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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in the Halloween season series we're calling the bone collectors about organisms in nature that form Texas chainsaw massacre style collections of bones and other dead body parts.

In the last episode, we talked first about the extinct cave hyena, Crocutuspelia,

which was a Eurasian apex predator of the Pleistocene epic.

These animals are famous for assembling these big pits of animal bones

that are now found preserved in caves and the caves where they lived around the

world. And that in itself provides interesting information about the adaptive characteristics

of these animals, mainly the fact that we sort of talked about them as like a tractor model,

predator, scavenger, that they were strong, had these powerful jaws,

and I think maybe for some reasons of social cooperation as well, we're able to haul large

amounts of animal carcass mass from kill sites or from scavenging sites out in the world,

all the way back to their dens, which were often in caves. And then you find these

assemblages of bones in the caves.

Yeah, they're kind of like tow trucks.

They're out there.

They find a carcass that's been illegally parked, and they're like, well, we've got to take this back to the garage.

And then after that, we talked about an insect native to a small stretch of forest in a mountain range on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, nicknamed the Bone Collector Caterpillar, because of its unusual behavior of, first of all, living inside active spider webs, and then covering its external silk case with dead, dried out insect body parts shopped from the spider's web,

which there's no perfect analogy for on our level, but I was thinking about it like,

if there were a species of bird that lived inside a Kentucky fried chicken and primarily

eight chicken scavenged from people's tables and completely covered the outside of its body with leftover chicken bones so as not to be mistaken by the people working there for like another chicken that should be cooked or something.

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