The Snow Beast: A Mystery Animal with Latif Nasser
29:11 Share

Terrestrials is supported by the John Templeton Foundation, funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. Learn about the latest discoveries in the science of well-being, complexity, forgiveness, and free will at templeton.org.

Radio Lab for Kids is supported by the New York Hall of Science, a hands-on science center and STEM learning lab in New York City. Every day is a new hands-on adventure in their innovative design lab. Build ice caves, pinball machines, and shadow puppets. Figure out how to bake pizza on the moon with just cardboard and plastic. Watch chemistry explosions.

that are as safe as they are attention-getting. Don't try it at home. Try it at the Hall of Science, where there is a constant stream of rotating activities that allow you to collaborate and innovate, like you're on a group mission to change the world. Visit nysci.org for tickets.

Radiolab for Kids is supported by IXL. IXL is an online learning program that helps to enrich homeschool curriculums, offering practice in math, science, social studies, and more. Their programs are designed to meet kids where they're at, helping them develop curiosity and determination all the way through 12th grade, no matter your child's learning style or knowledge level.

Ixl has built-in tools like video tutorials, detailed explanations, and learning games to guide your child in the way they learn best while meeting them at their level. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get Ixl now. Radiolab for Kids listeners can get an exclusive 20% off Ixl membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash rlkids. Visit ixl.com slash rlkids to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. ♪

Imagine you are one of the toughest snow beasts out there. You can chew thorns.

Walk barefoot across frigid surfaces. Spit a kind of potion to ward off threats. Your face can zip itself away from the frosty winds. And at almost nine feet tall, your long legs can easily step through deep, deep snow. But for some reason, no one really thinks of you as a snow beast. You have become...

Well, I'm not telling yet. Okay, fine. Now is the part where we sing the theme song. Oh, can I join in? Yeah, join in. Terrestrials, terrestrials. We are not the worst, we are the best real. Best real. Yeah.

I'm your host, Lillian Miller, joined as always by my song bud, Alan. Making snow angels. And today's storyteller is one of my favorite storytellers on the entire planet. My co-host at Radio Lab, my partner in radio crime.

Latif Nasser. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having me. Long time fan. And you wanted to do things a little differently today. Yeah. Your animal is a kind of mystery animal, which you will reveal to us partway through the show, and then we will go meet one. Can we talk about these gnarly, gnarly teeth?

Yeah, because it's an animal you know, but it's a story about it you don't. So you know how Batman got all his super crime fighting skills by training on other continents? Yeah, I guess. Well, this story is a little like that. About the unexpected place our mystery animal evolved all its powers. And like, it's stranger than fiction. Like, you couldn't make up the backstory of this creature. You just couldn't.

All right, let's do this thing. So the story begins with this woman. Her name is Natalia Rybczynski. Okay. She is what's called a paleobiologist, which basically just means she specializes in digging up old dead stuff. Okay. She said someone once called her Dr. Dead Things. Ha!

Yeah, that's true. And here she is. Mostly animals. And over the years, Natalia has come across some very cool ancient creatures that are now extinct, but used to roam the earth millions of years ago, such as... Oh, well, there's like a deerlet that was... I'm sorry, is a deerlet a tiny deer? Yes, sort of like a lap deer, maybe. Oh.

An ancient bunny. An arctic frog. How would a frog survive in the Arctic? Would it have to freeze? Yeah, freeze solid. Plus... The bear. An extinct bear. We're still working on the bear. Ooh. Yeah, so kind of that's her job, but it's especially interesting because she does it in really extreme and interesting places.

And one day in 2006, she grabs some tools and hops into a helicopter to fly way up north. Over a thousand kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. To a almost uninhabited island near the North Pole. Very cold, very remote. Ellesmere Island. Canada.

They set up camp. There's no one else around. We're living in tents. A trip line around the tents in case a bear comes into the camp at night. And they spend pretty much every waking hour of every day just walking up this kind of giant, steep, sandy hill. Wait a second. The song, but just we'll start singing whatever you say. Yeah, that's how it works. Pretty cool.

Pretty cool, huh? Love it. Okay, so Natalia and her team, they're just scuffing through the sand, scanning around to see if the melting snow or wind has surfaced any little, you know, treasures. Scuff, scuff.

People have dug there before, but the only dead stuff anyone had ever found in this area was like prehistoric plant parts and some insects from millions of years ago. Basically wood from extinct trees. Little pieces of moss. Stems. Leaves. And that's why they called it Files Leaf Beds. Ah, like beds of leaves. Yeah. So that's what she was expecting to find. Whoa.

And on this particular day, it's the afternoon, and she finds something just right there, just lying on the surface. The size of my thumb. Like rusty, sort of a color. Like a big potato chip or something? Yeah, a big potato chip is a good way to put it. Okay. So she gets out her hand lens. A little magnifying glass. She's looking at it real closely.

and wondering what species of tree it might be. And she's like, wait a second. This thing doesn't actually look like wood. It doesn't have tree rings. With the hand lens, I could tell the cross section had these little pores. And that's the giveaway that it was bone.

Just a little chunk of bone. This is huge. Because as far as she knows, in this four million year old leaf pile, she is the first person to ever find a bone. Oh my gosh, really? Yeah. Whoa. And what's wild is that... We could tell from this one scrap that it's a big animal. How can you tell that from a tiny scrap? You can see the thickness. A long bone that's like an inch thick. So what kind of animal would have that? It would have to be a pretty big animal. Huh.

So like a moose or a woolly mammoth? Or like a snow dinosaur? Side note, were there snow dinosaurs? Oh, absolutely. We have in the Canadian Arctic and also in Alaska evidence of dinosaurs. Let's take a break to consider that there used to be snow dinosaurs. And if they slipped and fell down a hill, they'd technically be sledding.

But to find out what creature this really was, Natalia would need to find way more bone fragments. So for years, summer after summer, she kept going back to that exact spot. Just like... Walking, scuffing...

Just looking, is anything coming up? And she finds more and more pieces of this ancient bone. 30 fragments. It's all these rusty little chips. These rusty little chips, exactly. But what they are kind of is like rusty little puzzle pieces.

So she put all these things together. She was like, okay, this is a tibia. It's a leg bone from a mammal. So it could be a cow. No, no, this is much bigger. Much bigger than a cow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, so you really have like an Arctic beast on your hands here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's when Dr. Dead thinks, there's something kind of shocking to this precious ancient bone. We took a saw and we just cut off a little corner of it.

Huh. And then right away, they smelt it. They smelled the old bone? Yeah. When they did that, it smelled gross. Ew. It's kind of like the smell of burning flesh. Ew. But Natalia knew right away exactly what that smell was. Something called... Collagen. Collagen.

You can think of collagen kind of like the glue that holds together your flesh and bones. And it's rare to find it intact in something that old. So Natalia was excited because in the same way detectives could use fingerprints to ID a person, scientists can use collagen to identify a species. So she takes one of the little fragments of this bone. She puts it.

basically in an envelope, and sends it in the mail to this guy at the University of Manchester. He's in England, so it goes... Over the ocean from Canada to England. He opens up his envelope, runs it through his collagen fingerprinting machinery. Uh-huh. A week goes by. Two weeks. Are you kind of on pins and needles? Are you feeling excited? Are you feeling like... Oh, yeah, I was on vacation, but I was checking my email every day. And then...

He finds a match. This three and a half million year old bone that Natalia had pulled out of the high Arctic tundra belonged to... Yes? I'll tell you what it is after the break. Ah, come on! The Greek gods live high on Mount Olympus. But from time to time we walk among new mortals. And wherever the gods move, stories are born. The Minotaur.

With the head of a bull and the body of a giant. I'm gonna buck you to the moon, little hero. Tune in to the new season of Live from Mount Olympus on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Terrestrials is back. We are about to unveil the identity of a giant ice monster that Dr. Natalia, a.k.a. Dr. Dead Things, has discovered up near the North Pole in Canada. Drumroll, please, for Latif. This three-and-a-half-million-year-old bone belonged to... Uh-huh. It's a camel. Wait. Camels like desert, hot, Egypt? Yeah. Camel? Yeah. Camel that...

With the hump that spits. Yeah. Stuff. Yeah. I mean, the spit is to distract predators. But yeah. Yes. Yeah. We were stunned. So that's like, what? We're like, really? So she's like, no, this can't be right. Camels don't live in Canada. As someone having grown up in Canada, I can attest. I never saw a camel growing up. So they're like, OK, weird. And I had no idea about this until Natalia's story. But surprise, surprise, surprise.

Yeah. Are actually originally a North American creature. No. What? For 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been on planet Earth, they could only be found in North America. What? So, like, alongside just all the things we think of in North America, like, I don't know, black bears and... Yeah.

Yeah. Badgers. Yeah. Beavers. Squirrels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were camels? Camels. There were at least 20 different camel species in North America. Whoa. Maybe more. It was just like camel country over here. It was camel country. There was one kind of camel that had a really long neck, kind of like a giraffe. Huh. Some had snouts like crocodiles. Whoa. The earliest camels were the size of rabbits. Oh.

Tiny camels? Like with their little hooves? This huge diversity of camels across North America. It's so wild. And you just want a pet rabbit camel, right? I do so badly. I just want to put it under my arm, sit with it on the couch, and tickle its little chin. And like stroke its hump? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Paint its nails. And in addition to tiny rabbit camels...

Thanks to Natalia's discovery, we now know that there were giant Arctic camels that weighed a ton, were way taller than today's camel, like as tall as a school bus, and would have been totally at home in the deep, deep snow. What?

Wow. And at that point, there's truly none over in the desert where we think of them, like in Africa or in the Middle East. There's none? Nothing. Wow. Nothing. It wasn't until long after camels took over North America, like 40 million years later, that they finally...

finally wandered across this huge bridge. I mean, people actually call it a land bridge that used to connect North America and Russia. It was over 600 miles long with forests all the way across. And camels walked all the way across it and had babies who had babies who had babies and they all kept walking into Russia and Asia and eventually into the desert of the Middle East and Africa. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty far. It's pretty far. But this is so confusing to me that camels didn't come from the desert because aren't they perfectly adapted for the desert? Like, isn't everything that makes them kind of weird looking? No offense, camels, but you know, the hump, the goofy body isn't...

All that stuff that makes them, you know, desert superstars. They are desert superstars. Just to wow you a little bit about them. Join me here in the desert for a tour through the camel's signature body parts. Sir. What do you say, son, bud? Can I get a little help? Absolutely. Absolutely.

The eyes, the mouth, the feet, and the hump. The four main secrets to how they strut their stuff. The eyes, the mouth, the feet, and the hump. Join me on a tour from their head to their rump. Let's start with the eyes.

Big long lashes, as cute as can be. But they're there for a reason. Sandstorms can get really nasty. The lashes blink away the sand in the hot desert wind. And a transparent set of eyelids keeps it all from getting in. Next up, after the eyes, the mouth. That big goofy smile is the toughest of lips. It can gobble things more extreme than it spits.

Cacti and thorns ain't no problem for 'em. It can eat these spiny desert plants that almost no other mammal can. Wow, crunch. Next up, the eyes, the mouth, the feet. The feet are quite amazing, big and flat like frying pans. They keep these heavy beasts from sinking deep into the sand. But of the eyes, the mouth, the feet, and the hump,

The cameliest characteristic of all is... The hump! The hump! Some have one and some have two!

But the humps do not store water. They actually store food. What? I thought we were always told the hump stores water. The hump is fat. It's like a fat backpack they're carrying around with them. So they can go long periods without having to eat. It's just like, it's like backup snacks. It's backup snacks. Yeah. But that thing about storing water is absolutely true.

They can go without a sip for like a week or even two. Really? The way they do it though has nothing to do with the hump. It's a tiny set of organs much closer to the rump. The kidneys! They're like a filter so that camel can drink water that's salty.

Camel pee comes out like syrup. Ew, that's so gross to imagine. And yet, incredibly water efficient. Slurp, slurp.

Wow. Now I'm just more convinced they belong in the desert and don't belong over in that snowy land where Natalia found this bone. Right? Because that's what we all thought. When you look at them, you say, of course, they must have perfectly evolved for this environment. But then Natalia's idea was, wait, no, we're looking at this backwards.

Once you find a giant camel in the Arctic, you start thinking about camels differently. Her theory is maybe all the body parts that make us think they're, you know, quintessentially hot desert creatures. What if those initially made it good in the snow? Huh. Can you sing your camel in the snow song? I don't have my auto-tune on. A camel in the snow, camel in the snow.

To make sure I really understood Natalia's backwards idea about camel features initially being good for the snow...

I traveled to a very frosty place with lots of snow. It is legit cold. A farm in Wisconsin in the middle of winter. Can I touch the hump? Go right ahead. Okay. This is the most famous feature. Where there happens to live a seven-foot-tall camel named Peanut. Are you trying to eat my backpack?

And lovingly pushing Peanut's mouth away from my backpack is Peanut's human friend, Shane. Peanut is an incredible camel. Oh my gosh, you are so cute. Okay. Now to me, Peanut looks totally...

totally out of place on this snowy, snowy farm with pine trees in the back and humans wearing mittens all around him. But to Shane, who has spent nearly four years caring for Peanut, he's not surprised at Natalia's theory at all. He says that Peanut adores the snow. In fact, Peanut's sheer joy whenever it starts snowing inspired him to write

this hit song. Or hit to me and his like 20,000 TikTok followers where he posts videos of Peanut and his other two camel friends rolling, frolicking, playing in the snow every time it snows. Camel in the snow.

And so now, with Shane and Peanut's help, we are going to run back through those same four features that made the camel so good in the desert. The eyes, the mouth, the feet, and the hump. And explain how they make the camel great in the snow. Yeah, let's do it, song bud. Okay. First, the long lashes on those pretty brown eyes. I put on mascara today. Who's got better eyelashes, me or Peanut? Yeah.

To be honest here, Peanut, look at those. I know, it's like not even a competition. So long. Great for swatting away sand, but... Oh, yeah, I guess that works in a snowstorm, too. They're kind of built-in windshield wipers. Wow.

Next up, the mouth. You put your bare hand in his mouth, peeled back his lips. It looked like tentacles. A mouth lined with tough bumps can allow it to gobble down a spiny cactus. Isn't that neat? If you could imagine, where else might this ability be good? How about the thorns and brambles of the cold winter woods? Oh! A camel will eat anything it has to to survive. Shrubs, greens, trees, cactus. What do you mean Lulu's backpack? YouTube!

- Are you trying to eat my backpack? - Next up, the eyes, the mouth, the feet. - Think about those big, huge feet. We think about them tromping over sand, right? - Yep. - But what if they were tromping over snow? - Now when I put his foot back down, it's going to expand about a half inch to an inch.

It like spreads out. Like a pair of snowshoes. It's like a giant pancake. Giant pancake for sure. Lets it walk for miles a day without sinking to its knees. Now what's that last lumpy trait that lets camels survive the deep freeze? That backpack full of junk the camel's funky lumpy humps.

Think about it. Would it be helpful to have an extra store of fat during a six-month-long winter? Oh my gosh, especially. That sounds pretty helpful, actually, right? Keeps you warm and gives you food. There's usually not a lot growing out there in the middle of winter. The eyes, the mouth, the feet, and the humps.

An arctic superstar that struts its snowy stuff. Wow. Wow. Wow. You're going to walk on up. You're going to put your foot over like a bike. Okay. To close out our adventure, Shane asked me if I wanted to ride Peanut. I've certainly never ridden a camel before. So I climbed up. Okay. Here we go. Into the little arch between its hump and its neck. And then Shane opened the gate to the barn and let us just go.

Peanut walking effortlessly through a snowy field toward pine trees and faraway barns. Wow. Hey, big guy. Nice ride. Can go like miles and miles a day. Miles, miles, miles, miles and miles.

And at some point, sitting up high on that camel, I started to see through that same backwards funhouse mirror that Natalia did. Right. You see a camel in the desert. Mm-hmm. And in your mind...

you jump to, this is exactly the way it's always been and it's supposed to be and it fits perfectly, right? Right. And it might not have gone that way. It might be a completely different story, a weirder story that you'd never predict. Yeah. It makes me think that belonging comes in all kinds of ways. Maybe you're born into a situation where you fit perfectly and

Or maybe the place where you fit is coming down the line. And everything you're doing right now will help you get there. Yeah. And for Natalia, looking closely at the camel, which is, you know, this globetrotter that's trotted its big feet across the globe, it's shown her not just the strange story that's behind it,

but also the one in front of it. These are the animals of the future because they're so resilient. If we think about the future in a much hotter Earth with drought and these unexpected weather changes. Hmm. If only there was a creature that could go weeks without water and that could endure 120 degree heat without slowing down. This is the kind of animal that can survive all that. And there are serious proposals on the table to bring camels back

to the USA to be farm animals because they can better endure the heat and because they could graze on all that spiny underbrush that can catch fire so easily and cause wildfires to spread. And as someone who literally had to flee my home this year because of a wildfire, let me just put on the record that I am pro any anti-wildfire uses of camels. Wow. Wow.

We're shifting back to a much warmer time. Camels are one of the animals that should do better than others. This is so fun. This is like the best day of my winter by far. Hey, you. You are so handsome. Anything to say, my friend? Camel in the snow. Ha ha. Camel in the snow. It's snow.

And you're a camel. You're a snowy camel. Camel in the snow. From here up high atop this camel we see it walk the earth below. It all makes sense. We see so clearly this camel seems just right at home. Camel in the snow. Camel in the snow.

Camel in the snow. Camel in the snow. Alan Gofinski in harmony with his incredible wife, Alita Gofinski. Let's hear it for the Gofinskis.

On skis. On a camel. And that'll do it for today. There is nothing else cool about... What's that? Excuse me, I have a question. Me too. Me three. Me four. The Batters.

Listeners with badgering questions for the expert. Natalia, Shane, you ready? Absolutely. For sure. Hi, my name is Anissa. I'm 25. Have you ever been spit on by a camel? Honestly, I get spit on a couple times a year. It's very, very gross. I have longer hair and it's definitely like a two or three shower ordeal if it gets in there. Wow. Hi, my name is Alice. I'm 10 years old. And my question is, has there ever been a three-humped camel? Pregnant.

My name is Owen and I'm 10 years old. You've used smell to identify bones, but have you ever tasted a potential fossil to see if it's legit? I've licked a fossil. You've licked a fossil? Yes. If you pick up a bone out of the ground and then if you lick it, you'd be like, oh look, it actually is a nice shiny little tooth. Why does lick

Yeah.

- Yeah, it's special. - What does it taste like? - It's salty and it's thick. But camel milk is actually really, really good for people that are lactose intolerant too. A lot of people can tolerate the camel milk. - Do people eat camel cheese? - Yeah, so there's camel cheese, there's camel ice cream, camel body wash, camel soap. - What would you call camel ice cream flavor?

Camel caramel. Camel. Camel. Camelrel. My tongue hurts trying to say that. My name is Ida. I'm eight years old. What's the biggest mistake you've made on the job? We didn't put enough gas in the ATV one day. Okay. But it broke down next to a new fossil, so that turned out okay. Okay.

What did you find? That was a walking seal. Oh, sorry, what? A seal that represents a time in the evolution of seals before they had flippers. Like a land seal? Yeah, he looked like an otter, webbed feet, and a long tail. And he lived in the Arctic like 20 million years ago. Wait, Alan, Alan, did you know there were walking seals?

I had no idea. Are we talking like five toes? Yes. Really? Like I'm imagining them with like Air Jordans on. This is how I prefer to think about seals from now on. Like walking through the forest. Are they kind of waddling like penguins? They're on all fours. Yeah, yeah. They're on all fours. They're not, yeah, they're not upright. I am now picturing it with sneakers, Alan. I love that.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lula Miller, with WNYC Studios. Our executive producer is Sarah Sambach. This episode was produced by Alan Kofinsky, Mira Burtwin-Tanik, Ana Gonzalez, Tanya Chalas, Sarah Sambach, Joe Plord, and me, with fact-checking by Anna Pugel-Mazzini. Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you!

And big special thanks to my co-host at Radiolab, Latif Nasser, for telling us this story. He originally told it as a TED Talk where he brought out a live camel at the very end. It's incredible. And if you want to see it, just Google Latif Nasser, camel, and TED.

Thank you also to Carly Mensch, Juliet Blake, Anna Bechtol, Stone Dow, Natalia Rotinski, and our camel man, Shane Rigdon. If you are in Wisconsin, you can go meet his camels at Rigdon Ranch. And you can follow his truly delightful TikTok to see camels in the snow at Rigdon Ranch. I wonder what a camel snow angel would look like.

Or Santa's sleigh drawn by flying camels. Maybe some of them wearing winter hats. I don't know. Maybe you do. Anyway, send us a drawing at... D-E-R-R-E-S-T R-I-A-L-S-T-W-N-Y-C dot org.

And hey, if you want to get emails from us, just sign up for our newsletter by going to www.terrestrialspodcast.org. And if you want to see pictures of the animals from our episodes and silly videos of us dancing and singing, follow us on Instagram and TikTok at terrestrialspodcast.

And finally, if you like our strange little show about the Earth and the creatures on it, please rate and review our podcast on Apple or Spotify. It really makes a huge difference. And or go a little further and pledge a few dollars of your support. You can support Terrestrials by becoming a member of the lab. To do that, just go to terrestrialspodcast.org slash join. This season, if you sign up, you will get a photocopy of a rat.

from our rats episode. I promise it's cute and kind of stylish and not gross and I will sign it. Anyway, that was a lot of links. All of them are also linked in the episode description on whatever you're listening to right now. You can just scroll down and you'll see them. Anyway, okay, that's it. Enough words. See you in a couple spins of this snowy old planet of ours.