Mammoth Feast

Hey, True Weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category, plus a Communicator Award for Excellence for Writing for Audio and Voice. And that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks! Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation. The discovery was made September 22, 1901. The mammoth, a gigantic species of woolly extinct elephant, was found in a great bed of ice near the Berezovka River.

The spot is 3,000 miles by road and river from Irkutsk, the nearest place on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. According to the last report received by telegraph from Irkutsk, the scientists have completed their tremendous journey and were engaged in excavating the body from its 100,000-year-old ice prison, a remarkable Christmas present to science. They got the math a little bit wrong.

The mammoth had been locked in the permafrost for about 44,000 years, but it was a wow of a find, almost perfectly preserved with just a few marks here and there. Missing was part of the trunk, and most, but not all, of the hair. The two men who made the discovery, Dr. Otto Herz and paleontologist Dr. Eugen Pfizenmayer, stood before it in awe. It seemed to them, based on the odd way the creature's massive legs were bent beneath its body, that the animal had fallen from a precipice above and was killed instantly. As they took this marvel in, the men realized they had a decision to make. What to do with the penis of this enormous prehistoric carcass?

The organ was erect, nearly three feet long, and having been flattened in the icy tundra, eight inches in diameter, the mammoth's testicles, equally frozen, were tucked inside the overlying carcass. The meat was dark and marbled, like properly hung beef. The men wondered if they shouldn't eat it, rather than continue to subsist on horse flesh. Look, it was a different time, you know. Today you wouldn't catch a scientific expedition debating on whether or not to grow up to find this important, not any part of it, no matter how well marbled. Still, having never been forced to subsist on horse flesh ourselves, we can only guess that it must get pretty monotonous if the sight of ancient frozen mammoth dong has the power to set a man's mouth to water. The men decided against it. Their dogs had no such scruples.

And they got a small beam of light against it here. Stuff. The Great Wooly Mammoth, that hairy, curvy, tusked ancestor of the modern Asian elephant. Extinct, but not until very recently, as deep time goes. Wooly mammoths roamed Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until just a little more than 3,700 years ago, which means that as the age of the Great Pyramids in Egypt was at its peak, Wrangell's wooly mammoths were cheerfully munching away on the island's tough grasses and mosses and even twigs. Their whole world, the only world there was as far as they knew, was their frigid island home, just 2,900 square miles.

And they couldn't know that they were the last of their kind, that for them, the clock was running out. They were lucky in that one small way, blissfully unaware that they were hurtling toward extinction. Unlike us, the wooly mammoths probably didn't wake up every night at 3 a.m. with a bad case of the existential zoomies. For the longest time, the theory was that this last herd of mammoths slowly died out from genetic meltdown, meaning as their numbers dwindled, genetic mutations accumulated. With fewer and fewer animals reproducing, those mutations couldn't be selected out, leading ultimately to the death rate of the wooly mammoth eclipsing the birth rate, and finally, extinction. You can't help but picture the herd thinning and thinning until there was only a handful of mammoths left to graze Wrangel Island, then just a pair, and then finally, only one, the last mammoth, all alone in all the world, and then gone forever and ever.

Maybe it'll cheer you up a little to learn that Earth's last woolly mammoths didn't have such a terribly lonesome end to their story. Now scientists believe that the last remnant population of the animals went extinct all at once, the result of some sort of catastrophic event. At least in this model, they all went out with a bang together, which is tragic, but not nearly so heart-wrenching as imagining the terrible solitude of the very last mammoth, watching her raise that magnificent betusked head, listening as she bellows a final confused and mournful call into the void.

Let's go back now to 1901 on that riverbank in Siberia. It was a hunting dog that led the to the remains of the massive carcass of the mammoth. The enormous body was encased nearly entirely in ice, which was handy for preservation, but presented a real challenge to the scientists. They didn't have a single tool capable of punching through the permafrost. The only solution was to somehow thaw the ground to the point where at least digging was possible, and so they lit fires, a ring of fires, around the remains and waited for the heat to soften the earth, which worked, sort of, kind of. The men ended up having to hack the carcass into pieces to get it out of the earth, which was frozen harder than concrete.

Eventually those pieces would have to be stitched back together, but let's don't get ahead of ourselves. When Dr. Hurt's party began the work of excavation, the cold was such that a shed had to be erected. A fortnight was occupied in thawing out the monster. The mammoth was covered with a coat of rather thick red-brown hair. The return journey of 3,000 miles was covered on skates, the mammoth having been dissected for convenience in transportation. The press was as fascinated with the sheer size of the beast as the team who spent weeks pulling it out of the ice.

The tongue of the mammoth is 19 inches long and the tail, with the hair on it, is more than 14 inches long. He's going to be very popular. Just getting the mammoth carcass back to St. Petersburg was a grueling undertaking, and not every man on the trip survived it. The country was so harsh and inhospitable to human life that the men were forced to subsist on a meager diet of dried fish, horse milk, and stewed tree bark. This might explain why they were so tempted to grill up a century's old mammoth wanker. Surely that would be tastier and more satisfying than a bowl of stewed bark, right? Once the mammoth had been extracted from its icy tomb, the men carefully removed the animal's skin. The skin formed one load by itself. It was perfect even to the tuft of hair on the end of the tail. Next came the flesh. The flesh was cut up in sections and carefully preserved. Hundreds of pounds of salicylic acid being used for this purpose. Salicylic acid, for us, that's used in medication. Treatment of acne, psoriasis, and dandruff, for example.

But should you be eating it? No. You probably could have guessed that. But then there were no laws regulating food back in the day, and it was common to preserve meat with salicylic acid, borax, even formaldehyde. Because back then, as now, there were a whole lot of Americans just absolutely furious at the thought of the government policing their dinner tables.

Now, salicylic acid does occur naturally in some plants, and stuff like beer, and coffee, and olive oil have fairly high levels of it. And you're fine so long as you're not allergic to the stuff. It's just not something you'd want to consume a whole lot of. And there was a whole lot of it in that old mammoth meat. The thing about this discovery wasn't so much that it was a woolly mammoth, a creature that was well known at the time. It was more that this specimen was almost completely intact, down to its thick coat of hair. Even the contents of its stomach were a revelation. A belly full of autumn grasses, undigested. Death had come swiftly for the animal, and the frigid cold worked almost as fast to preserve its remains.

Astonishing in every way, especially since it was far more common to find only bones and tusks. And those tusks? Jackpot! Mammoth tusks were valued for their ivory. African ivory is likely to become gradually scarcer and scarcer. And if there were no source of supply, this beautiful substance would soon reach a prohibitive price.

As a matter of fact, there exists, however, in the frozen tundras of Siberia, a supply of ivory which will probably suffice the world's consumption for many years to come. The ivory is the product of the mammoth. But listen, the trade in mammoth ivory was booming long before Herz and Fitz and Meyer found their long-dead prize.

Mammoth ivory was known to the ancients and for centuries has been an article of trade and commerce. Back in 1821, a Yakut man, Yakuts are an ethnic group that have lived in the frozen Russian north for centuries. Well, he brought 2,000 pounds of Siberian mammoth ivory to market. Over the next 80 years, many more thousands of pounds were unearthed and sold.

Boatloads of tusks have been seen on the Lena and Yenisei rivers. In 1840, the estimated annual output of Siberian ivory was 110,000 pounds, representing 100 mammoths. The total number of animals whose remains have been exported since the conquest of Siberia must be between 20,000 and 30,000. That's a whole lot of mammoths sacrificing their tusks.

But then, once upon a time, there were a whole lot of mammoths roaming the earth. They first began wandering the world about 300,000 years ago. In those days, something called the steppe tundra was our planet's most extensive biome. Biome is a animal and plant life. Now, imagine a vast swath of the planet stretching from Western Europe to Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, all the way down to the Arctic and then south to Central Asia and Southern Europe and ultimately Northern China. For the most part, think of this steppe tundra as cold and dry, though of course the coastal areas were wetter with milder temperatures.

In some places there were rivers and the landscape was forever being altered by the movement of glaciers. But for the most part, the steppe tundra was an enormous grassland teeming with animal life. Not just the woolly mammoth, but the woolly rhinoceros, along with antelope and reindeer, bison, muskox and horses. Stalking the plant eaters were all sorts of carnivores, wolves and coyote, cave hyenas and wolverines, and the long-extinct giant short-faced bears and scimitar-toothed cats. How giant were those bears? A full-grown male could top out at 11 feet tall standing on his hind legs and weigh nearly two tons.

As for the scimitar-toothed cat, it might not be as famous as its saber-toothed tiger cousin, but it was nothing you'd want to tangle with. As big as a modern-day lion or tiger, with bigger and more serrated canine teeth, arranged more like a hyena or a wolf than any cat we know. These were the predators that stalked the woolly mammoth herds as they grazed, and those predators had to be extra big and extra strong because the mammoth really lived up to the name. An adult mammoth stood on average between 10 and 12 feet tall and weighed anywhere from six to eight tons. The coarse hair that gave them the name woolly grew longer than two feet, covering an extremely thick hide. Below that were several inches of fat, insulation against the bitter cold. On the mammoth's back was a large hump, a mound of more fat. Think of that like being a backup supply of water and energy. The mammoth had human predators too. The early primitive humans who showed up on earth about 1.8 million years ago did a lot of damage to the mammoth's distant relatives. Science calls that the proboscidea clade or group. Our modern elephants belong to that group too, and we have evidence going back 400,000 years showing that Neanderthal cousins couldn't get enough of the tasty meat of the ancient proboscidea and even found multiple uses for the creature's bones. Once homo sapiens hit the scene, our ancestors, things really took a bad turn for the mammoth with the rate of extinction more than tripling. The huge beasts were hunted for their meat, their hides, and of course the staggering ivory tusks. But it wasn't hunting alone that drove the woolly mammoth into extinction as we used to believe. Big shifts in the earth's climate were a factor too. As the earth became a much warmer and wetter place, it was ideal for humans to thrive, but much less so for the woolly mammoth who was built for the dry cold of the steppe tundra. Which, I mean, doesn't it make you look at the elephant with a whole new level of awe and respect? Because the elephant has managed to somehow survive the millennia to share the planet with us, a feat their cousin the woolly mammoth couldn't pull off. Which, doesn't this make you look at the elephant with a whole new level of awe and respect? Because the elephant has managed to somehow survive the millennia to share this planet with us, a feat their cousin the woolly mammoth couldn't pull off. Make that the Asian elephant who's more closely related by DNA to the woolly mammoth than it is to the African elephant, which is wild, right? You know what's even more wild? Unlike other prehistoric animals that have left only their fossilized bones as proof they existed, the woolly mammoth occasionally managed to leave us its flesh. And you know what folks back then did with that? They ate it from a newspaper story printed in March 1899. There have been several authenticated cases of the finding of frozen mammoths so preserved that dogs and even Eskimo ate the ancient flesh with apparent relish.

But some Russian officials who claimed to have tested mammoth steak a few years ago agreed that it was neither fresh nor sweet. The next news may be of the opening of a mammoth meat mine to supply the population at work in the gold mines. Who knows? That same year, two men marking out a homestead claim in Dawson, Montana stumbled across a remarkable find. The body of a mammoth 40 feet below the surface in a perfect state of preservation. There were no scientists to examine the body, but it measured 44 and a half feet long. Its right tusk was broken, but the left tusk was perfect. It was probable that the right tusk may have been snapped off in the fall that caused its death. The flesh was cut and tasted sweet. It's very unfortunate that an expert geologist was not upon the ground at the time of the find, as it is of considerable importance.

Taking a bite out of a find like this sounds reckless and insane, and not just because the meat might make a person sick. Reckless and insane because hello, are you really out there eating the flesh of a prehistoric animal, a remnant of a long lost world? These specimens belong to all of humanity. This is science, not an Applebee's, Chad. What the f**k? Since the invention of the home refrigerator and freezer was still many years in the future, people were understandably fascinated by how the Siberian permafrost had done such a fine job of preserving the centuries-old mammoth meat. This was published in Oregon in 1910. How long food can be kept in this way without spoiling is not known, and probably we can never find out. Well, that's a pessimistic take. I mean, sir, probably we could find out, and eventually we actually did, but back to that ancient meat.

The longest frozen storage on record is some mammoth meat which was packed away in Siberian ice about the time when the human race began to stand up and lose its hairy hide. When the mammoth thawed out, it was sufficiently well-preserved to be eaten by dogs. Doubtless our would have been more critical than theirs, but since mankind has long forgotten the taste of mammoth meat, no one can say that its flavor had been impaired. Which brings us to what may be one of the strangest and weirdest and most remarkable banquets ever. The host was Dr. Otto Herz, half of the duo that unearthed the frozen Berezovka River mammoth, you know, the one where our story began. Every article of food served at the banquet was more than a thousand years old.

The piece de la resistance was a magnificent tenderloin from an ancient hairy mammoth who died in the old stone age and was buried beneath the eternal ice of Siberia. The enormous carcass was preserved for how long? No one knows. Through hundreds of centuries, perhaps, until not so many years ago, some movement of the earth raised the mammoth mausoleum, leaving it exposed to sun and wind until gradually, very gradually, the ice crust wore off and revealed the long hidden treasure. So what goes best with ancient mammoth tenderloin? Bread made from wheat stored in the pyramids by the Pharaoh Ramses the Great. Wine that had been buried beneath the ruins of Corinth when the most luxurious city of ancient Greece was sacked by the Romans. Fruit that had been concealed and preserved beneath the ashes of Pompeii, overwhelmed by Vesuvius. On plates and goblets found beneath the site of Babylon that had perhaps been used at the feasts of King Nebuchadnezzar. Why not raffle off the Mona Lisa during dessert while you're at it, boys? The meat was cut thick, grilled and served with a strong sauce, piquant in order to conceal any evidences of antiquity that might intrude themselves upon the attention of the learned and enthusiastic guests. Perhaps the most peculiar circumstance about the mammoth steak was that the blood ran freely when it was cut. This is hard to believe and you are absolutely right to doubt it, but the press of the day hate it to let a fact get in the banquet were enchanted by it. The huge cut from the mammoth recalled to them the Paleolithic old stone man living in a cave on the rocks, clothed primarily with his own long hair and driving to defend himself against cave bears, mammoths and other extinct beasts. The truth is that meat was about as far from tender and juicy with blood as a piece of meat could get and there was no amount of sauce that would make it even palatable, much less delicious. But the story of this strange feast became a global sensation. It took another 20 years, but a Russian geologist, paleontologist, explorer and expert on Siberia named I.P. Tolmachoff investigated and discovered that all that talk of mammoth steak being served at a banquet had been not just an exaggeration, but a whole fiction. The descriptions of the meat were accurate enough. It was true that some portions of the flesh recovered from the long frozen mammoth were, to quote Tolmachoff, fibrous and marbled with fat and looked as fresh as well-frozen beef or horse meat. But the smell, the god-awful reek was gag-worthy. Tolmachoff said the stench was unbearable.

Another scientist on the team was brave enough to give it a go and managed to swallow some mammoth meat. But bless his heart, the poor man immediately vomited. His stomach was smarter than he was and said, no way are we keeping this putrid rot down, buddy. Only the expedition's dogs had any real enthusiasm for the meat. Dr. Herz wasn't the only person claiming to have dined on prehistoric fillets. In 1915, an Alaskan prospector named R.A. Fox rolled up on the town of Dawson with a sack something. Well, now let me tell you, fellas, what it is you're looking at. That long, white, stringy, shabby stuff is nothing more or less than the flesh of a prehistoric mammoth reduced to fiber. That wider portion, which is less marked by strings, is the residue of the fat. The real grease evaporated. Fox told his rapt or maybe revolted audience that he guessed the mammoth had been buried under a million tons of rock for 200 million years. He found it by chance when he spotted a white object jutting out from the face of the rock at a secluded bend in the 60 mile river. When he got in for a closer look, he realized that what he was seeing was mammoth ivory, part of a tusk. The man used dynamite to blast away enough of the bluff to expose the shaggy remains of the long dead beast. Now, it's only a matter of recovering the rest. I threw some of the white fiber to my cats and they gnawed on it. And since it didn't hurt them, I eaten some. And I think that mammoth steak is all right. I mean, of course, it's a little drier than jerk beef and it lacks the salt, but we can always get plenty of salt.

As your tall tale telling Yukon prospectors go, R.A. Fox was a pretty perfect example. This is the same prospector who a few years earlier claimed he'd been visited by a phantom. Well, it was a thrilling experience. Happened in a cabin on Court Street. There was a lone of an evening when a fellow I knew suddenly appeared in the center of the room.

Now, this got my attention because this man had been killed not too long before an accidental killing. But there he was operating a rocking chair and holding up his head to the conversation just as nice as you please. Then all of a sudden he disappeared. Hey, just because a man visits with ghosts doesn't mean he's lying about dynamiting a mammoth and feeding its flesh to his right. Stories about eating mammoth continue to circulate for the next few decades. In 1936, a doctor with a newspaper column named Logan Clendening told of a patient who came to him suffering an excruciating bout of gout. He'd thrown himself a big birthday party.

The menu included caviar, goose liver, every kind of smoked and pickled fish and imported straight from Siberia mammoth steak. It was sold as a delicacy once available only to Tsar Nicholas of Russia. The patient assured Dr. Clendening that he'd been careful to boil the meat before serving it to spare his guests the risk of death by prehistoric food poisoning. Despite the agony of his red, enormously swollen foot, the man swore to the doctor that every plate had been licked clean. Though he did allow us to how the mammoth meat might have been dog meat for all he knew.

Dr. Clendening's verdict? People with gout should pass on eating mammoth. 1947 brought the story of a man who claimed he'd eaten plenty of mammoth meat while traveling in Siberia. It was pitch black in color, he said, and tasted like a cross between whale and bear. He didn't report any ill effects, though he'd heard of others who'd eaten mammoth and became violently sick. Which makes sense. Our modern guidelines on frozen meat are measured in months, not millennia. And that's meat that's been carefully dressed out and butchered, not meat that's still wrapped in its original skin and just lying on the ground. And then came 1951 and the most legendary woolly mammoth feast of all.

At the Explorers Club in New York City. If you're a fan of Josh Gates and his Discovery Channel TV show, Expedition Unknown, then you've heard of it. Josh is one proud member. The club was founded in 1904, and if you're getting Indiana Jones vibes, yes. But it's also a serious community of scientists that supports work all around the world, and every year the club hosts a lavish dinner. In 1951, the Explorers went all out. The setting was the Grand Ballroom at the Roosevelt Hotel.

The menu promised Pacific spider crabs, a soup made from green turtles, and the meat of a long extinct giant ground sloth. It was a gentleman named Commander Wendell Phillips Dodge who notified the press that the 47th annual Explorers Club banquet would feature prehistoric meat. About 500 explorers and guests will munch on the meat of a prehistoric mammoth that died, it's being Valley Hood, 250,000 years ago. Well, maybe not quite that old, but the meat was at minimum 25,000 years old. The meat is being described to prospective eaters as an especially delectable epicurean connoisseurs experience never put before man on earth. It is being resurrected from coal storage beneath six miles of glacial ice in the Alaskan Peninsula. The menu planners worked themselves up into a real froth of excitement. You will be able to tell your family and friends that you actually did eat prehistoric meat from some 250,000 years ago. First cooked in the pit of Hades and then placed in Mother Nature's quick freeze to remain as good as new until eternity. As to how many Alka-Seltzers will be needed to chase it seems of too slight importance to mention. If you're one of those solidly practical people who regularly makes good decisions, you might be saying, wait a minute, it's got to cost a fortune to find and a woolly mammoth out of the permafrost just to eat it. And you're right. To serve those 500 explorers and their plus ones, the cost per plate would have to be nearly $6,100 in today's money.

So instead of mammoth steaks, the plan was to serve special cocktails, each garnished with a small cube of mammoth meat. The ice in those drinks will be flown in directly from the Juneau, Alaska ice cap. 30,000-year-old ice cubes snuggled up next to a 25,000-year-old cube of meat supplied, it was said, from the private stock of a man known as the Glacier Priest, the Reverend Bernard Hubbard. One member of the Explorers Club, Paul Griswold Howes, was unable to attend. The FOMO, he very politely requested that if possible, he'd be sent a piece of the meat. And sure enough, a parcel soon arrived with a small, withered-looking piece of flesh labeled megatherium, the scientific term for the extinct giant sloth. But for whatever reason, maybe because megatherium and mammoth both start with the letter M, the confusion over just what that sample was grew and persisted.

For years, that sample was on display at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, until 2001, when it was moved to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. And there it sat for the next 13 years. For all anyone knew, it was a relic of that time. Guests at the 1951 Explorers Club banquet feasted on the woolly mammoth. And then in 2014, a pair of very curious students asked for and got permission to run DNA tests on that sample.

The cost of the testing was funded in part by the Explorers Club itself. The results were surprising and maybe even a little disappointing to anyone still alive who'd attended that dinner. It wasn't the flesh of a woolly mammoth at all. The meat served that night in 1951 was green sea turtle. Everyone had been fooled, probably in large part because Commander Wendell Phillips Dodge would have been right at home as a carnival barker.

He'd worked in Hollywood as an agent. His biggest client was that old-time movie star Mae West. It was Commander Dodge who promoted the backstory of the mammoth meat, the whole priest of the glacier situation. Still, not every explorer bought it. Some thought, nah, this isn't woolly mammoth. It's extinct giant ground sloth, Megatherium. Commander Dodge had succeeded in fooling some of the people about mammoth meat and the rest of the people about sloth meat. And it only took 63 years and a couple of college students to reveal the truth that that prehistoric feast was nothing more exotic than turtle meat. And here's a little fun fact. Not long after the banquet, Commander Dodge released a statement joking that he might have stumbled upon a formula to turn green sea turtle into the meat of a giant sloth. But ha ha ha ha tell the truth and it just won't matter if the lie is what people really want to believe.

The Modern Day Explorers Club didn't get its feelings hurt over the deception. They actually sounded a little relieved to have not served up such a valuable scientific specimen for dinner. Though they were quick to acknowledge that a person certainly could eat the meat of a preserved in the dirt of the permafrost instead of a freezer.

Now, don't be too quick to dismiss the idea of woolly mammoth on your plate. Of all the extinct animals, the mammoth looks to be the front runner for a little something called de-extinction. They're working hard right now to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Or because that's not exactly possible. They're working hard to bring about an elephant with the mammoth's resistance to cold, along with all of the major biological markers of a mammoth. If it looks like a woolly mammoth and sounds like a woolly mammoth, it can survive in the same ecosystem where its long dead ancestors thrived. And we're nearer to that than you know. After all, our Asian elephant is a pretty close relative. Genomes are being sequenced. The genes responsible for the woolly mammoth's stunning adaptability to the harshest and coldest environments are being identified. So are the genes for its shaggy coat, its humps of fat, its massive tusks.

Eventually, soon, it'll be time to transfer the woolly mammoth's genetic material into the donor egg of an Asian elephant. Then that egg will be implanted into a surrogate elephant mother. Elephants have long pregnancies, a 22-month gestation. So listen up. If we don't blow the world to smithereens, I think you just might live to see the birth of the first woolly mammoth alive on earth in thousands of years. It'll be fluffy and adorable and miraculous. But dude, please just don't try to eat it.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, was it jealousy or was it insanity? Was he just a hardworking farmer who snapped or was it all an act? And why did no one believe the man as he crisscrossed the countryside, insisting he was a murderer? The farmer takes a wife on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Sam Moore, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan.

Uh, Sherry, this is proof that men will eat anything. Notice that I noticed in the story there were no women who were eating this stuff. So these are men who are going, you're gonna eat it? Well, then I'll eat it too. I'm thinking when meat goes bad in the fridge and it stinks, I think to myself, that's meat to avoid. I'll throw it in the trash. But these guys, oh no, there was so much cheese. Well, with this, I'm eating this ancient meat.

So, um, one of the, there are so many things about this. Like, if you, if you stumbled across, let's say you're a hiker and for whatever reason, you're hiking, you know, up where the permafrost is. Right. And you come across, um, the partially uncovered remains of a woolly mammoth. Your first thought would be, oh, Museum of Natural History, not, oh, salt and pepper in a grill. Like you would never, it would never occur to you to eat that. And of course, go ahead. These were different times. And for the Siberian expedition, those, those men were starving. They were cold.

They were sick. They were hungry. I mean, they contemplated eating prehistoric mammoth penis. That should tell you how hungry they were. Because that bark stew is sure that'll tide you over for a little while, but you know, bark stew. Oh my God. Life is, our lives are so cushy compared to just any average day from a hundred years ago. Just pick one, pick them all. Like our lives are amazing. All I can think is in my pantry, I have a box of two different sizes of freezer bags, because I'm so freaked about making sure that there's not freezer burn on the food.

These guys weren't concerned about freezer burn at all. And all I can think is I know that there's a steak that's in a bag that's been in my freezer, I'd say about 18 months. And I'm like, you just need to throw it out. You're not going to eat it. It's too old. But these guys, they didn't seem to be concerned about that at all. And some of the, you know, okay, years ago, if they were really starving, but in 1951, which really was not all that long ago.

Well, that was the thing like, okay, you know, anytime a sentence begins with in the year 18, you immediately go, oh my God, all bets are off. You know, folks are going to do anything. But you know, in one instance, it's 1947. Like we're about to invent color TV people, like we're going to be, we're going to soon be launching astronauts into space. And you're, you're still doing this, you're still looking at that and going, I wonder if I could eat that, which may be fundamental to being human. We're so separated from nature, like especially like city people who work with technology like we do. Maybe at our core, we are creatures who stand up, look around and go, wonder if I could eat that. That's the feeling that you get.

I think about the comedian who did the joke one time, he said, so we're drinking cow's milk. He said, how many other things did we try before we hit upon that as something that's acceptable to drink? We accept that now. But when you think about it, it is kind of an odd thing for us humans to drink. It's a very peculiar thing. I mean, it's meant for baby cows. And, you know, like, if you have, let's say you're walking in the woods looking for something prehistoric to eat.

Oh, and there's a baby, right? You'd be better to give the baby goat's milk than cow's milk. Goat's milk is easier for babies to digest. Humans are whack, man. We are some kind of, we are some kind of crazy. And a story like this just brings that home. But there's an innocence to it, too, because these are, you know, mammoth remains were probably stumbled across by early hunter-gatherer tribes and nomads. And we just don't know about it. If you look at how recently these creatures, these beautiful prehistoric creatures have been found, that's kind of exciting. It's kind of new. It's news, actually. It really is. I think anytime you find any of that, it's new. And the thing that I always love when they find something like this, they always get at least a bit of information that we didn't know up until that find, which I think is always sort of the fascinating thing about this. And we always have to put our time travel hats on and remember that this period that we're talking about, as recent as it was, was a completely different time. Like I think now, unless you're a very unscrupulous person or a poacher, if you found a prehistoric mammoth preserved in the permafrost, you might not lop off its tusk and sell it on the black market. You might be more mindful that this is a treasure that belongs to all of humanity, you know, and maybe not be greedy. But back then, these weren't conversations that people were even having. So Sherry, the most interesting character in this story is our buddy R.A. Fox, because no matter what happens, no matter what happens with something scientific, there's always somebody who shows up and looks and says, you know, there is some truth to this, but I'll bet people will believe anything and they're hucksters and they take advantage of a situation. It's so, so, so true. And this guy, I mean, R.A. Fox was a character and well known as, you know, like you're a stereotypical Yukon prospector, like from a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Right. The beard, the pickaxe, the tall tales, all of it. He was sort of known to be a real who enjoyed attention. Now, he did come across the remains of a woolly mammoth. My goodness, there are gazillions of them on this continent, in Europe. I mean, they were everywhere. Just because the last herd died out on Wrangel Island, it's easy to forget when you think about that, that the planet was their territory. So, yeah, he probably did grab a chunk of it and throw it to his cats. And it doesn't surprise me at all that he put it in his own nasty mouth, right? Because that's just what people did. I know, even though it was 1915 and they sort of should have kind of known better by then, wouldn't you think? But I love this.

I love that you put it in here because it gave us some interesting color to this. Well, it's really rare. You know, when we're working on one of these stories, it's really rare not to come across one of these characters in it. And you have to remember that this guy was a gold rush prospector. And that was a certain kind of individual. Think about some of the prospectors we met in the episode we did on the Headless Valley, right?

You know, it takes a certain kind of personality to leave everything behind and strike out to find your fortune in a vast uncharted wilderness. That's probably going to be a pretty colorful sort of human being, ballsy, extroverted, high tolerance for risk. And that's this guy for sure. I mean, everybody in this episode, all of these explorers and scientists and hunters and prospectors, they found what they found, but they've risked dying of exposure and hunger. I mean, they may have not had much sense when it came to eating museum quality specimens, but they were brave. I'll grant you that. And I know that I mentioned it before a couple times in this discussion that we've had after episodes, but I had no idea that these elephants were as widespread around the world as they were. But of course, they were such hardy creatures in the kinds of climates that they could live in. That part of it, you go, maybe it's not as surprising as it should be. But I had no idea. I knew Asia and Africa, there were elephants. And then they're able to trace back the ancestry to the elephants that we have today. Because I think elephants are the most fascinating creatures, because they seem to have a soul. They seem to be...

They're sentient. Right. Yeah, they're sentient. So the woolly mammoth, it's very... What's interesting about the woolly earth, it dealt with multiple hominid populations. There were the Denisovans and the Neanderthals and ultimately Homo sapiens, which is us. I mean, it was here for so much longer than we've been here. And it weathered and survived so many centuries of migrating around and eating and its thing. But its cousin is the Asian elephant, not the African elephant. And in fact, the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth are more closely related than the Asian and African elephants are.

Isn't that fun to think about? Yeah, it is. So something I learned doing this, and there just wasn't room for it in this episode. One of the things they're hoping to accomplish by bringing the woolly mammoth back, and this is a closer... This is much closer to the truth of de-extinction than what happened with the so-called dire wolf, because the genetic relationship between the Asian elephant and the woolly mammoth is so much closer. So we'll bring the woolly mammoth back, not the exact woolly mammoth, but we're going to get a lot closer to it than they did with the dire wolf.

Part of the reason they want to bring this creature back isn't just as an oddity or to prove that we can, but one of the factors in the changing of the steppe tundra, this dry, cold grassland that covered so much of the planet, the mammoths were a factor in making that ecosystem thrive in the way that the buffalo were a factor in the thriving of the plains of North America. So when the woolly mammoths, they would graze and they would move across the landscape and depositing waste, and it caused the landscape to constantly be regenerating.

The relationship between the animal and the place, it was symbiotic. When we lost the buffalo, and I know we didn't lose all the buffalo, thank you, Brian, but when we lost the great herds of buffalo, the impact on that ecosystem was profound and not for the better. So one of the things they're hoping is to repopulate that part of Siberia where mammoths were indigenous to help restore the natural balance of that ecosystem. Elephants do it now in the parts of the world where elephants roam. Those big feet, crushing and stepping, and there are all these cool symbiotic relationships between certain kinds of plants and the elephant populations that move through those spaces. When the elephants eat certain things, they excrete the seeds. You follow how it works, right? Fascinating. So part of the goal of de-extinctifying the woolly mammoth is to kind of do for the steppe tundra what the buffalo, what restoring the American buffalo population did for the Great Plains.

Can I ask you about the short-faced bears? Because I didn't know about the short-faced bears and the fact that they were a predator for this enormous animal and that they themselves were 11 feet tall. So that's, if you imagine, that's twice my height. I cannot imagine these creatures going around and probably they were a predator just based on their sheer size to begin with.

Their nickname is the bulldog bear because think about a short, you're picturing a bear, like a regular bear like we know today, and they have kind of a snout. Now smush that in, hug that up a bit. That's the short-faced bear. My goodness, they were gigantic and they were monstrous. They were most abundant. Now they were all over North America, but they were most abundant in California. Wow. Isn't that interesting? It is. Yeah. Because they were so gigantic and they were carnivorous, right? Oh wait, I don't know why my, why did YouTube just start up? They were gigantic and they were carnivorous. So they of course, you know, were going to be stalking plant-eating animals, you know, like the mammoth, an antelope and all of those other herbivores, I believe is what they're called. So yeah, it was a wild time. The scimitar-toothed cat, we, we grew up with the saber-toothed tiger, right? And, and most of what we know about that is from cartoons. And I hate when that's what I know. But the scimitar-toothed cat is less famous than the saber-toothed tiger in the way that the short-faced bear is less famous than the saber-toothed tiger. But the scimitar-toothed cat, oh, you want to, there's certain animals, you want to be glad they're not here anymore. Because that thing, imagine something the size of a tiger, but with teeth like a wolf, right? In addition to all the other like big cat magic that it possessed, these were monstrously terrifying creatures. And the mammoth was huge.

The mammoth was enormous. But you know, nature is cruel. And it was a, it was a hell of an ecosystem. It would be, if you could time travel, that would be a cool place to go. Yeah. You could just kind of hover with some binoculars and watch. So yes, the mammoths were insanely plentiful. And for the longest time, in fact, for most of your life, and you were taught in school that the woolly mammoth went extinct because early humans hunted it into extinction. But we know that's not true now. We did hunt the bejeebers out of them. And we certainly made a massive dent in their population. But the woolly mammoths were caught in a period of pretty significant change in the earth, which is alive and ever-changing, both seismically and in terms of our climate.

And the world was just warming up. And the woolly mammoths were not, they had not evolved for a warm wet world, they had evolved for a cold dry world. And so, you know, between predators and natural selection and the changing climate, the population diminished, diminished, diminished, until, and this is the part that always breaks my heart. There weren't mammoths scattered here, there, everywhere. The last mammoths on earth were all together on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean.

And then, Cherie, you did the description of the poor last elephant looking for anyone. Oh, my God. Heartbreaking. It's sad. But doesn't it make you, I thought it would cheer you up to know that that's for the longest time, that's what we thought happened. That there, this little herd on Wrangel Island, you know, they're over time, they were interbreeding.

And they lost genetic diversity. And with the loss of genetic diversity comes, you know, disease and congenital failures and, you know, poor reproductive opportunities, blah, blah. And so, we, for the longest time, thought, well, they just slowly died off one by one. And sooner or later, the day would come when there was only one. And she would not know that she was the last woolly mammoth in the whole world and that there would never be another. And that is heartbreaking. It is.

So, it's kind of good. And this is why some people, it's good that we know more and better now that we understand that the herd went out with a bang all at once. But one of the criticisms that ignorant people, and I say ignorant, not stupid, because they're two different things. One of the criticisms that ignorant people have of science is, well, you can't trust it. It's always changing. Okay. It's changing because as we increase our base of knowledge and our depth of knowledge, we look back on ideas and assumptions and theories that we held in the past. And we bring in this new information and we revise those theories and assumptions. Science, like the earth, is dynamic and alive and ever-evolving. It's not supposed to be written in stone.

So, when they say, well, you know, when I was a kid, this is what they said about chicken pox. Well, you were a kid a long time ago, and a lot has happened between those dark days and today. And so, as we learn more, we revise and re-evaluate. And that's one of the cool things about the woolly mammoth is we've learned more. And so, now we know they weren't driven into extinction by human hunters. There wasn't one last lonely woolly mammoth trumpeting at the sky.

Thank God, because that's so sad. Oh, my God. That makes Charlotte's Web look like a sitcom. It was terrible. Disney's going, wow, let's make a movie. Yeah, it's good, you know. Yeah. And you know, also, that dinner, that 1951 dinner at the Explorers Club, here's what you've got to understand. People believed that that was real up into the mid to late 1970s. People were like, oh, yeah, back in the 50s at the Explorers Club, they all ate a woolly mammoth. Well, they didn't. I love the story of the guy who ate it and threw up because his stomach was smarter than he was. It reminds me of going to Kegger's when I was in college.

Yeah, yeah. Remember when your stomach was smarter than you were? That's why we have the expression, trust your gut. Right, right. So, a couple of things about the smell of the mammoths and the permafrost. This was really an interesting thing to learn. And it's true for critters or people that are frozen for far less than millennia. Right. So, as soon as you die, as soon as a living thing dies, the process of decay sets in very, very swiftly. I mean, you're like, bye, I'm going to heaven.

And you start decomposing. And it is fast and it is nasty. And there's a lot of fascinating stuff going on. But for the woolly mammoths in this case, the ones that are preserved, it looks like a lot of them died kind of in an accident, which is how they ended up submerged in the muck, which then froze around them and preserved them. Right. So, that's why a lot of the intact woolly mammoths that they find, it starts to sound the same, like one tusk was broken, the legs were bent backward underneath them. They can often see the evidence of where the fall was.

Right. So, these gigantic six, eight ton animals fall off of a cliff or a bluff or whatever into the muck and they can't get out and they're going to die. And it's hardening and freezing around them. So, that's why they're so well preserved. Hair, flesh, skin, all of it. Now, centuries go by and they are absolutely rock frozen solid in that permafrost. And then the permafrost begins to warm up, which is the thing that's happening all around the world. We have melting permafrost.

And now the mammoth, that dead thing that's been dead for thousands of years, suddenly that is exposed to oxygen. And that process of decomposition is turbocharged. So, they could, they, explorers and hunters describe being able to smell the smell of the woolly mammoth for miles before finding it. I mean, the process of decay is so rapid.

Which brings us to, I know you boys are hungry and you've been living on bark and horse meat. Hmm. And that flattened mammoth penis does look well marbled and delicious. But does the smell not tell you anything? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. They didn't have Mando. But Sherry, what was interesting too is they were able to see what the contents of the stomach of that animal were. Because death had been so swift.

That's forensically, I've been watching a lot of crime shows. Forensically, you know that that's the case. Because if it had been wandering around aimlessly starving for weeks at a time, that would not be the case. There was a mammoth found, we might've mentioned it in the Headless Valley episode. There was a mammoth found up in that world. Northern British Columbia, Yukon, that whole kind of section of North America.

And it was found in the Great Muck, which is this enormous area where something very catastrophic happened very swiftly. Because they found, we talked about this a little bit, all those animal remains perfectly preserved. And one of the mammoths that they found had a mouthful of buttercups. Wow. That's how swiftly death came. I thought you were going to say butterfingers.

When you said butter, I went, butterfingers? How? How? I'm sorry. Yeah. So what's intriguing about that mammoth with the mouthful of buttercups kind of brings us to the episode we did called Adam and Eve Declassified. This idea of a storm system that descends so rapidly with such arctic temperatures that you can literally, things die in like a minute or seconds even. That's like a polar vortex on turbo speed. But that mammoth, I always think about that mammoth because you have to ask yourself, where and when do buttercups grow? Buttercups grow in grassy meadows and warm temperatures, correct? Yeah, you would guess. Yeah.

So, I mean, the earth, I know some of y'all hear climate change and you break out in a rash, but the earth has been changing its climate since the earth came out of wherever it came from. And yes, human beings do have an impact on that. Okay. So please get over yourself. But the earth is going to do what the earth is going to do. And what it's going to do is probably not going to be awesome for you or me, but here we are. Anyway, there's some speculation about a pretty massive climate shift around that part of the world. Who knows? Some gazillion years ago.

But I think about that mammoth grazing in that meadow, the sun on her back, plucking big pieces of juicy green grass and buttercups out of the ground. And then whatever happened, happened. And she was frozen solid for centuries. I'm sort of fascinated with what happened to them through the course of time where they ceased to be. I mean, we realized that it wasn't just the predators, that it was the climate and all of these things, because you look at these creatures and you think they're kind of indestructible. They seem indestructible because they're so massive. And because they can eat vegetation, they don't have to rely on hunting. You think, well, they're just going to last forever.

There's a lesson in that, in what you just said, if you think about it. You know, the dinosaurs ruled this planet for eons. Like, we're a blink compared to the dinosaurs. And the mammoths, big and plentiful and indestructible and so much territory that they could claim as their own. And yet they're gone. So there is a lesson there for all of us. And for the mammoths, you know, you can, like evolution, maybe given a slower pace of global change, of planetary change, maybe they could have adapted to a warmer, wetter planet.

But they didn't. I mean, they needed that steppe tundra ecosystem. They needed those grasses and they needed all of that to be intact. And they followed it to the Arctic. They followed it to Siberia. You know, the earth's final woolly mammoths, as their habitat changed, they followed their shrinking habitat to its last place. And then that's where they were wiped out.

We don't know yet. We don't know what catastrophic event took all of the Wrangel Island mammoths out at once. But whatever it is, for me, it beats, you know, the poor, lonely last mammoth on earth situation. Wrangel Island is actually pretty close to Alaska. Yeah. Yeah. And Russia. And it's a nap. It's actually Wrangel Island is a nature preserve under the administration of the Russian government. It's uninhabited by people. I think there's some research station stuff on there, but nobody lives. Nobody except animals live on and birds live on Wrangel Island today. It's protected territory. And also, it's it's pretty far north.

Yeah, there's there's no Costco and you're going to hate it. No, Amazon won't deliver. It's going to be awful. So I love the idea of the woolly mammoth coming back. And they're so close, Max, you wouldn't believe how close they are to being able to do this. They've got we've made so many like insane, huge, rapid leaps in terms of decoding that genome. And we know so much more now about doing cloning an animal and creating this animal than we did when Dolly the sheep came out in the mid 1990s. So they're pretty close. And I think I think we probably will in not too many more years be looking at videos of a baby woolly mammoth stumbling around, you know, how sci fi is that? It's amazing. I mean, you know, Jurassic Park came out a little over 30 years ago. And that seemed like science fiction then. But now here we are.

It makes me like I'm not, I learned something. I learned 10 things every day that I'm like, how did I go through my whole life up to this point, not knowing this or not understanding this? Like, because I was a kid out west, you where you go to elementary school shapes a lot of what you're taught. So being a kid out west, I learned a lot about the American buffalo and Lewis and Clark and all of you know, right, westward manifest destiny, westward expansion, all that.

And we spent a lot of time talking about learning about the relationship between the buffalo and the because if, if you don't really ever, if you never really learn that, you wouldn't think of it, right, right. You don't think of well, this environment needs the buffalo, this environment needs the woolly mammoth. That's how these grasses get propagated. That's how these, the soil gets aerated and turned like there's a gazillion fertilized with their waste.

There's so many interlocking systems that are dependent on each other for thriving. And with the loss of the steppe tundra came the loss of the woolly mammoth. But with the loss of the woolly mammoth came the degradation of what was left of the steppe tundra. In the same way with the American buffalo in the plains. You know, sure, you're talking about learning something new. Do you know that up until about 10 years ago, I didn't realize that there was a candy called Swedish fish. I don't know how I missed it. But I did. And everybody else went Yes, of course, there's Swedish fish. They told me with us and went, How did I miss that?

But I have to believe if Swedish fish were found frozen, it melted, that people are not going to go, Look at this. Let's put this in our mouth. I might be tempted, but I think, but I think the Swedish fish will survive. I think that they will survive. So I just, here's the thing, people like, when, when someone tells you something unpleasant, that scares you. It's okay to say, Wow, that is unpleasant. And I'm scared. As opposed to, that's not real. That's not true.

But I understand the impulse to go, that's not real. And that's not true. Because if you think I walk around going, I'll tell you what would be great. It would be so great if a global cataclysm could wipe me off the face of the earth before dinner. I don't do that. Max doesn't do that. We're not walking around going, You know what, are the woolly mammoths extinct? Survival of the fittest. We're not doing that either.

We're, we're even more weirded out and scared by some of this than you are. Because we spend a lot of time with it. Like a lot of time with it because we're weirdos. Yeah. So I've always been fascinated. We love elephants. We've done whole episodes on elephants. Yes. We love elephants. And I've always been fascinated with the woolly mammoth.

You know, of course, our idea of the woolly mammoth is artist renderings and pictures and books and stuff. But they always just seemed like such gentle, shaggy giants just minding their own business. And so the story of what happened to them, the story of what happened to them is sad. It's extra sad, but you know what makes it extra sad?

Because there are no villains in this story. The story of the woolly mammoth is a story of, well, to every season, there's a, you know, everybody gets their moment, but nobody gets to have it forever. Like there's something so profoundly beautifully sad. About the fact that the woolly mammoths were here and they were everywhere, but things changed and now they're gone. We're so wired for having, there has to be a bad guy in the story, you know?

Yeah. There's no villain here. I mean, sure. The short faced prehistoric bear was an asshole, but he was just trying to eat too. He's gone too. He's gone too. Sure. It was a moment and then it was over. He could have learned how to eat vegetation, but no, he had to have meat. Oh, he was that guy? He was that guy. If he had only said, you know, let's try this tree bark.

I know that it's not great. I can make it into a stew. Because look at our bears today. Like they're, you know, they'll eat berries and cliff bars if they can get them, right? They'll eat anything. You know, grizzlies are, you know, the grizzlies want your meat, but you know, like Yogi Bear. Yogi Bear was good with like a vegetarian diet. Yeah, they're pretty much. And pandas, they eat vegetarian diet. I believe that they're primarily a vegetarian. Bamboo. Yeah.

Part of the reason that pandas are in constant danger of disappearing from the face of the earth is twofold. The food that they live on, bamboo, has so little nutrition to it that they have to around the clock, right? And they have very little interest in mating. So like a couple of wild pandas are like, I don't know, you want to have sex and not go extinct? And the other panda is like, I can't, I'm exhausted from eating bamboo. And so they don't, they don't mate.

That is the problem. Did you like that is the problem with giant pandas is they're like, yeah, I mean, I guess we could mate, but I don't know, I'm gonna take a nap and roll down this hill. So, like, there's, when you look at the short face prehistoric bear, he's a lot like my husband, Kevin, who's like, well, I know a vegetarian diet would be better for me. And I like vegetables, but I just don't want to give up meat. Well, here you go. We don't know why the short face bears aren't around anymore. But could it be? Could it be? So let's all like just be patiently waiting and watching how we're doing with the de-extinctification of the woolly mammoth.

And I know it sounds like we crapped all over the de-extinctification of the dire wolf, but that's because they didn't really bring the dire wolf back, did they, Max? No, they didn't. And the clickbaity headlines were exciting. Yes, but. But, and one of the problems with those kind of clickbaity headlines is it does feed this, again, ignorant, not stupid, this ignorant notion that science can't be trusted because it's ever changing. Yeah. And so that that makes me a little bit, that makes me a little bit crazy.

But we are going to, we are going to see the return of the woolly mammoth. Just, we're not going to eat them. We're also not going to eat any meat that's been lying in the permafrost for thousands of years. And I'm not going to eat that steak that's been sitting in my freezer for 18 months, despite the fact that it's been in a freezer bag all that time.

But I'm not going to. I researched that, Max. I didn't know you had an 18-month-old steak in your freezer. Okay. So I researched that trying to figure out, like, how long is meat safe? Well, you can be sure that the science, like the USDA, they didn't think in prehistoric terms. 18 months old, you can eat it, but it's going to be, according to the science, degraded in flavor and texture. Well, they had those ice cubes they were bringing back that were ancient ice cubes. God only knows what was floating in those. Did you not find it, the arrogance of, they ate wheat that had been found in one of the pyramids. They ate preserved fruit from, whatchamacallit, you know, we're at Pompeii. Right.

They had ice cubes from a glacier. Did that not, like, I was almost, I was like covering my eyes in case a lightning bolt from the past struck me, like the arrogance of it. Listen, eating stuff from, like, an ancient Egyptian tomb, more than that, you should be worried about the curse. Oh, who in their right mind would, I wouldn't go into, I wouldn't break into an ancient Egyptian tomb, much less steal the pharaoh's grain. You're going, all right, fine, here's the pharaoh's grain. I think I'm going to eat some of this. But, you know, it was back in the day and people didn't have the same sensitivity. They knew in 1951 when they had this banquet, they knew about germs and stuff. I mean, you know, and they're scientists, for God's sake. It's just, it blows your mind. It blows your mind how recently people were acting like that. Doesn't it? It blows my mind, Sherry. It's unbelievable to me how people are acting now. Oh, the fact that, the fact that there's any debate in the year of our Lord 2025, the fact that there are people are going, you know, germ theory. The ignorance. So next week, we're going to take a radical, like, gear shift and we're going to go to farm country in the Buckeye State. Ohio now, I don't know if people realize, Ohio now is, like, still really rural. But back in the early days of Ohio statehood, it was tremendously rural with this rich, incredible soil and people coming from, people emigrating from all over to take their shot at homesteading and becoming farmers in Ohio. Farm life is hard. It's really stressful. You're at the mercy of the weather and, you know, everything can look like it's going pretty good and then your wheat gets blight or something and that's it. A year's worth of work and you have nothing to show for it. Your animals can get sick and die. There are so many things, a blizzard. There are just a gazillion things that make farming one of the hardest jobs in the whole wide world.

And this is at a time when there are no modern farm tools. There are no modern farm practices. I mean, you are backbreaking labor, night and day, all year round without a break. So we're going to pay a visit to a farm in Ohio and we're going to meet a man who on paper looks like everything's fine, but he's jealous. And the jealousy is making him sick and the sickness from the jealousy is making him crazy. And he's about to do something so unspeakably dark, so shockingly evil, that you'll lose your breath. And then, like some sort of bloodstained Paul Revere, he jumps on his horse and starts proclaiming his crime throughout the countryside. And you know what happened? No one believed him.

Until one bystander pushed back. And that's the only reason that we have the story of Murder Farm to tell you on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com.

And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland.

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