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

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Star Trek Week continues here on the show, and I want to turn our attention to a classic monster from the original Star Trek series,

the Mugato's of the planet Neural.

The Mugato is a white gorilla-like creature with a dorsal spine, a tail, and a cranial horn.

In the original season 2 Trek episode, A Private Little War, we see that the creature is highly

aggressive and given its strength,

horns, and spines, it's already a fierce opponent for any humanoid who happens to encounter one.

But we learn that the creature also boasts a venomous bite that can prove lethal, if not

treated. The Megato bites Kirk with its venomous fangs in the episode shortly before Dr. McCoy is able to blast it with his phaser.

What do we have in the natural world to make sense of the Megato? Well, we of course have actual gorillas, which lack the horn, spines, tails, and carnivorous diet of the Magato. Great apes, which include humans,

lack all of these things, and primates in general sometimes have tails and diets that include

meat. Spines and horns, however, are right out. The black horn capuchin monkey, for instance, is

only so named because a pair of hair tufts on its head sort of

look like a pair of horns. But what about venom? Well, we do have something similar in the

pygmy slow loros of Southeast Asia. The creature is able to secrete a toxin from modified

sweat glands near its elbows. When threatened or alarmed, the loris can lick these glands,

mixing the secretion with its saliva.

The toxin then coats the tiny monkey's teeth in order to power up a venomous defensive bite.

In addition, a few other species of monkey and lemur

are known to anoint their fur with toxins

...