Episode 338: Updates 6 and an Arboreal Clam!?!

This week we have our annual updates and corrections episode, and at the end of the episode we'll learn about a really weird clam I didn't even think was real at first.



Thanks to Simon and Anbo for sending in some corrections!



Further reading:



Lessons on transparency from the glass frog



Hidden, never-before-seen penguin colony spotted from space



Rare wild asses spotted near China-Mongolia border



Aye-Ayes Use Their Elongated Fingers to Pick Their Nose



Homo sapiens likely arose from multiple closely related populations



Scientists Find Earliest Evidence of Hominins Cooking with Fire



153,000-Year-Old Homo sapiens Footprint Discovered in South Africa



Newly-Discovered Tyrannosaur Species Fills Gap in Lineage Leading to Tyrannosaurus rex



Earth's First Vertebrate Superpredator Was Shorter and Stouter than Previously Thought



252-Million-Year-Old Insect-Damaged Leaves Reveal First Fossil Evidence of Foliar Nyctinasty



The other paleo diet: Rare discovery of dinosaur remains preserved with its last meal



The Mongolian wild ass:







The giant barb fish [photo from this site]:







Enigmonia aenigmatica, AKA the mangrove jingle shell, on a leaf:







Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week is our annual updates and corrections episode, but we’ll also learn about the mangrove jingle shell, a clam that lives in TREES. A quick reminder that this isn’t a comprehensive updates episode, because that would take 100 years to prepare and would be hours and hours long, and I don’t have that kind of time. It’s just whatever caught my eye during the last year that I thought was interesting.

First, we have a few corrections. Anbo emailed me recently with a correction from episode 158. No one else caught this, as far as I can remember. In that episode I said that geckos don’t have eyelids, and for the most part that’s true. But there’s one family of geckos that does have eyelids, Eublepharidae. This includes the leopard gecko, and that lines up with Anbo’s report of having a pet leopard gecko who definitely blinked its eyes. This family of geckos are sometimes even called eyelid geckos. Also, Anbo, I apologize for mispronouncing your name in last week’s episode about shrimp.

After episode 307, about the coquí and glass frogs, Simon pointed out that Hawaii doesn’t actually have any native frogs or amphibians at all. It doesn’t even have any native reptiles unless you count sea snakes and sea turtles. The coqui frog is an invasive species introduced by humans, and because it has no natural predators in Hawaii it has disrupted the native ecosystem in many places,