Episode 482: Smoky Mountain Mystery Animals
About this episode
This episode explores the geological and ecological history of the Great Smoky Mountains and the animals that inhabit them.
I took this episode from an article I wrote for Flying Snake magazine, which was published in December 2020 (Vol. 6, #18). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. The Great Smoky Mountains is a subrange of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretches from the middle of Alabama in the United States north into southeastern Canada. The Appalachians formed when the world’s continents crunched together to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The southern Appalachians formed separately and later than the northern Appalachians, around 270 million years ago. The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies or Himalayas, but by the time the dinosaurs went extinct, they had eroded down to the mountain cores. Sediment weathered from the peaks and filled in valleys. But during the Pleistocene, when massive glaciers covered the northern parts of North America, the weight of the ice pushed the North American plate down, causing the southern part of the plate to rise. Eventually the ancient mountains’ roots were a thousand feet (300 m) above sea level again. Rivers that once flowed east into the Atlantic Ocean or west into the remains of the shallow Western…
More episodes of Strange Animals Podcast
- Episode 488: The Java Tiger Mystery
- Episode 487: Animals and the Sense of Taste
- Episode 486: Two Rediscovered Birds
- Episode 485: Cryodraken’s Very Bad Day
- Episode 484: The Sewellel and the Superflea
- Episode 481: The Pictish Beast
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