spend the day sleeping in
shady places among the rocks. Under rock overhang
or in small caves and cliffs.
At night, they come out to find plants.
But because they live in such harsh environments,
Most of the plants are pretty tough.
2 species of dwarf rock wall in particular
turn out to have incredibly strong jaws for
their size. As strong as the jaws of
much larger species.
Their teeth are also larger to help them
grind up tough plants. And 1 species called
the Nab Wall even grows new mueller's to
ride its life as the old ones wear
down.
That's the only Mars known to grow new
Mower throughout its life.
The Nab luck is reddish gray in color
and only weighs about 3 and a half
pounds at most, or 1.6
kilograms
and is barely more than a foot long
or 30 centimeters.
With its fluffy tail almost doubling that length.
When it hops, it curls its tail up
over its back.
It eats grass, fern and other tough plants.
Like most species of wall, it's endangered due
to habitat loss and introduced predators like fox.
Another very small Wall is the band hair
wall, which only has a few small
populations remaining on a few island.
It's almost exactly the same size and weight
as the nab
and is gray with lighter speck and darker
stripes on its back.
It's also nocturnal and lives in brushing areas
where it can hide easily.
Even though these wall are smaller than domestic
cats. Some 45000
years ago, there used to be a type
of kangaroo that was extremely large.
The short faced kangaroo
stood as tall as a big gray or
red kangaroo,
about 5 feet tall or 1 and a
half meters but was much bulk here as
much as twice the weight of a modern
kangaroo.
It was so heavy that some researchers think
it couldn't hop but actually walked on its
hi legs instead like a person.
Big foot.
A few years ago, scientists
comparing the genetic sequence of the short faced
kangaroo to other Macro pods discovered that this
big strong kangaroo
closest living relative
was the tiny band hair wall.
Our next animal is a suggestion for Lorenzo.
Who sent a bunch of requests a while
back.
Before we talk about the animal, I should
probably
explain the situation with the list.
This is the list of topics that I
want to cover. A lot of them suggestions
from listeners and a lot of them animals
I've added myself.
It started out as a simple word document,
but after a few years, I moved it
over to a spreadsheet and divided it into
categories.
There's a page for mammals, a page for
birds and so on. I copied and pasted
Lorenzo suggestions
into the reptile page because I recognized the
first few as reptile or at least their.
Well, at some point, I took a closer
look at that list of Lorenzo suggestions,
and added a note. These may not all
be reptile. Then later, I took a even
closer look and added another note These down
here are basal art pods. Why did you
put them under reptile. But next to today's
animal at some point I added the note
I think this is a bird.
Dear listener.
W wax is not a bird.
Scientists aren't actually sure what it is. But
100 percent it is not a bird. It
lived just over half a billion years ago
in the early to middle cam period. Which
we talked about in episode 69
about the Cam
explosion.
That's when life on earth evolved from relatively
simple, tiny organisms
to much larger and more complex ones.
Many of the cam animals look bizarre and
confusing to us today because they're so different
from the animals we're familiar with, and that's
the case for w wax.
W
grew about 2 inches long at most or
5 centimeters,
and slightly less wide.
It was flat underneath like a slug, and
it probably moved sort of like a slug
too. The upper part of its body was
covered in overlapping plates called sc, which acted
as armor. As the animal grew older, it
also developed spines that grew between the sc
in 2 rows with the longest spines growing
2 inches long or 5 centimeters.
Modern marine invert have mineral
spines and scales that make them harder. But
this hadn't evolved yet, and Wax were basically
the same material as the rest of the
body, but tougher.
Both the scales and the spines were shed
and reg grown every so often.
Like all the other animals in the cam
Wall lived in warm shallow ocean water. It
had a feeding apparatus at its front that
had tiny con teeth and scientists think it
used this feeding apparatus to scrape bacteria off
the microbial mats that lived on the sea
floor in most places
or it might have lived directly on the
sea floor or on rocks.
Either way, its feeding apparatus is enough like
the reg found a modern mu
that it's been tentatively placed in the ph.
This means it may be a very distant
ancestor of slugs,
snails,
clams, muscles, oysters,
squid,
octopus, and lots of other animals.
W was originally
as an ancestor or at least a relation
of modern poly worms, and a lot of
scientists
still think that's correct.
Since the original
description of
In 18 99,
a lot of specimens have been discovered in
the Burgess Shale and Canada,
along with a lot more found in China,
Russia, the Czech Republic, and Australia, with more
fossils found in other places that might be
w wax spines.
Because all the cam fossils discovered are flattened,
there's a limit to how much we know
about it anatomy when alive. The best fossils
are re examined frequently as new and more
powerful methods of study are invented.
W was apparently very common throughout the world
between about 520
and 505000000
years ago. So as more and more fossils
are discovered, we'll definitely learn more about it.
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monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening.
But 100 percent, it is not a bird.
It's like the opposite of a bird.
Actually, now that I think about it, the
opposite of a bird would probably
be a rock.
Because rocks can't fly, and they don't have
feathers
and
they aren't alive. They don't like eggs.
Actually, rocks are the opposite of a lot
of animals.