The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Man-Eating Deer, History’s Top Counterfeiters, a 12-Foot-Tall Bird

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from an absolutely enormous bird from New Zealand to deer with a taste for human flesh. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by: Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Sarah Trodosh. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact that we picked up in the course of reading, writing, reporting, getting ready for for book club on Sunday, et cetera, and we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene

and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you start with your tease? One of the rarest elements in the universe is inside Euro banknotes. Unobtainium, I assume. Yes, exactly. They isolated it from a James Cameron movie. Such a feat. Eleanor, what's your tease? I want to talk about a 12-foot-tall extinct bird. Glorious. Who doesn't?

My tease is that lots of people think about what they want their loved ones to do with their remains after they die. And if what you would like is for a deer to consume you, I have great news. Exactly what I was looking for. That's an amazing tease. Thank you. Does that mean I should proceed? Yes. Okay, great.

This is a story that's actually two years old, and I've been thinking about it for two whole dang years, and I've been saving it. And today is the day that I want to talk about it. This is momentous. But first, we need to talk about body farms. So there are seven of these so-called body farm facilities across the U.S. And what it boils down to is that scientists leave corpses lying around to see what happens to them for science and justice and stuff. Of course, I'm simplifying the scientists make very informed decisions about where and how they're leaving the corpses lying around. But ultimately, the idea is that you're putting human remains in all these different sorts of conditions and then observing them so that forensic scientists in particular, but all researchers who study human remains, can understand how those different factors affect decomp so that you're able to look at remains and wind back the clock on what happened to get to the time of death, which is important.

in solving crimes. So the original body farm is the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, which is near Knoxville. And it's behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center. It was started in 1981 by the anthropologist William M. Bass. And on purpose. Yes. Yes. It was on purpose. He was oftentimes a consultant on cases that required forensic anthropology. And he was like, why isn't anybody really studying decomp in a practical way? Like bones. Right. So he decided they would have a body farm.

And I think he actually did this in the 70s. And it was in 1981 that it became like an official thing. An entity. Yes, an entity. And so it's like a wooded area and bodies are placed in various scenarios, including one time or probably many times because that's how science works, locking a body in the trunk of a car. So they could understand what that does. Very relevant. Yeah.

Yeah, actually, probably. And it was the only one for a really long time. The second one didn't open until 2006. Wow. So for decades, really, if you wanted to slowly watch a corpse rot, you did it in Tennessee. How did you know? That's exactly what I want. Right.

So now there are seven facilities. They have different specialties with the aim being to study as many possible conditions for decob as they can. There's one in Western Carolina that has like mountains and it's often used to train cadaver dogs. are the dogs that track down human remains after disasters or if there's a missing person. In Texas, there's one where vultures used to be a nuisance, but now have opened up a whole new field of study about how vultures eat human remains. My favorite disposal method. Yeah, yeah. So differences in factors like wind speed, precipitation, elevation, temperature, what scavengers are local to the area, what bacteria are endemic to the area.

All of these things help give each body force. its own personal flavor. And that adds to our body of knowledge. But it's really an American phenomenon, apparently. The first non-U.S. farm was in Australia. And as far as I can tell, that's the only one that there are plans for a few others in the works. And Australia is planning another one, which would be the first ever body farm in the tropics, which just goes to show how little we actually know about how bodies decompose in different

conditions. The seventh U.S. facility is really new. It's in Florida, and it was the first you really set out to deal extensively with remains in the water. Up until then, really the only people studying decomp in the water, we're using pigs. We have an article on Popside.com I'll link to that has some really haunting photos. It's some real saw bullshit where the pigs are just like hovering tied to the ocean floor. Yeah, I don't like it either. But, you know, there's specific concerns when bodies are in the water. The increased pressure can control how the bloat of decomposition happens. You know, we release a lot of gases when we decompose. So the body can, like, float at the surface or it can, like, bob somewhere in the middle, which I find fascinating and disturbing.

A death fart. Yes, a death fart keeping you in the murk. It can also make fats transform into this waxy, soapy substance, like we talked about in the recent Bog Bodies episode, which can change your appearance in a way that forensic scientists would want to know about if they were pulling your body up from the water. It can also cause them to fall apart in strange ways due to which parts of the body are more buoyant or less buoyant due to clothing. See the Mysterious Foot episode. We have a lot to refer to. Death. They also will like bob around and knock into things in a way that doesn't really happen if you're sitting still being dead in the woods. a body in the water can stay on the move.

And that means you can bash into things. So there's a lot more post-mortem injury potential, at least, you know, for blunt force trauma. Then there are, you know, unique scavenging critters that can diminish your remains. Apparently a lot of marine scavengers are voracious. So it can be even more of an issue than on land. And certainly the issues are different. So now we have a place where we can put corpses in the water. That's like the dead whale falls but humans.

Yeah, it is like a whale fall, except it's a body of human flesh. I have a thought. Okay, go ahead. No, what's your thought? No, it's just so interesting that it was only like 40 years ago that someone was like, maybe we should be systematic in our understanding of like how bodies decompose, which is so true of like most forensic science. They're just like, oh, like I think that this is sort of how it works and we'll just go off of that and we'll prosecute crimes based off of that.

And then it's like decades later, they're like, okay, So we kind of made all of that up and we need to be a little more systematic about like blood spatter or like all of these different kinds of things. Yeah, it's true. A lot of forensics was completely made up, which is why forensics remains kind of a controversial field today. Because there's a lot of old skeletons to like shake off. Zing. Replaced them with new skeletons that you study empirically. And if you're wondering where these bodies come from, they are donated to science.

So, you know, in our episode, wow, this is so referential. We talk about courses so much on weirdest thing. The body horror hour. So much death content already. So if you're wondering where they come from, we had an episode where I talked about a place where yoga and acupuncture practitioners can go to learn anatomy using real corpses. And we talked about what it actually means for your body to be donated and how a lot of that is a lot less straightforward than you might think. You might assume if you're donating your body, it means. You're going to a medical school, but sometimes you're going to a body farm.

And in fact, there are many people who choose specifically to be donated to body farms. I believe there was an op-ed in the New York Times recently from someone who has made this choice. And it is a really noble choice to make because it's an important topic. We need to solve crimes that pertain to murder. Science can help and your body can too. So, okay, now we're going to get back to the story that has been on my mind basically nonstop for two years, to be honest. So in May 2017, Serafect, who previously was an editor here at Popular Science, came to me with a study from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which is a really interesting journal to like delve into because it has a lot of case studies, which are just when scientists write about like an unusual intriguing thing that happened to one or two or three people. But, you know, it's not enough to be like we are drawing conclusions about the broader population, as you normally would with a study.

It's just letting their colleagues know the details of a wacky thing that might happen. And as you might imagine, the case reports in the Journal of Forensic Sciences are often really crazy, like, final destination style deaths. There was one that we have an article about on Popside.com that I'll link to about a person who was struck by lightning while inside and died that way, which is like— Oh, my God, just when you think you're safe. Right. I, like, thought that's how lightning strikes worked when I was a little kid. Like, I was afraid to be, like, near the window during a lightning storm. So now apparently—

Vindicated. Yeah, but it was a very odd set of circumstances. There's another case report I remember us covering about a corpse that warmed up after death for various reasons. And, you know, that's the kind of thing that forensic scientists want to make sure their colleagues know can happen. And the Victorians would have loved. Yes, absolutely. Oh, he's back. But, of course, a lot of the case reports in journal of forensic sciences are just sad and disturbing.

So it's a real, you never know what you're going to get. So proceed with caution. But this one is delightful. A lot of preamble for the story, a lot of buildup. I'm so excited. It's about a deer eating human flesh. Oh. Yeah.

So. Bamby, no. Bamby's revenge. So like I said, this case report came out in 2017, but the incident was actually in late 2014 into early 2015. So researchers had left a body in a wooded part of the forensic anthropology research facility or FARF in San Marcos, Texas. A lot of the body farms have fun acronyms.

They really missed an opportunity to make the last thing a T so they could have been fart. Yes, absolutely. The forensic anthropology research track. Texas. Forensic anthropology research of Texas. There we go. I love it. So they wanted to see how different scavengers interacted with human remains and what the resulting marks looked like so that law enforcement and forensic scientists could potentially identify those marks on.

mutilated corpses in the real world. So they set up a motion sensitive camera in the summer of 2014 with this body to track what was picking at it. And then in January of 2015, January 5th of 2015, to be exact, the camera spotted a young white-tled deer standing near the skeleton with a human ribbone in its mouth. Oh my God. And then again, on January 13th, it caught a deer with another rib sticking out of its mouth like a cigar. And I have to say that as an apt description. It's just kind of like hanging out the side of its mouth, chilling. It may or may not have been the same deer, unclear.

But this was the first known evidence of a deer scavenging human bones and possibly eating human flesh. So deers, we think of them as being vegetarian and they basically are, but they have been known to explore other culinary options. We've seen them eating fish, bats, dead rabbits. And scientists actually think that some herbivores like deer may kind of opportunistically seek out flesh on purpose to get minerals that they don't really get in the winter from their plant diets, which I can totally appreciate because I mostly don't eat meat. But like if there's a sandwich there and nobody else is going to eat it, you know, I'm not. I'm not doing that cow any favors by not eating that sandwich.

And I think the deer felt the same way about this human flesh. So respect. So we care about this because they were. able to look at how the deer eating the human remains looked on the bone. So it was mostly damaged the ends of the bone. There were like zigzag motions of their jaws making this like forked pattern. And they were also seeking out like really dried out bones of long dead animals unlike carnivores who will like get in there as quickly as possible. So yeah, they learned a lot. And more importantly, there's at least one deer in Texas with a taste for human flesh. So keep that in mind

the next time you're in the woods, I guess. It's the end of the story. I'm... No words. Yeah. I mean, the fact that they were looking for turkey vultures and then found a little deer really says it all. It's always the quiet ones. Also, the image of like a deer with a big rib bones. Like, ribbones are not small. That is just, that's upsetting. Yeah, it's really kind of charming or it would be if it wasn't a piece of a human. Maybe like dears that learn how to eat meat will become favorable evolutionarily and will have dears that just like can eat roadkill and stuff. Yeah. And it's like, you know, to that point, it is important to note that, of course,

The fact that this deer munched on some human does not mean that deers are predators. They are still extremely chill animals that are scared of you and most things. If you end up in a body farm, which I do recommend, it is a great way to give back to the earth and to your fellow humans. Just know that lots of things could happen to you. You could get tied to the bottom of the ocean. You could spend some time in the trunk of a car. or you could get eaten by a very happy little deer, and that's beautiful. Can we link to how you donate your body to a body farm?

Yes, never fear readers on popsight.com slash weird. We will have an article for this episode, and I will make sure you know exactly how to get that body to a farm. Sign me up. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. And we're back. Sarah, why don't you give us your fact? Yeah, let's talk about some counterfeit money, because, boy, fake money has really existed as long as money has for real. I'm shocked. I know. Okay, so like obviously the earliest money

was just like coins, which were made of precious metals and literally were valuable because they were like, hey, this chunk of gold has worth. And since all the money was metals, basically like the primary form of forgery was just to make your coin out of a cheap metal and then like cover it in gold or silver. So like many of the coins that we find from ancient Greece have little slash marks in them, which was from like merchants testing them to see, like, was there just some shitty metal underneath this gold? Covering with a cheap metal underneath is so common. It's called a foray.

There's a term. I'm not saying that right. It's French, but I'll put it on popsye.com. Also, people would do this little trick where you would like shave just sort of the rim off of the edge of a bunch of coins, and then eventually you would collect enough shavings to make new coins. Oh. That's smart.

Which is why we have ridges on the edges of our coins now. Oh, that's also smart. Because if, yeah, right? Ooh. Like the whole history of counterfeiting is just someone is like, hey, I could cheat it the system this way. And then people are like, all right, well, now we got to come up with a way to prevent that. Like, it's just this endless back and forth. I've seen Catch Me If You Can.

I know. I was just about to say that. It's literally, it's, that's actually a genuinely good movie. Except for Tom Hanks's Boston accent, which is one of the worst things I've ever. In this house, we have nothing bad to say about Tom Higgs ever. I'm sorry. I love Tom Hanks so much, but it's the worst accent. It is a really bad box. It's so bad. But that's a great movie. Anyway, so yeah, eventually we came up with paper money. And by we, I of course mean the Chinese in the seventh century because Europeans didn't catch on until the 17th century. Thank you for clarifying. And then, you know, when paper money became a thing, then people figured out how to counterfeit paper money. So a brilliant woman named Mary Butterworth counterfeited tons and tons of money. using a piece of starched cloth and taking a hot iron and transferring the bill pattern onto the cloth.

And then she would, like, by hand, ink in the rest of the design with the quill. Oh, my gosh. She did it incredibly well, like, so well that they brought her to trial, but she was acquitted because there wasn't enough evidence to convict her. And she just, like, retired on her counterfeited money, which is incredible. A brilliant lady scammer, if I love that. That's amazing. And then, like, during the Civil War, the union side made fake Confederate money. seemingly with the consent of the northern government.

And they were really good at it because the Confederates didn't have access to like the high tech printing the North had, I guess. And so much of the Confederate money was better or as good as the real money in the South, which is wild. One guy made, I'm not really sure why this is a novelty item, but he made like facsimile Confederate money. And he had printed like on the bottom like this is a facsimile. But then later, it was really high quality. So later, people just cut off that part of the bill and spent it as real money in the South. I remember hearing on some podcasts, probably 99% invisible, about the fake money used in movies and TV, which is like there are so many rules. Right.

Because it has to be really, really fake looking. I mean, obviously, you can use real money in TV, but you're not going to because that costs money. And you're probably going to get some, like, fake blood on it or whatever, depending on what you're using. your money for. But to get prop money, there are like very few, perhaps only one authorized manufacturer. And it's, they do all of this stuff to it to make it very clearly not trying to look like real money. But real enough on camera. Right. That you're not like, hey, that's monopoly money. Yeah. It's a delicate balance. Did you know that like prop trash is like $100 a bag? Because they can't use real trash. I also learned that on 99% invisible.

Thanks, Roman. We need to do like a crossover episode. Roman Mars hit us up. We went to the same weird college. Oh, did you guys really? Yeah. Go llamas. Colamas.

Incredible. Go llamas. Wow. I love a good weird mascot. Anyway, less happily, the Nazis had like one of the biggest counterfeiting operations ever, which was intended to destabilize the British currency. Like they manufactured so many fake British pounds that they were literally going to like drop them over Britain and collapse their currency, which is a wild plot. They were firing on all fronts. Yeah.

I read that someone objected to that plan because it was against international law, which is wild that that was an objection that a Nazi officer had. That's a bridge too far. We can't counterfeit money. That's the principle of the thing. Was that what the union was trying to do with the Confederates, like similarly to destabilize their currency? Probably. I think so, but just like not on as organized as scale. This may be controversial, but I think the counterfeiting.

to destabilize the economy bothers me way less than genocide. Whoa. So. What a bold take. I know. I really went out on a limb. Brave. So anyway, today our paper money is not actually paper.

Like U.S. money is mostly cotton and 25% linen. So it's really more of a fabric than a paper. The fabric of our lives. The touch, the feel of money. Because it's fabric you can use like those little pens that they sometimes use when you try to like use a suspiciously large bill at a grocery store or something. Those are just like an iodine solution. And if you've printed your money on normal paper, it will react and like have a black stain because it will react with the starch. But there's

there aren't those same starches in the cotton linen blend. And so if it's real money, there's no stain. Clever. Yeah. I learned about lots of wild anti-counterfeit measures. There's also like a, it's called a Uriyan constellation, like, oh. Ryan, but as if you mushed it with Europe, which is like a little, it's like a little arrangement of five circles, but like not in any kind of regular pattern. And it's embedded in all kinds of money. And it's the way that color photocopiers can detect that it's money and they will refuse to make a copy. Wow. I mean, I don't know what terrible counterfeiter is just like trying to literally photocopy money. But I don't think it's Michael Scott.

Yeah. We're printing money. But yeah, apparently you can't. I've never tried this, but I really want to now. You can't photocopy money. And similarly, like Adobe Photoshop and other photo manipulation softwares, they also have ways to detect that something is money. And if you try to import an image and edit it, it just will refuse to open it. And it, like, redirects you to a website that explains how you're not supposed to counterfeit money. Counterfeiting is bad. That's scolding. We notice you maybe try to counterfeit. Can we redirect you? Clippy pops up. Even the Nazis didn't do this. So, yeah, so there's not there, like, much easier ways, like, you know, watermarks, which are just, like, a varying thickness in the width of the paper or the fabric, using micro-tax,

which is just literally, like, we're going to print this so small that it's hard for normal printers to print this. There's, like, weaving, you know, specific ribbons or threads into the fabric of the bill. Lots of countries have plastic money now, which is a great idea, because they're way more durable. Like the amount of money we have to take out of circulation and remake because we make it out of cotton is ridiculous. You can rinse plastic money. I've seen it on YouTube. And you don't ruin it. Like if you leave a bill in your pants, it doesn't get wrecked. This is brilliant. I think pay, like, I don't, why are we using paper money? Why do we not using plastic? It's amazing. But one of the, like,

most advanced ways that we have for anti-counterfeit measures is all kinds of invisible marks, like things that fluoresce. If you put something that fluoresces into your bill, that can be quite hard to reproduce. So like fluorescence is going to go back to a basic chemistry lesson here. So fluorescence is just what happens when you like shine electromagnetic radiation at something and the atoms in that object absorb the energy from the radiation and they push electrons into like a high energy orbital. And then when the electron falls back down, it emits light. And it emits light in like a very specific pattern. So like this is how we can know what elements are in stars that are millions and millions of light years away is because they emit very characteristic patterns of light

called spectra. So for that reason, if you put a very rare element that fluoresces into your money, that would be a great way to prevent people from counterfeiting it because it would be hard to get your hands on that element. And you can't fake a spectra because it's just a fundamental property of the element. So euros use europium, which is a great play onwards. And there's rumors that that is like why the Euro designers picked it, because obviously it was only like 2004 or something that Euros became a thing. But for obvious reasons, people who design money are not interested in sharing details about their decision-making process. It would be cool if we could do it with U.S. money because we do have an element named

after America amaricium, but it's radioactive, so that would be a bad idea. You know, just a little bit. It would probably be good if our money was radioactive. I think we would learn some important lessons. So yeah, I just think, A, I think it's funny that they use Eropium. And also, like, I just think it's very clever to take advantage of literally basic chemistry. Okay, but I have a question. How, now that you know all of this, would you counterfeit a bill? I can neither confirm nor deny that I wouldn't have countervitted a bill. So you're even keeping it as proprietary information. Yeah, I would never share my, I would never share my knowledge.

Did you know that, like, modern counterfeiters have gotten so good at this that they now have, super dollars, which are like so indistinguishable from real money that it's gotten down to like one super dollar that was like a $100 bill. There's like a lamp post on one side of the bill and these counterfeiters got caught because they had printed the lamp post like slightly too heavily. Like on the real bill, it fades just a tad and they had printed it a little bit too intensely. They were too good. Or like there's like the clock on the Independence Hall. On $100, Apparently the hands like extend a little bit outside of the circle of the face of the clock. But those silly counterfeiters assumed it was a normal clock where the hands stay inside.

And that was also how they got caught. I just think it's wild that people like, given how many measures there are, that people are still out there really effectively printing fake money. Scammer's going to scam. Yeah. It's the purest crime because it's just like why would I, why would I do something that earns shady money when I could literally print money? I love it. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back.

Okay, we're back. And for our last fact, Eleanor, take it away. Okay. New Zealand seems like quite a marvelous place. It is the homeland of our Lord and Savior. That's Lord with an E. It's the favorite prepper apocalypse hideout for billionaires like Peter Thiel. And it has a crap ton of crazy birds.

It's the last thing that I'll be talking about today. So I've often heard it said, written, repeated, that birds in New Zealand occupied every ecological niche. Because this is nuts. They have no native land mammals there. Right. So there are some whales offshore and some bats in some caves. But there aren't, you know, cheetahs or leopards or bison or whatever, you know, other places might have. And so this is something that Sarah and I have talked about before because she has an abiding interest in New Zealand. But I recently read Sea People, which is this new book by Christina Thompson that we excerpted on our site and is sort of the story of how we came to understand Polynesian origins.

And she was talking about some of these birds. And so basically what it means is that birds opportunistically filled all of the rolls you typically see mammals take in other places. So Hasse's eagle, which is now extinct, weighed about 30 pounds, and it filled the apex predator roll, which is something that in other places like a lion would fill. But this eagle did that. It had a wingspan of a typical eagle, strangely enough, but it was about three to five times the size of like a bald eagle. It was absolutely enormous. Did it also sound like a squeaky chicken

bird? Great question. I'm not sure. It did like hunt people though purportedly. Wow. Like would take children. Well, it makes sense. That bald eagle did take that baby one time. Do you remember that? That video? And the dad got it back, but it swept in. Wow. So even though they were enormous paleontologists actually think that they could have taken a flight just by jumping off the ground. They were just like really beefy birds. That's terrifying. And they viciously attacked and consumed another extinct bird of note, the Moa, which were these enormous flightless creatures that weighed about 500 pounds and were nearly 12 feet tall. No.

Like a literal big bird. And they weirdly filled the grazing roll so people have compared them to like deer. Like that's their like role in the New Zealand. Elephants. Yeah. That's what they were up to. I actually have the spookiest photo of all time of a man standing next to a 12-foot-tall skeleton of a recreated skeleton of a moa. I don't understand what parts of the bird go where.

It's all neck and leg. It really is, it looks like just a man-sized wishbone. And then like a giraffe neck on top. Yes. But a very tiny head. Yes. It's really, it's just, it boggles the mind. They're giraffes.

But birds. Definitely the giraffe of birds. Also, this man standing next to it, we can put this photo on popular science.com, popsy.com. He looks like a haggard Hogwarts professor. And the image is absolute goals. It definitely looks like he's about to do some kind of dark magic with this giant. This bird skeleton. These bird bones.

Both of these examples, the Hasse eagle and the Moa, are examples of a phenomenon that's called island gigantism, which is this evolutionary theory that's small. small animals in isolation tend to get substantially bigger than their continental counterparts. While insular dwarfism also happens in these isolated island places, which is where big animals get substantially smaller. And obviously, while there is tons of evidence that this has happened in multiple places around the world, it's not like a perfect theory. Like not everything applies. But island gigantism and insular dwarfism are really common. And you can definitely see them in New Zealand, an example of insular dwarfism. would be the Kiwi, which is still alive. It's not an extinct species. And it's really famous for

among other things, having the largest egg relative to the mother's body size. They look really silly. It's like kind of frightening. Truly, the x-rays of them with the egg look like they've been faked. Totally. It's all egg. They're just all egg in there. It's six times the size that you'd predict based off of all other egg data. And it's also a quarter of the mom's body size. Wow. Yeah. It is cute. No, it's really frightening. But they eat seeds and grub, and they just kind of scurry along the forest floor thundering with their giant eggs. Some people compare them to badgers, and that's sort of the ecological niche that they're filling. Of course, this is all kind of simplistic as extinct blog, which is about, quote, the philosophy of paleontology. They talk about how, you know,

the QBadger's comparison and other things like that may be useful in understanding similarities and differences between animals across time and space. There is some contention around it. It's not a perfect comparison

by any means. It's more of a sort of way of starting to think about these things rather than actually solving any scientific problems. But there are tons of examples of island gigantism and dwarfism far outside of New Zealand.

So I found, for example, pygmy mammoths. I'm going to cry. And they're a little Little little guys, they're five and a half foot tall, tiny, you know, ancient elephants. I want to tear up. And there's this photo, there's this like visualization

on Wikipedia that's like a man. And, you know, like an average human just coming in slightly taller and then this little pygmy mammoth. Oh, my God. And from what we know, it seems like they evolved

from the Ice Age, you know, mammoth mammoths that we all know and love and that they were isolated on the Channel Islands off of California. And like as the land bridge melted, they became completely restricted

and so in order to adapt, like, their dietary needs and stuff, they started to shrink, which is something people have actually predicted might happen with polar bears under climate change, that, like, a lot of animals instead of going extinct, will just adapt by becoming smaller, so they have, like, a lower, like, nutritional load. Climate change is terrible, but tiny polar bears. That's my exact thought. That's the only good thing I've heard coming out of this whole situation. So some anthropologists have argued that you can even see this in humans.

So there's some skeletons that have been found that are classified as, homo-floory sincensis. I'm saying that wrong. It's complicated. But they were basically people who lived on the Flores Islands in Indonesia about 60,000 years ago. And they were about 3.7 feet tall on average. And that's why a lot of people, with a little bit of New Zealand flair, called this group of hominins hobbits. So bringing that full circle. So the thing that I kept noticing, though, as I was reading sea people and looking for other examples of this, is that it seemed like most giants, most dwarfs, just like most native island species are endangered or already extinct. So like the moa, for example, had a huge place in Maori lore,

which that's the name for like the indigenous people of New Zealand. And so Thompson in her book, See People, quotes a missionary who wrote about a certain monstrous animal, which some said it was a bird and others a person all agreed that it was called a Moa, that in general appearance it's someone resembled an immense domestic cock. with the difference, however, of its having a face like a man. Oh, that's upsetting. Yes. It was reportedly guarded by two giant lizards.

And so most Europeans who arrived New Zealand, as they called it, it's actually called Eoterraoa by the people who actually live there, they show up and they're like, oh, that's so cute. What a cute story. And then they did find some evidence of what they called like an ostrich-like bird because there were all of these like bones that remained. And they were like, okay, well, that's interesting, I guess. we'll set that aside. And then in the mid-1800s,

they actually realized that the Moa and the Maori people coexisted because they found the bird and human bones mixed together in burial sites, as well as like Moa eggs that had clearly been meddled with by human tools. And so it took another like 150 years to piece this together. And what we found is that they did coexist, but they didn't coexist for long.

So all of our radiocarbon dating evidence and other like sort of human settlement patterns, suggest that New Zealand was first colonized by Polynesians around 1280 AD, so less than 800 years ago. And it seems that they started hunting the moa who were like pretty much defenseless. They couldn't fly. They were very large, obviously, but like, you know, spears. Yeah. And so about 1400 AD, the moa are extinct, so a century. Wow. And that process is basically still happening today. New Zealand has the highest rate of endangered species on the planet. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, there are more than 4,000 native species at risk on the

islands, which is incredible to think about. And a lot of other islands are similarly, you know, places that are extremely biodiverse have the only population of that animal and are losing them to, you know, species that are brought in by, you know, new people in cargo and things like that and just run wild. And with habitat loss and all of these compounding effects, we stand to lose a lot more moa-like creatures. Wow. So it's kind of a bummer, but also go on popside.com and see this photo and you'll feel better. It's wild. And on that note, the weirdest thing I learned this week, speaking personally, is this photo that will both intrigue and haunt me possibly for the rest of my life. I don't know what it is about it. It's just wrong.

It's like it's from, it looks like something from a Jim Henson movie and like a dark. one. Totally. It looks like a Muppet skeleton. Yeah, it does. I think it's the severity coupled with the absolute hysterical bird shape. This picture looks like Jim Henson made a movie about Alistair Crawley. Yeah.

And so it gets my vote. Wow, thank you. I'm also voting for Moes. Thank you. Great. On behalf of New Zealand, where I've never been, I really appreciate this award. That was incredible. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast.

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