How to Carry a Rhino

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

Kirk Mona (0:23)

Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice? Let's do this.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show.

So excited to be here with everyone. Rachel, you're far away right now, though. You're in Colorado.

Rachel Gimza (0:51)

I am in Colorado. As of the recording, I'm staying with my great aunt, who is 91

So I thought I would go and visit. It's been really fascinating because I love her to pieces, obviously. But her house is very much an old lady decorated this house sort of thing. It stopped progressing in the 80s and 90s. So it's been really fascinating to be like in the before times.

Kirk Mona (1:20)

A time capsule.

Rachel Gimza (1:21)

I literally just was showing Kirk and Victoria that some micro cassettes that are next to me as we're recording.

Kirk Mona (1:31)

We don't do the podcast on micro cassettes, but they were useful in their time. Well, shout out to our Colorado listeners. Rachel is in the hood. I'm going first this week. Actually, before I go, I want to remind people the sort of thing we put out there last week on the show. We've, you know, the episodes are counting down to 300 So if you want to be on the 300th episode and have your voice on the show, please send us your recording. Short, little, keep it short, name where you're from and what your favorite episode was, and send that to our favorite topic, and do a little voice recording and send it to contact at strangebynaturepodcast.com.

And we would love to get a bunch of those and string those together. So help us celebrate our 300th episode by becoming part of it yourself. Okay. Let's get on to the show here. I want to talk about hyraxes.

Rachel Gimza (2:28)

Oh, we haven't talked about those.

Kirk Mona (2:32)

We have not talked about hyraxes.

Rachel Gimza (2:35)

The timeline with our podcast where it's like, wait, we haven't talked about that yet?

Kirk Mona (2:43)

This has been on my list since essentially the beginning of when we talked about doing this show, but I finally getting around to it. Hyraxes are these weird little animals that are found across Africa and the Middle East. They're a mammal. They look, if you're not familiar with what they look like, they look a bit like a marmot or a groundhog.

But they aren't in the rodent family, like some of those other animals are.

They are the sole members of their family, which is called Procavidae. And they are really strange and interesting critters with some weird wild adaptations to their lives that are spent in rocky outcroppings and piles of rocks. So let's just go through some of these strange adaptations that they have, OK? OK. First up, their feet are weird. They have like rubbery pads on their feet. OK.

And they're look like kind of smooth little rubbery pads. And then the sort of the middle of their foot is a little bit concave. And they kind of sweat through their feet, so they get a little bit kind of, you know, moist. And they can kind of use their feet almost like a suction cup to hold on to rocks. Yeah, there's actually like a suction cup effect that their little rubbery foot pads have. So that's cool. If you spend a lot of time on rocks.

Rachel Gimza (4:10)

That's gross. Also.

Kirk Mona (4:13)

You think it's gross having size and cup feet?

Rachel Gimza (4:16)

I mean, it sounds fun, but like, I don't know what it is. Rubbery like foot pads just sounds unpleasant.

Victoria Thompson (4:23)

Fair enough.

Kirk Mona (4:24)

Fair enough. You're you're allowed. I googled.

Rachel Gimza (4:26)

I think I googled Iraq.

Victoria Thompson (4:27)

So their feet look kind of cute.

Rachel Gimza (4:28)

Oh, they're really cute.

Kirk Mona (4:30)

Yeah.

And they're their feet. I'll tell you, Rachel, look at their feet. They're cute. They are. Cute little feet.

Rachel Gimza (4:37)

OK, I will accept it then.

Kirk Mona (4:39)

But speaking of their feet, unlike most other mammals, their nails on their feet are really weird as well. They don't have claws. They have, like, rounded hoof-like nails instead of claws. What? Well, I guess that's not entirely true. They do have one claw. OK. So they have one claw called the grooming claw. And they use that one grooming claw to, like, dig through their fur and pull rocks and sand and things out of their fur. Since, again, they live in pretty dry, arid, deserty kind of areas. So they do have one claw, the grooming claw. Everything else is a rounded hoof-like nail.