Welcome back to 2026’s Month of Horror, and this week we are looking at perhaps the most freaky looking fungus on the planet. With its red body and tendrils this fungus has earned its name of ‘Devil’s fingers’, and the smell of the fungus has helped it earn this title.
Taxonomy and Evolution
The Devil’s fingers fungus has several other common names including the octopus stinkhorn and the squid stinkhorn. All these names refer to the same species which have the scientific name Clathrus archeri. It is one of just over 20 species of fungi belonging to the genus Clathrus, and this genus belongs to a family of fungi called Phallaceae. This family is better known as the stinkhorns for their strong and awful smelling odour, although the family name is in relation to something else. Biologists thought most of the stinkhorns resemble a certain…appendage and named the family after this. Stinkhorns are unique fungi and convergently evolved to have a similar biology to certain species of flowering plant.
Biology
Devil’s fingers go through two very different stages in their life. Like other stinkhorns, they begin life in the ‘egg stage’. In this stage, they resemble small eggs and somewhat are like eggs as the arms of the fungus will eventually grow from these eggs. The eggs range in colour from a light brown to white, although the brown colouration is far more common. Fungi often survive by breaking down organic matter, and Devil’s fingers take nutrients from breaking down decaying plant matter. Not only does this help the fungus grow and develop, but it also helps key nutrients to break apart and return to the soil. Coming from the Devil’s fingers eggs are root-like structures called mycelium which spreads across a wide area and transports both water and nutrients to the main body. The eggs are between 4 and 5 centimetres high. During the summer the eggs ‘hatch’ and the famous arms come out. These arms, or tentacles, are a dark red, and generally Devil’s fingers have between 4 and 8 tentacles. Devil’s fingers’ tentacles can reach up to 14 cm in length.
When the Devil’s fingers burst from their eggs it is clear that they belong to the stinkhorn family. Their smell has been described as resembling a mixture of rotting meat, poo, and garbage. On the tentacles are black patches covered in a slime which gives the fungus its horrific smell. This slime is called ‘gleba’ and is vital in reproduction. The gleba is full of spores and develops that strong smell as a way to attract flies like certain species of flowering plants. Flies will land on the tentacles, eat up some gleba, and ingest spores. The flies will fly off with the spores ready to germinate in their digestive system, and the fly will soon defecate as gleba acts as a natural laxative. As the fly poops the spores are released allowing the next generation of Devil’s fingers to begin growing. There are some debates about whether Devil’s fingers taste nice, but they are edible. Why you would want to eat a fungus that smells of dog poop is beyond my understanding, but that has not put some scientists off.
Distribution and Habitat
Devil’s fingers have to rely on dead plant matter and are found in more temperate climates. However, where Devil’s fingers are naturally found has been up for debate. It seems that they certainly come from Tasmania, but it is unclear if the Devil’s fingers found in Aotearoa are naturally found there or were introduced. The First World War would accidentally introduce this fungus to so many more countries as their spores were accidentally transported in bundles of Australian cotton. In 1980 the first of the fungi were found in the Colombian Andes, and in 1982 the first sighting of Devil’s fingers in the USA happened, in Santa Cruz County, California.
Conservation and Threats
The IUCN Red List has not evaluated the Devil’s fingers, but it has identified the Devil’s fingers as being a highly invasive species. From potentially a small an area as Tasmania the spores have spread across the world as far apart as the UK to Colombia to Madagascar. They were properly introduced to Europe, by accident, thanks to the First World War with sightings of them taking place in France and the UK in 1914. From there it spread to Belgium and east across Europe to Romania and Ukraine. A 2021 paper has argued that the fungus will likely be spreading further north in the next few years as global warming turns the normally seasonally freezing temperature into temperate climates.
Animalogic, ‘The Devil’s Fingers Fungus is Straight Out of Alien‘, YouTube.com, (26/02/2021), [Accessed 17/10/2026]
David Arora and William Burk, ‘Clathrus Archeri, A Stinkhorn New to North America’, Mycologia, 74:3, (1982), 501-504
S.D. Johnson and A. Jürgens, ‘Convergent evolution of carrion and faecal scent mimicry in fly-pollinated angiosperm flowers and a stinkhorn fungus’, South African Journal of Botany, 76, (2010), 796-807
Marcin Pietras, Marta Kolanowska, and Marc-André Selosse, ‘Quo vadis? Historical distribution and impact of climate change on the worldwide distribution of the Australasian fungus Clathrus archeri (Phallales, Basidiomycota)’, Mycological Progress, 20, (2021), 299-311
César Augusto Pinzón-Osorio and Jonás Pinzón-Osorio, ‘Primer registro de Clathrus archeri (Berk.) Dring 1980 (Phallales, Clathraceae) para los andes colombianos’, Boletin Cientifico Centro de Museos, 24:2, (2020), 15-24
Gill Pitts, (ed.), The Natural History Book, Second Edition, (London: DK, 2021)
In October 1803 the village of Hammersmith, now a part of London, was being haunted. A ghostly image was stalking the village and had apparently started attacking the people of Hammersmith. After several months of being haunted an excise officer called Francis Smith took a musket and began hunting for the ghost, and when he saw a man in white he fired thinking he had hit the ghost. In reality, he hit a bricklayer called Thomas Milwood, killing him. As part of 2026’s Month of Horror we will look at the case of the Hammersmith Ghost which caused a legal debate in Britain on the position of self-defence under false impressions.
The Ghost
The first reported cases of a ghost that would haunt Hammersmith for the next few months would first be reported in either late-October or early-November 1803. A white shrouded figure was spotted around the graveyard of the local church and in some of the alleys. What actually happened with these sightings is unclear due to the stories only being written down in the aftermath of the shooting. Regardless of their veracity, these stories created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia among the people of Hammersmith. This led to varying descriptions of the Ghost. While they all claimed to see a white shrouded figure some reports described the Ghost as wearing the ‘hide of a calf, with a pair of enormously large horns and cloven feet.’ This description was perhaps even more terrifying for the locals as the horns and cloven feet would have evoked a more terrifying figure – the devil himself.
The Ghost put fear into the hearts of anyone who saw it. In one story a pregnant woman saw the Ghost and was grabbed causing her to faint. A few days later she would die from the shock. Whether this was true was debatable as there are no reports dating to before the trial that can corroborate this – we do not even have a name for the woman. London newspaper The Morning Post would report that the Ghost had made women and children ‘So terror-struck…that not one will venture over the threshold after five o’clock in the evening’. Despite the belittling approach of the newspaper it was apparent that men also were terrified of the Ghost. In another unverified story a cab driver saw the Ghost and was so scared that he ran away leaving his horses and passengers to the mercy of the Ghost.
Ghosts in England
Ghosts were far from unheard of in English history. Susan Owens has considered the appearance of saints following the Norman Conquest as a form of ghost sighting, and ideas of spirits returning to the land of the living appear in records dating back to the Romans. Romans, who also had their own ideas of being visited by apparitions, had reported local British beliefs about spirits which merged with their own ideas. Most famously, in nearby Ireland there was Samhain, which evolved into Halloween, where the spirits of the dead would return to visit the living when the line between the living and the dead was at its weakest. Ghosts in pre-Reformation Europe were often regarded as the souls of the dead who were trapped in Purgatory, being unable to pass onto either Heaven or Hell. While the post-Reformation educated elite tried to dispel notions of ghosts as optical illusions, as under Protestantism Purgatory was no longer a thing, popular ideas of ghosts persisted.
Popular stories going into the 1700s explained ghosts as the spirits of the departed who were unable to pass on to the next life for whatever reason. A popular genre was a haunting by a deceased lover who were displeased that their living partner had moved on. Ghosts could also visit the living to give warnings, advice, or information. They even went to court. In 1757 the Edinburgh High Court put Duncan Terig and Alexander Bain MacDonald on trial for the murder of Sergeant Arthur Davies five and a half years earlier. The ghost of the deceased apparently visited Alexander MacPherson to tell him where the ghost’s body was buried and who had killed him – somehow Davies had learnt Gaelic beyond the grave as he spoke to MacPherson in Gaelic. This belief allowed the people of Hammersmith to identify who the Ghost might have been in life. A few years prior a Thomas Flynn assaulted his estranged wife, went to the cemetery, and slit his throat and stabbed himself. Flynn’s violent death and with his death being by suicide meant that his spirit would be unable to pass on and would be barred from Heaven.
Assault and Murder
Through December 1803 and early-January 1804 the people of Hammersmith were increasingly paranoid thanks to the Ghost. This was especially the case as there had been reports that the Ghost had been assaulting people, mainly women. However, one case had a man being violently attacked by the Ghost. Thomas Groom, a brewer’s servant, was walking through the cemetery with a friend when the Ghost grabbed him from behind and held him by the neck. The Ghost eventually ran off and Groom reportedly got ill from a mix of shock and being throttled. As Groom had described the Ghost being soft and wearing felt certain members of the community became convinced that the Ghost was actually a man. By the end of December local night watchman William Girdler began organising patrols to look for the Ghost, and on December 29 he apparently saw the Ghost. He gave chase and managed to grab onto the Ghost who shook off its shroud. Due to the darkness Girdler could not see the Ghost’s face who managed to run off into the night.
Things would deadly on 3 January 1804. Tax excise officer Francis Smith wanted to take part in the patrols and had spent the evening talking to locals in the pub. He had approached Girdler to ask the night watchman to join him on a patrol, something Girdler agreed to when he had finished his rounds. By this time Smith had not only declared to the pub that he intended to hunt down the Ghost, but he had grabbed and loaded a musket. Upon entering Black Lion Lane Smith saw a man in white, yelled out a warning, and fired. However, the figure was not a Ghost, but a bricklayer. Smith had just shot and killed Thomas Milwood. The young bricklayer was wearing the white clothing of his profession, and had actually ignored his mother-in-law who advised him to wear a coat after Milwood had already been mistaken for the Ghost. He had just left the house of his parents and sister looking for his wife who had not yet arrived at home. Upon realising that he shot and killed Milwood the new murderer collapsed and let himself be arrested.
Trial of the Ghost-Killer
The ensuing court case would propel the Hammersmith Ghost from a local story to a national one. Francis Smith never denied that he shot and killed Thomas Milwood, he instead argued that he thought Milwood was the Ghost and had fired. This would become a major bone of contention during the trial. Although the papers said that Smith was sober, he had spent the evening in the pub and was clearly not sober. Milwood’s sister testified that she heard Smith cry out a warning to Milwood, but that he fired immediately without getting a response. He would have been close to Milwood because Milwood had gunpowder on his face! Again, as Smith never denied killing Milwood the real question was if he had done it meliciously. Alcohol, a dark night, and a desire to end the Ghost had driven Smith to kill, but he would claim it would be in self-defence. The jury decided that, while he did kill Milwood, that Smith had done so under mistaken identity, and they gave a verdict of manslaughter. However, the sitting judge Archibald MacDonald was not happy. He sent it back to the jury with a comment, later reported on in the press:
However disgusted the jury might feel in their own minds with the abominable person guilty of the misdemeanor of terrifying the neighborhood, still the prisoner had no right to construe such misdemeanor into a capital offence, or to conclude that a man dressed in white was a ghost … In this case there was a deliberate carrying of a loaded gun, which the prisoner concluded he was entitled to fire, but which he really was not; and he did fire it with a rashness which the law does not excuse. In all the circumstances of the case, no man is allowed to kill another rashly.
The Newgate Calendar
Effectively, the judge meant that there was no actual law broken if Milwood had been the Ghost, other than being a public nuisance, and that did not give anyone the right to become a vigilante. It was to be a black-or-white verdit: guilty or not guilty. With that the jury returned a guilty verdict, and with a guilty verdict for murder this meant Francis Smith was sentenced to death. Luckily for him the reporting of the trial had reached the highest office in Britain, that of the king. A royal pardon reduced the sentence from the death penalty to a year in prison.
The Ghost and Ghosts
Whether there ever was a genuine Hammersmith Ghost is up to whether you believe in ghosts or not. In my opinion, there was more than one Ghost as locals realised they could have fun and play pranks at their most innocent, or use it as a cover to assault women. This is not out of the question. Just a decade before London had been plagued by the ‘London Monster’ who would assault women for his own sexual pleasure before he was arrested and imprisoned. It is not out of the question that someone used the Hammersmith Ghost hysteria to assault women for their own pleasure. After all, most of the sightings involved just a white sheet so it would not be difficult for someone to replicate the Ghost. One person did confess to being the Ghost. During the trial a cobbler called James Graham confessed to have dressed up as a ghost to scare his apprentice in revenge for his apprentice scaring his children with ghost stories. Around three years later Graham would be arrested for being drunken and disorderly after Graham and another man tried to stop the police from arresting a sex worker.
The press coverage of the Hammersmith Ghost would have ripple effects. Other ‘ghost’ sightings and copycats would crop up during the trial itself. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal would report another apparent ghost in St. James’s Park in London, something which the paper linked to the Hammersmith Ghost. Eight years later another wave of ghost sightings broke out in Hammersmith and several nearby villages, all of which are now part of London, and the police soon arrested a man. Described as a ‘noted sporting figure’ we do not know who this man was as he skipped his trial. Ironically, the White Hart, where Thomas Milwood was brought when his body was found, is apparently haunted by the ghost of Milwood.
Law and Mistaken Identity
The Hammersmith Ghost would establish a legal precedent in the UK that would last until the 1980s. The conviction of Francis Smith began the precedent that acting on mistaken belief did not absolve someone of committing a crime, even in self-defence. For the next 170 years the Hammersmith Ghost haunted the UK legal system, but a court case in 1983 would change that. A man called Gladstone Williams witnessed one man assaulting another, and ended up assaulting the assaulter. However, it turned out the assaulter was preventing a man who had just mugged someone from getting away. The Hammersmith case initially held up and Williams was sentenced for assault, but he appealed and legal history was made. The following year the court heard the appeal and the judge made this verdict:
In a case of self-defence, where self-defence or the prevention of crime is concerned, if the jury came to the conclusion that the defendant believed, or may have believed, that he was being attacked or that a crime was being committed, and that force was necessary to protect himself or to prevent the crime, then the prosecution have not proved their case. If, however, the defendant’s alleged belief was mistaken and if the mistake was an unreasonable one, that may be a peaceful reason for coming to the conclusion that the belief was not honestly held and should be rejected. Even if the jury come to the conclusion that the mistake was an unreasonable one, if the defendant may genuinely have been labouring under it, he is entitled to rely upon it.
This effectively means that if someone performed some form of criminal act believing they were going to stop a crime, if it can be proved that the accused genuinely thought they were stopping a crime could absolve them. In the early-2000s this would be written directly into British law. The Hammersmith Ghost had been exorcised from the British legal system, and the precedent set by Francis Smith two centuries earlier was no longer relevant.
Continuing the 2026 Month of Horror theme we are looking at a fish which has become infamous in the media for being a ravenous monster – the red-bellied piranha. Like most things in life the red-bellied piranha is not the monster that Hollywood has portrayed it as. This week we will look at this remarkable fish, and how it is not actually a monster.
Taxonomy and Evolution
The red-bellied piranha has the scientific name Pygocentrus nattereri with it sharing this genus with two other species. They belong to an order of fish called Characiformes which is a diverse order of fish that also includes tetras, but they specifically belong to a family called Serrasalmidae. This family is found exclusively in South America and not only includes piranhas, but also includes silver dollars and the very strange pacu. Around 92 species belong to this family, with piranhas first appearing in the fossil record during the Miocene, sometime between 15 and 11 million years ago.
Biology and Behaviour
Red-bellied piranha are large for piranhas reaching around 30 cm (around a foot) in length and reaching 1.81 kilograms (4 pounds). This might seem quite small, but that is largely because piranhas are actually quite small fish. These piranhas have an oval-shaped body which is strangely thin. Piranhas change colour as they age beginning life having silver scales with dark spots. As they age the red-bellied piranha develops black and gray scales which are actually incredibly shiny. This is something often overlooked with piranhas – their scales are highly reflective. What gives this piranha their name is their iconic belly which is a red or orange colour, something which is darker in females than the males. Their dorsal fin is quite small and black with an orange anal fin. Red-bellied piranhas have faces with a projecting lower jaw full of their infamous sharp teeth.
Piranha teeth are quite amazing. Piranhas have interlocking serrated teeth directly part of the jaw, and these sharp teeth are attached to strong muscles. This gives piranhas a strong bite, and for their size piranhas have one of the strongest bite forces of all vertebrates. The red-bellied piranha is overshadowed by the black piranha which, if scaled-up, would have a bite force more powerful than that of a great white shark. Red-bellied piranhas obviously use their jaws to tear apart prey, but they are also used for communication. Primarily, piranhas use their swimbladders in conjuncture with various muscles to produce sounds, although most of these sounds have been noted as being made when they are held in gillnets. However, other sounds are made by the snapping and contracting of the jaws which are especially used during the breeding season when they become more territorial. Piranhas have noticeably large eyes and nostrils as it gives them a way to navigate through the murky waters of the rivers they call home.
Red-bellied piranhas are shoaling fish, forming shoals of up to 30 fish. These shoals are not formed to attack animals as they swim through the water, if anything it is the opposite. Piranhas form shoals as a way to defend themselves from predators. The older, and larger, fish stick to the centre while the younger and smaller fish are on the outside of the shoal. A 2005 paper found that red-bellied piranhas in smaller shoals exhibit higher levels of anxiety compared to those in larger shoals. Piranhas are monogamous and form breeding pairs. Courtship involves swimming in circles in line with one another, and if successful the male will make a circular nest in sediment with vegetation reaching 15 cm in diameter. The female will lay thousands of eggs on the vegetation which the males then fertilise. The parents will protect the nest and this is when they are most aggressive. Most bites on humans happens at this time as the piranhas bite those who get too close.
Diet and Predators
We have seen it in the media – a shoal of piranhas reduce an unfortunate soul to a skeleton in seconds. Piranhas can certainly do this, but not to large animals. This myth was started by former US president Theodore Roosevelt who saw piranhas tear apart a cow. However, in reality locals had cornered off a shoal for a long period of time so they were starving. Normally, red-bellied piranha will only tear apart fish and sometimes smaller birds like egrets. On the show River Monsters, in a famous scene, the presenter Jeremy Wade poured blood into a piranha-filled pool and got in, and the piranhas swam away from him. Unless you are a fish or bird, or maybe a capybara, then piranhas will not tear your apart. Even then, red-bellied piranhas are more likely to nip at the fins of larger fish than eat them alive. Small fish, crustaceans, and insects make up most of their diet, and they eat a lot of fallen fruit. They are eaten by a lot of animals including larger fish, storks, caiman, otters, and river dolphins. There is another species of piranha which relies on the red-bellied piranha for food, but they are cleaners. The spotted piranha will eat parasites on the sides of red-bellied piranhas keeping the larger species clean and healthy.
Distribution and Habitat
Red-bellied piranha are freshwater tropical fish living in waters between 15 and 35 degrees Celsius in temperature. They are found in what is called ‘whitewater’ which is water with a neutral pH with a lot of sediment floating in it. This is mainly because their habitat is constantly shifting as rivers change course flooding forests that previously was on the land. Red-bellied piranhas are found across most of tropical South America reaching from Colombia and Venezuela in the north, across the Guianas and Brazil, and down through Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay to north Uruguay and Argentina. Some have been introduced to lakes in the US and China.
Conservation and Threats
The red-bellied piranha was last assessed by the IUCN in 2020 when they gave a classification of ‘Least Concern’ with their population being stable. Being hardy, adaptable fish found over a wide area they have managed to survive changes to their environment. For more specialised fish keepers they have become popular, although difficult. Their need for red meat and for biting the fins of other fish make them an expensive and difficult to care for fish. There is a captive breeding market which also means that they are not being taken from the wild to meet the demands for the pet trade.
G.L. Brejão, ‘Piranha-Vermelha’, IUCN Red List, (21/12/2020), [Accessed 10/10/2026]
LivingZoo, ‘Piranhas: The Animal That Just Doesn’t Make Sense’, YouTube.com, (31/05/2026), [Accessed 10/10/2026]
Sandie Millot, Pierre Vandewalle and Eric Parmentier, ‘Sound production in red-bellied piranhas (Pygocentrus nattereri, Kner): an acoustical, behavioural and morphofunctional study’, The Journal of Experimental Biology, 214, (2011), 3613-3618
Dick Mills, Aquarium Fish, (London: DK, 1993)
Joseph S. Nelson, Terry C. Grande, and Mark V.H. Wilson, Fishes of the World, Fifth Edition, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016)
Helder Lima Queiroz, Marcela B. Sobanski and Anne E. Magurran, ‘Reproductive strategies of Red-bellied Piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri Kner, 1858) in the white waters of the Mamirauá flooded forest, central Brazilian Amazon’, Environmental Biology of Fishes, 89, (2010), 11-19
Helder Queiroz and Anne E. Magurran, ‘Safety in numbers? Shoaling behaviour of the Amazonian red-bellied piranha’, Biology Letters, 1, (2005), 155-157
Last year Ryan Coogler’s Sinners took the world by storm for its interesting plot, amazing acting, soundtrack, and world the movie is set in. It immediately became one of my favourite movies and this period drama set in an African-American community in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 took immense care to represent the time period in which it is set. Well, except for the vampires. It is Black History Month here in the UK and being October it is the Month of Horror. Sinners is a perfect vehicle to look at history. As I will be talking about key plot points in the movie this post will contain multiple spoilers.
Vampires
Vampires led by the Irish vampire Remmick are the main antagonists of Sinners, and for the most part they are representative of how we imagine vampires in the media. They burn in sunlight, drink blood, need to be invited in, and are weak to garlic and silver. Sinners does change up some of the vampire lore. Largely influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, media has created the concept of the ‘head vampire’, a progenitor or powerful vampire that can control other vampires. Sinners portrays the head vampire Remmick as leading a quasi-hive mind. When bitten Remmick has access to the memories of those he turned – speaking in Mandarin and revealing knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan based on those he turned – and those turned can likewise access his memories. This led to one of the most iconic scenes in the movie when Remmick led a traditional Irish folk dance for a congregation consisting of Deep South African-Americans, two Klansmen, and one Chinese man. This idea feeds into one of the themes of the movie itself – American ‘melting pot’ against the identity of minorities. The ability of ‘Preacher Boy’ Sammie to transcend time and space with his music attracted Remmick who wanted to reconnect with his lost past and promises the black community a world without racism, Jim Crow, or exclusion. However, this comes at the expense of them losing the ability to be themselves; their identity is subsumed into Remmick’s community. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourse of America being a ‘melting pot’ expected migrants to abandon their identity and become ‘American’. Instead of being African-American, Chinese, Choctaw, or Irish they had to be ‘American’, and communities that kept their culture were treated with distrust or, for Native Americans, genocide. We will expand on this idea later.
The characters are fully aware of what vampires are, which thankfully means that Sinners avoids the trope of going in depth of what vampires are, as by 1932 vampires were well known in the English-speaking world. A decade earlier Germany produced one of the first film adaptations of Dracula with Nosferatu, and in 1933 Universal’s famous Dracula starring Bela Lugosi would be released. However, what is unique about Sinners is that the lead vampire, Remmick, is Irish. Cultures across the world have developed stories of blood-sucking nocturnal demons independently – before consistent street lighting was available the dark was genuinely scary and dangerous, and blood keeps us alive. Ireland also had several tales of blood-sucking revenants such as Abhartach, a lord who rose from the dead and demanded blood from his town. There have been unconfirmed stories that Abhartach inspired a later Irish author – Bram Stoker. However, ‘vampires’ as we understand them emerged in popular culture largely from the popularisation of eastern European tales from Poland, Serbia, and Romania. Somewhat like we discussed with American culture and the melting pot, these ideas of vampires saw local blood-sucking creatures subsumed into the title of ‘vampire’. Abhartach became a vampire and another tale by an Irish writer brought together several ideas creating the modern vampire.
Music and Stories
Perhaps the most important part of Sinners is the importance of music and stories to identity. We see it in the very first lines of the movie:
There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past… and the future. In Ancient Ireland, they were called Fili. In Choctaw land, they call them Firekeepers. And in West Africa, they’re called griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities but it also attracts evil.
Sinners plays around with music regularly featuring blues, soul, jazz, Southern gospel, and Irish folk throughout. It reflects how integral music is to culture and identity, and how history is told through these means. For most of history identity and community has been passed on via oral stories, even in societies with written sources it is only within the last century that the majority of the population were literate. Sammie’s ability to play so well allowed him to pierce the veil between time and space which attracts Remmick. The vampire, isolated from his family and heritage, sought out Sammie to use his ability to reconnect to the vampire’s past. Meanwhile, it also created one of the best scenes in the movie. As Sammie plays the blues his music pierces through time connecting the blues of the 1930s to hip-hop of the 1990s and to West African dances from centuries ago. As Grace and Bo Chow enter the scene their histories are brought into the dance with Beijing opera performers re-enacting Journey to the West are seen. Sinners demonstrates how people have managed to keep their culture alive, and, in the case of African-Americans, Choctaw, Chinese, and Irish depicted in the movie, survive colonialism, genocide, and forced migration.
A Mississippi juke joint
Sinners further depicts the competing musical trends in 1930s African-American communities – the Church against the juke joint. While this was not a binary – plenty of African-Americans would go to church on Sunday and in the evening enjoy jazz and the blues – they represent how African-Americans used music to create their own space in Jim Crow. Since the end of slavery the church served as a way to connect the community together and forge that sense of community. It is for that reason why so many churches were targeted by white supremacists when they wanted to attack the black community. It is also for that reason that much of the civil rights movement, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, came from black churches – Martin Luther King, after all, was a reverand. As Brendan Payne has argued, during the rise of Prohibition white wet politicians reached out to the black church as potential allies, as the evangelical roots of the dry movement was deeply tied to white supremacists. A minor antagonist of Sinners is Sammie’s father Jebediah who tries to keep Sammie out of the juke joint and in the church. While abusive, Jebediah genuinely believed that the gospel music of the church would protect his son and community. The church was the centre of the community and a way to protect the community – it was their own space away from a white supremacist society and was a safe space. This is why gospel music is so uplifting, it was, and is, an expression of joy. In the words of Elijah Ward:
Anyone who has seen a great gospel show in a black church will feel the shock of recognition, not only at the power of the performer to move and speak for her audience, but at the way the truth and soulfulness is supported by broad, self-conscious theater. Working for a public that still has its roots in the world where Rainey held court, gospel stars continue to surround themselves with the flashing lights and rolling bass drums, and the gaudy array of gold and diamonds, which a more urbane performer might consider “cheap.”
Ward, Escaping the Delta, 43
The crux of the movie surrounds the new juke joint opened by Sammie’s cousins Smoke and Stack, effortlessly played by my Hollywood crush Michael B. Jordan, newly returned Chicago. Juke joints were, at times, impromptu venues where the black community in the Deep South could play music, gamble, drink, and party. Sometimes these joints received black and white patrons – one in the Mississippi Delta accepted white patrons in the early evening and black patrons later. It as the character Delta Slim says in the movie: See, white folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it. The blues emerged from the oral histories and resistance we have already discussed. West African stories of tricksters became the lyrics of the earliest blues songs as a way to resist Jim Crow and white supremacist violence. Blues itself was part of a heritage of communal singing that can be traced directly back to West African singing traditions. Singing in plantations as a group while working was a way to build community in resistance to the crushing horror of slavery, and from there African-American music genres emerged. Migration after slavery allowed northern music trends to travel south bringing the music of Harlem and Chicago to the Deep South where it blended with local musical genres. This movement between North and South allowed the emergence of blues and jazz creating a symbiotic heritage. We see this reflected in Sinners. Smoke and Stack return home from Chicago bringing a specifically northern style to the southern juke joint, and at the end an elderly Sammie is played by Buddy Guy. A blues musician from Louisiana he moved north to Chicago bringing the southern musical flare to the north.
Race and Community
Mary and Stack
Sinners features several characters who did not fit the black and white binary that the Jim Crow South presented itself. First, there is Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld. Mary is mixed race and is described as an ‘octoroon’, meaning that she had one black grandparent. Mixed-race people undermined the strict binary that Jim Crow aimed to create, hence the ‘one drop’ law which stated that if someone had just ‘one drop’ of African-American blood they were legally ‘black’. However, on the ground things were more complicated. Mixed-race people with lighter skin could theoretically ‘pass’ as white and evade the worst aspects of Jim Crow, but at the cost of either buying into the logic of Jim Crow, or by alienating themselves from family. Women in particular were at risk from increased violence if found communicating with their black relatives if their skin was light enough to be considered ‘passing’. Kathryn Schumaker found that in court records from Natchez, Mississippi white men who married black women would face far fewer restrictions compared to if a white woman married a black man, or had his baby. As Schumaker argues, patriarchy and the supremacy of men over women trumped white supremacist fears of miscegenation. This is represented in Sinners. Stack pushed Mary away to protect her from the white community – as she was passing the whites would just see a white woman with a black man.
Jim Crow viewed America to either be black or white, and alongside mixed-race people there were also other minorities. Jim Crow simply did not know what to do with Native Americans, Mexicans, and Asians. While some states, like Texas, enacted ‘Juan Crow’ laws against Mexicans or, like California, campaigned to exclude Asian migrants, in the Mississippi Delta they were not present enough in large numbers for white supremacists to understand where they fit. Grace and Bo Chow represent the little known Mississippi Chinese community. Chinese communities began being brought to the Deep South by plantation owners as a way to supplant black labour following Emancipation in the 1870s. As plantations found a way to legally enslave African-Americans many Chinese moved on or settled to open their own businesses. Chinese-Americans did not fully fit into the racial dynamic that Jim Crow created. They faced discrimination because they were not white, but they were not black. This resulted in Chinese stores opening that would actually serve African-Americans, often on credit due to the economic constrictions placed on many rural African-Americans. This is why the Chows had two stores in Sinners – one to serve African-Americans and one for whites. As Shaolu Yu has argued, Delta Chinese faced racial discrimination from whites, such as being barred from owning homes in the white part of town, but their own desire to retain their culture meant marrying African-Americans was openly discouraged. The Delta Chinese sat in an unusual position where they were considered both ‘close to white’ and ‘close to black’.
Irish, Whiteness and Americanness
Returning to Remmick his character offers a unique metaphor for migration and Irish oppression, and also the assimilation to the American idea. Remmick represents how an oppressed people can become the oppressor. Remmick says that he remembers the Christianization of Ireland as when Sammie says the Lord’s prayer he says:
Long ago… the men who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a Devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth. We are earth and beast, and god. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I – to everything.
There is some debate among fans if this was actually in reference to the English colonization of Ireland with the ‘forced these words upon us‘ being English instead of the Lord’s prayer. In an interview Remmick’s actor Jack O’Connell mentioned that Remmick was 600 to 700 years old meaning this date was likely sometime in the mid-1100s when Henry II used Ireland’s apparent lack of Christian orthodoxy to invade. Since then the Irish was oppressed and faced genocide by a new landed class that, from the 1500s would see Protestants expel Catholics from their land. Thanks to generations of English, later British, exploitation an Irish diaspora emerged, especially from the 1840s when British policies led to the infamous Potato Famine. One million Irish starved to death and another million left thanks to the British-caused famine. Upon arriving in Protestant America many Irish continued to face discrimination as anti-Catholicism caused violence against Irish communities. This would continue through the next century with the second Klan expanding their targets to also include Catholics. As late as the 1960s people were debating John F. Kennedy’s loyalties as he took the presidency. For many Protestant Americans the Irish were not white, an idea shared by Protestants back in England. Remmick famously has his vampires dance to him singing Rocky Road to Dublin – a song how a poor Irishman from a rural community goes to Dublin where he is robbed and then to Liverpool where he is attacked for being Irish. Remmick’s story, like the African-Americans and Choctaw, was one of being beaten down by hegemonic white supremacist powers.
The Irish-American community, however, did not remain the oppressed. Irish migrants used the Civil War and their enlistment into the Union Army to prove their ‘Americanness’ and began buying into the racial capitalist system of the US. As Noel Ignatiev argued, by proving that they could oppress black and indigenous communities the Irish began shifting to the ‘whiteness’. We can see this in regards to Joe Biden and the Irish government. While Ireland does have a racism issue the Irish government has shown solidarity with Palestine during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, being one of the only European nations to walk out of genocider-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu’s United Nations speech. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who prides himself on having Irish ancestry, actively supported Israel’s genocide. The long history of Ireland’s oppression meant that, despite domestic racism, Ireland showed solidarity with Palestine, whereas Irish-American shift into becoming white Americans meant that a self-proclaimed Irish president aided and abetted genocide. Remmick represents the shift. As mentioned above, his anti-racism rhetoric means the black community is subsumed into his identity, an identity where he actively hid his Irish accent through most of the movie. Remmick, the abused migrant who was displaced by settler colonialism, did not reject racial supremacy but embraced it. This is also where the Choctaw come in. The Choctaw Nation famously sent money to Ireland during the Famine, which Ireland reciprocated during Covid, and this Irish vampire is hunted down by Choctaw where he seeks refuge with Klansmen.
Racial Violence
Sinners is set during Jim Crow Mississippi and does not shy away from showing the horrors of racism that black communities faced. Smoke and Stack buy the juke joint from Hogwood who turns out to be the local leader of the KKK, and his nephew and niece-in-law are KKK members who become the first to be turned by Remmick. Hogwood’s lie that ‘Klan don’t exist no more‘ was not entirely incorrect in real life. During the 1920s the second KKK was a widespread political force exceeding over 3 million members at its peak in 1925/26, but just a few years later it was collapsing. Overt violence, financial incompetence, and several rape scandals had dinted the popularity of the Klan, and the Depression sapping everyone’s funds led to the Klan shrinking to just a few thousand. That did not mean that Klan or racial violence had stopped. Lynchings still terrorised black communities and the Klan in Camp Hill, Alabama in 1931 murdered a labour organiser who was trying to organise 200 black sharecroppers. The Klan’s attempt to burn down the juke joint, only to be met by a furious Smoke armed to the teeth with World War I weaponry, was incredibly common. They were a terror group that aimed to put fear in the hearts of the black community.
Sinners shows another form of racial violence other than the lynchings and Klan terror that still impacts many African-Americans – economic racism. The character Cornbread is a sharecropper, it is implied that the plantation Sammie lives on is a sharecropping plantation, and we see a chain gang early on. During Reconstruction the white planter class were looking for a way to suppress the now free black population, and a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment allowed them to do this. Forced labour without pay is perfectly legal in the United States if someone has been found guilty of a crime, so white law enforcement used vague charges of ‘vagrancy’ to re-enslave African-Americans. Alongside this was sharecropping. This, at times, was effectively a form of peonage where poor farmers rented land from landowners, and in return the farmers would give the landowner a percentage of the crop. However, high interest rates and payment in company scrip, in the movie this is when the elderly patron pays using a button, turned many sharecroppers into peons. By 1930 there were 1.3 million sharecroppers, most of whom were poor whites, but black sharecroppers were in worse conditions and higher levels of debt. This was restoring the plantation system under the guise of the law. In Mississippi sharecropping was only abolished in the 1990s, but the use of slave labour in the form of prison labour is still perfectly legal in the US.
Hoodoo
There is so much more that I could write about Sinners, but one last thing I want to write about today is Hoodoo. Throughout Sinners the character Annie practices Hoodoo which gave her insight into what Remmick effectively saving the characters from certain doom. Hoodoo, sometimes referred to a rootwork and conjuring, is an African-American spirituality which emerged from the encounter between West African religion, Native American herblore, and European folk remedies. Key to Hoodoo is the oral tradition of herbal healing and remedies, as well as belief in spirits and conversing with the other side. For many practicioners Hoodoo is not distinct from Christianity, the power of protection comes from God, although Hoodoo is not accepted by certain churches. Annie further describes the vampires as ‘haints’, a concept from Hoodoo of a spirit or witch that exhausts a victim until they die. Hoodoo further reflects the theme that goes through Sinners. It was born from oppression and colonialism. African beliefs were brought to the US thanks to slavery, and these believes mixed with the belief of poor Europeans and displaced Native Americans creating a syncretic belief that offered agency to Africans. Especially women. Women, like Annie, found a niche with Hoodoo giving them an important role in resistance to oppression.
Bibliography:
Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, (Warner Bros.: 2025)
Kristofer Allerfeldt, The Ku Klux Klan: An American History, (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2024)
Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010)
Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)
Stephen A. Berrey, The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969, (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)
Khalil Greene, ‘Everything You Missed in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners—COMPLETE Historical Reference Guide’, History Can’t Hide, (16/03/2026), [Accessed 02/10/2026]
Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)
Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995)
Serap Ayșe Kayatekin, ‘Credit and Its Legal Context in Sharecropping Relations in Postbellum Mississippi Delta: From Ownership to Controlling of Laboring Bodies’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 57:2, (2025), 157-175
Brendan J.J. Payne, Gin, Jesus, & Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2022)
Robert Seto Quan, Lotus Among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1982)
Kathryn Schumaker, ‘“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi’, Law and History Review, 41, (2023), 773-794
Rachel Stuart, ‘Sinners: How Real Stories of Irish and Choctaw Oppression Inform the Film’, The Conversation, (29/04/2025), [Accessed 04/10/2026]
Aisling Walsh, ‘Sinners sinks its teeth into Irish settler colonialism’, Red Pepper, (03/03/2026), [Accessed 07/10/2026]
Elijah Ward, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, (New York, NY: Amistad, 2004)
Amy West, ‘Sinners‘ Michael B Jordan says he would be “up for” doing a prequel about his characters’ adventures in Chicago – but Ryan Coogler prefers a little mystery’, Games Radar, (17/04/2025), [Accessed 05/10/2026]
Shaolu Yu, ‘Placing Racial Triangulation, Triangulating Place and Race: Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow Era’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112:1, (2022), 97-122
It is our first Zoopedia post for 2026’s Month of Horror, and to mark the occasion we are looking at when you mix a bat with a ghost. This is the ghost-faced bat, or Peter’s ghost-faced bat, from the Americas which, quite frankly, has a face that only a mother could love.
Taxonomy and Evolution
The ghost-faced bat has the scientific name Mormoops megalophylla, and it shares this genus with one other species, the Antillean ghost-face bat. The Antillean species is smaller than the species we are looking at today. There was a third species simply called the giant ghost-faced bat that went extinct around 70,000 years ago, and it was much larger than the ghost-faced bat. They belong to a family called Mormoopidae which consists of other species of bats known for having faces like they have had a skillet to it. These are small echolocating bats whose messed up faces act as radar dishes as they fly through the night.
Biology and Behaviour
Ghost-faced bats are medium-sized bats reaching around 6.7 cm in length and weights between 13 and 19 grams. For a bat they are on the larger size, but they are generally quite small. Then there is their face which combines a bulldog with the Ferengi from Star Trek. This is due to them having short skulls with a flattened face, but also having a steep forehead and protruding lower jaw as well as with curved ears. They have brown bodies which they will moult every year producing a new layer of fur for the new seasons.
Why do ghost-faced bats have such strange looking faces? Simple, echolocation. Like many other species of bat they have a heavily specialised organ in their skull which emit calls that reflect off of surfaces. These waves are then reflected back at the bat which their scrunched up face can pick-up like an aerial dish. This gives them an ability to fly through the night as clearly as we can see during the day. These calls are just 50 kHz lasting just 4 milliseconds, but they are so sensitive the bats can pick up the calls.
Mostly due to where they live we have do not have much information about how ghost-faced bats reproduce. They need deep limestone caves for roosting which has made it difficult to properly observe them in the wild. A paper published as recently as 2025 managed to track reproduction in this species and found they breed sometime between October and December with birth taking place in early summer with lactation ending by the end of summer. Sensitive to the cold the newborns are born deeper in the cave which means it is harder to observe them. Ghost-faced bats seem to have just one baby at a time.
Distribution and Habitat
The ghost-faced bat is found in forests where they have access to plenty of insects, although they roost in caves and abandoned mines. They prefer limestone and deep caves, especially when breeding as it helps keep the babies warm. Ghost-faced bats prefer warmer climates, around 40 degrees Celsius, and their metabolism collapses when temperatures get cold. They are found as far north as southern Texas, with a lot being found in Big Bend, through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and then into northern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and very northern Peru.
Diet and Predators
Like many bats that use echolocation the ghost-faced bat is insectivorous. This means that their diet mainly consists of insects, especially moths. Their echolocation helps these bats detect flying insects and catch them while flying, never having to ever come close to the ground. It is hard to catch a bat so the ghost-faced bat has few predators with their main predators being owls, hawks, and other bats, such as spectral bats.
Conservation and Threats
The last time that the IUCN Red List would assess the ghost-faced bat was in 2016 giving them a rating of ‘Least Concern’, but with a warning that their numbers were decreasing. Deforestation and the loss of roosting sites through mining or land development has reduced the safe spaces where they can reproduce. The populations in Ecuador may even be at risk of entirely vanishing if actions are not taken.
M. Alejandra Camacho, Veronica Leiva-D, Ricardo López-Wilchis and Santiago F. Burneo, ‘Genetic diversity of the ghost-faced bat Mormoops megalophylla Peters, 1864 (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae) in Ecuador; implications for its conservation’, Therya, 8:3, (2017), 223-232
L. Davalos, J. Molinari, H. Mantilla-Meluk, C. Medina, J. Pineda and B. Rodriguez, ‘Mormoops megalophylla, Ghost-faced bat’, IUCN Red List, (09/07/2016), [Accessed 02/10/2026]
Robert S. DeBaca and Clyde Jones, ‘The Ghost-faced bat, Mormoops megalophylla, (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae) from the Davis Mountains, Texas. (General Notes)’, The Texas Journal of Science, 54:1, (2002)
Gihovani Ademir Samano‐Barbosa, Ixchel Rojas‐Martínez, Sergio Leonardo Porto-Ramírez, Fernando Salgado‐Mejia, Ahiezer Rodríguez‐Tobón, Arturo Salame‐Méndez, Edith Arenas‐Ríos, Luis Manuel Guevara‐Chumacero and Ricardo López‐Wilchis, ‘Morphological and Histological Variations of the Reproductive Organs During the Annual Cycle in a Neotropical Bat: Peters’ Ghost‐Faced Bat Mormoops megalophylla (Chiroptera: Mormoopidae)’, Journal of Morphology, 286, (2025), e70066
It is finally October 2026 so it is our annual Month of Horror, and to start off we are looking at an extinct animal that would have been terrifying to our modern eyes. This was the Megarachne, long thought to be a giant spider. However, since its initial discovery we have found that Megarachne was not in fact a spider, but something else entirely…
Discovery and Fossils
Megarachne in Walking with Monsters under the name ‘Mesothelae’
The first fossil belonging to Megarachne was described in 1980 from a fossil site in Argentina by Argentinian palaeontologist Mario Hünicken. The holotype was not complete but Hünicken recognised it was a very large arthropod. This made sense as the fossil site dated to the Carboniferous, a time of increased humidity and oxygen percentage in the atmosphere which allowed arthropods to grow to large sizes. At the time it was believed that this newly described arthropod was a giant spider, perhaps the largest in history, so Hünicken gave it the name Megarachne servinei meaning ‘Servine’s Giant Spider’. Servine was a fossil collector who found the fossil, and ‘Giant Spider’ as it was the largest known spider. For the next 25 years it would be known as a giant spider and would, sort of, be featured in the BBC documentary Walking with Monsters. This specimen was soon locked in a bank vault leaving only copies for palaeontologists to look at. Then, in the early-2000s, another specimen was found which completely changed how we understand Megarachne. In a 2005 paper written by Paul Selden, Jose Corronca, and Hünicken it was found that Megarachne was not a spider at all, but was a member of a group called eurypterids.
Taxonomy and Evolution
Instead of being a giant spider we now know that Megarachne was a eurypterid, better known as ‘sea scorpions’. Despite their name eurypterids were not related to scorpions and were not even arachnids. However, they were somewhat related belonging to a different branch of a group called chelicerata which includes modern arachnids and horseshoe crabs. Unlike the arachnids, the eurypterids never ventured onto land, but they did for a long time dominate the waters. Yes waters. Much like the ‘scorpion’ part of their name the ‘sea’ part is inaccurate as eurypterids did move into freshwater, and the last few species were freshwater. Megarachne belonged to one of these later families, called Mycteropidae, that evolved a very different lifestyle to some of the more famous eurypterids, like Pterygotus. A 2010 paper has suggested that Megarachne was part of a growth stage alongside Mycterops and Woodwardopterus, both of which were used to help reconstruct Megarachne, so if that is the case Megarachne would be declared invalid. For now, Megarachne is classified as its own genus and is not synonymous with the other eurypterids.
For an arthropod Megarachne was large. Based on the two specimens that we have Megarachne reached lengths of around 54 centimetres (21 inches) which would have made them the largest known spider, but among eurypterids they are far from the largest. In contrast, the largest eurypterid Jaekelopterus reached over 2.5 metres in length! What allowed palaeontologists to realise that Megarachne was a eurypterid and not a spider was due to some notable parts of the body that are more commonly found with aquatic arthropods instead of spiders. The end of the body also had several segments called ‘tergites’ which were adapted for moving in the water. The 2005 classification compared the body to that of another eurypterid called Woodwardopterus which the authors used as a basis to create their reconstruction. Megarachne was reconstructed with four pairs of appendages, although the final pair has not been preserved in either specimens. These appendages were at the front of the body and away from the telson, the end segment of arthropods, avoiding the legs getting caught as it propelled itself through the water.
These appendages give us a good clue into the lifestyle of Megarachne. At the end of the appendages were blade-like structures which were not offensive structures. Megarachne, and for that matter its relatives, lacked the spikes and claws of earlier eurypterids meaning they were not active predators. Instead, Megarachne would swim or crawl along the floor wafting its appendages through the silt and mud capturing small invertebrates with these structures. They still had a good eyesight despite not using their eyes to hunt. Compound eyes on top of the head would be able to detect and spot threats such as large fish, including freshwater sharks, and amphibians.
When and Where
Megarachne is known from one formation, the Bajo de Véliz Formation in northwest Argentina. This formation dates to the latest part of the Carboniferous period, dating between 303.7 and 298.9 million years ago. Unlike many of the other known eurypterids the Megarachne was a freshwater eurypterid, not a marine one. Megarachne actually lived in a floodplain or swamps, moving from deeper to shallower water as the seasonal rains came and went.
Paleoecology
Instead of the terrifying giant spider depicted in Walking with Monsters, which had to be edited last minute to acknowledge the new paper, Megarachne was a freshwater animal that moved through swamp waters. We do not have much other aquatic life from the Bajo de Véliz Formation, but there was certainly vibrant life on the land with many species of insects and genuine spiders being found. Megarachne lived at a time of great changes during the Carboniferous. Compared to the early-Carboniferous where the climate was warm and wet, the end of the Carboniferous when Megarachne lived was becoming colder and drier. Quite possibly this is what resulted in the eventual extinction of Megarachne as cooling temperatures changed its habitat too much.
Riley Black, ‘Megarachne, the giant spider that wasn’t’, National Geographic, (20/12/2010), [Accessed 29/09/2026]
Benjamin Gutierrez, ‘Megarachne‘, Prehistoric-Wildlife, (27/08/2012), [Accessed 01/10/2026]
James C. Lamsdell, Linda Lagebro, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Graham E. Budd and Pierre Gueriau, ‘Stylonurine eurypterids from the Strud locality (Upper Devonian, Belgium): new insights into the ecology of freshwater sea scorpions’, Geological Magazine, 156:10, (2019), 1708-1714
James C. Lamsdell, Simon J. Braddy and O. Erik Tetlie, ‘The systematics and phylogeny of the Stylonurina (Arthropoda: Chelicerata: Eurypterida)’, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 8:1, (2010), 49-61
Paul A. Selden, Jose A. Corronca and Mario A. Hünicken, ‘The true identity of the supposed giant fossil spider Megarachne‘, Biology Letters, 1, (2005), 44-48
Ben G Thomas, ‘When Earth Was Ruled by Arachnids’, YouTube.com, (20/10/2024), [Accessed 30/09/2026]
Under the shadow of the Tequila volcano in Jalisco, Mexico there is a small pool near a village called Teuchitlán. In this pool a tiny species of fish can be found and is named after the volcano – the Tequila splitfin. This tiny fish is one of Mexico’s unique species of fish that evolved in the isolated lakes which has also meant they are at risk of extinction through the smallest of changes to their environment.
Taxonomy and Evolution
The Tequila splitfin, also called the Tequila fish, was discovered and named by science as recently as 1998. They have the scientific name Zoogoneticus tequila, named after the volcano, and they share their genus with two other species of fish. Zoogoneticus belongs to an order of fish called the Cyprinodontiformes, which is a bit of a mouthful but this order is commonly called the killifish after one of the notable families belonging to this order. Specifically, Tequila splitfins belong to a family called Goodeidae which consists of around 50 species of fish. These fish are unique to specific lakes, streams, and isolated bodies of water and evolved due to this isolation. As the common ancestor was caught in these bodies of water millennia ago in Mexico and the western US they genetically diverged to adapt to whatever body of water they now lived in.
Biology and Behaviour
These fish are tiny. The females are larger just reaching 8 centimetres in length to the 6 centimetres of the males. Tequila splitfin have the basic fish body plan with the most iconic part of them being their tailfin which is crescent shaped. In the males the end of the tailfin is an orange or yellow coloured curved band, something that helps attracts females. Otherwise, this fish is a silver-blue colour having just a black band on their tail. Most of what we know about these fish come from studying them in captivity due to how quickly they became endangered after becoming known to science. As a result, scientists have only managed to research these fish relatively recently in their natural habitat, more on that later.
Again, we have only observed reproduction of Tequila splitfins in captivity. Unlike many other bony fish which spawn the Tequila splitfin, and for that matter their family, give birth to live young. A notched tail fin in the females, which gives the group the name ‘splitfin’, allows males to deposit sperm which is used to then fertilise the eggs. The female has one ovary in which up to 29 eggs are stored. After 65 days she will give birth to her young and from there her time as a parent comes to an end – parental care stops from here. The young are tiny and will initially rely solely on the yolk from their egg to sustain them. Like with many fish sexual maturity is more based on size than age, but Tequila splitfin will reach that size from 6 to 10 weeks of age.
Distribution and Habitat
The Tequila splitfin are currently known from one pool in near Teuchitlán that is just 4 metres in diameter. It is thought that this population is the remnant of a larger one that was found in the Ameca River that runs through the state to the capital of Guadalajara. These fish prefer warmer waters, between 20°C and 24°C, and prefer the shallower end of the waters. Their small size means that this makes them less at risk of predation from larger fish found in deeper water. The pool at Teuchitlán is only 20 cm deep and is made mostly of mud and sand.
Diet and Predators
Being so small it is hard to find good things to eat, but the Tequila splitfin do have options. They are not picky with their diet consisting of a mixture of plankton, insect larvae, and general biological detritus that comes their way. Their main predators are other, larger fish although birds and even the nymphs of dragonflies are capable of eating them.
Conservation and Threats
The Tequila splitfin are a remarkable case of rapid conservation efforts. Runoff from farming and the introduction of large invasive fish, mainly tilapia, wiped them out of the main river leaving the tiny population in Teuchitlán. Recognising that this population was at risk with only 50 adults being found in 2001. They were brought into a protective ‘Fish Ark’ ran by the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo and just in time. By 2011 no wild Tequila splitfin could be found. The Fish Ark recognised that only by working with and engaging with the local community could the reintroduction of Tequila splitfins be successful. Invasive fish were removed from a segment of the river and locals helped build a series of ponds to replicate their habitat. With a successful breeding programme in 2016 10,000 fish were released into the ponds, and a few years later 80 were released into the river on Day of the Dead. Much as Day of the Dead features the dead returning to visit their families this ‘dead’ species was returned home. In 2018 the IUCN declared Tequila splitfin to be endangered, up from being ‘Extinct in the Wild’. They are not out of the woods yet, but with local cooperation their future might be bright.
Bibliography:
‘Reintroducing the Tequila Splitfin’, Reverse the Red, [Accessed 25/09/2026]
Luis H. Escalera-Vázquez, Omar Domínguez-Domínguez, Demián Hinojosa-Garro and Luis Zambrano, ‘Changes in diet, growth and survivorship of the native Tequila Splitfin Zoogoneticus tequila in co-occurrence with the non-native Shortfin Molly Poecilia mexicana‘, Fundamental and Applied Limonology, 188:4, (2016), 341-351
M. Koeck, ‘Zoogoneticus tequila‘, IUCN Red List, (13/04/2018), [Accessed 25/09/2026]
Joseph Nelson, Terry Grande, and Mark Wilson, Fishes of the World, Fifth Edition, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016)
John Pint, ‘How Mexico’s Celebrated Splitfin Fish were Rescued from the Brink of Extinction’, Mexico News Daily, (17/06/2026), [Accessed 25/09/2026]
Shane Webb and Robert Rush Miller, ‘Zoogoneticus tequila, A New Goodeid Fish (Cyprinodontiformes) from the Ameca Drainage of Mexico, and a Rediagnosis of the Genus’, Occasional Papers of the Museum of Zoology the University of Michigan, 725, (1998)
This week we are looking at the planet’s smallest species of crocodilian, but they are still quite large. The Cuvier’s dwarf caiman is a heavily armoured crocodilian whose smaller size has actually made them a pet for more experienced reptile enthusiasts, although please do not read this post hoping to be convinced on getting one. They are dangerous animals with unique care needs.
Taxonomy and Evolution
Cuvier’s dwarf caiman is named after French zoologist Georges Cuvier who was also one of the key figures behind the development of palaeontology as a science. They have the scientific name Paleosuchus palpebrosus and they share this genus with one other species, the smooth-fronted caiman. They are caimans which belong to the alligator family, and the caimans are only found in the Americas. Alligators first appear in the fossil record at the end of the Cretaceous with the caimans diverging from the alligators shortly after the Late Cretaceous extinction event as the Americas became separated from the rest of the world. The isolation of South America, in particular, allowed some caiman to become giants with the Purussaurus potentially being the largest crocodilian in history.
Biology and Behaviour
Cuvier’s dwarf caiman, or simply known as dwarf caiman, are the smallest species of crocodilian if we consider the Congo dwarf crocodile to be a subspecies. However, they are still large animals reaching between 1.2 and 1.5 metres (3.94 to 4.92 feet) in length. Behind that small(ish) size is some weight with them reaching between 6 and 7 kilograms. All crocodilians have bony scales on their back called osteoderms but dwarf caimans are unique as their underside and chest are also covered in these hard osteoderms. This extra armour might have evolved as a way to help protect them from predation – their armour making up for their smaller size. They are a reddish-brown in colour with some caiman being more black than brown. The babies look like small versions of the adults. They have around 80 teeth in their jaws which can pack a considerable punch for their small size, although they do not have the same bone-crunching power as their larger relatives.
Dwarf caimans are like most crocodilians where they are solitary but sociable. Unlike other crocodilians, this sociability is largely limited to only a couple of other caimans. This means they are willing to migrate over wide distances to avoid competition with other groups of caiman, especially during breeding season. Large males can get very aggressive with other dwarf caimans. They are vocal communicating through a series of groans and grunts which they do through forcing air through their nostrils. You might even see them smacking the water with their heads and jaws. When threatened or challenged they can do this to deter predators, or they will hiss and inflate their bodies to make them seem bigger. Dwarf caimans are largely nocturnal and in more exposed habitats they build burrows to hide out during the day.
Breeding season sees dwarf caimans becoming more territorial. Dominance displays very rarely become violent with them instead lifting themselves vertically in the water to show off their size. Both parents will create a nest, but depending on local conditions determines how long after hatching the mother will stay with the hatchlings. Clutches range in size from 10 to 25 eggs which the mother will stay with until they hatch after three months. Then, depending on the area, the mother can immediately abandon the hatchlings or will remain with them. A 2012 paper found that dwarf caiman mothers in the Pantanal could stay with their hatchlings for as much as 21 months! Sexual maturity is by size, not by age. Dwarf caimans become mature when they reach around a metre in length. Some wild caimans have been known to have reached up to 40 years in age!
Distribution and Habitat
Dwarf caimans are reliant on the water, but at night they can walk large distances from the water. As the dawn comes they will retreat to the closest body of water meaning some have been found in small bodies of isolated water. A 2024 paper found that this has led to dwarf caimans exhibiting large amounts of genetic diversity leading to the creation of three separate lineages. They are found in a wide range of rivers and lakes in South America including the Amazon, Orinoco, Sao Francisco, Paraguay, and Parana rivers. This means they are found in many countries including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Some have even been found in Trinidad, castaways during storms that now call the island their home.
Diet and Predators
Dwarf caimans are carnivorous with them eating a wide range of animals including insects, crabs, shrimp, rodents, water birds, snakes, and fish. The diet of adults is overwhelmingly fish whereas babies and juveniles eat far more invertebrates. Hatchlings and juveniles can be eaten by large snakes, larger caimans, large fish, and water birds, whereas the adults are only really threatened by anacondas and jaguars.
Conservation and Threats
When last evaluated by the IUCN Red List in 2018 the Cuvier’s dwarf caiman was given a classification of ‘Least Concern’ with their population being stable. Being found over a wide area this has helped avoid significant population fragmentation, and having armoured skin across the entire body has meant they have not been hunted too much for their skin. Due to them being smaller compared to other crocodilians dwarf caimans have become a niche pet for reptile enthusiasts. However, as someone can have a caiman for a pet does not mean they should have a caiman as a pet. They are aggressive, need specialised habitation, and will need specialised veterinary care which makes them very inappropriate for everyone short of a zoo owner.
Zilca Campos, Tânia Sanaiotti, Vanílio Marques, and William E. Magnusson, ‘Geographic Variation in Clutch Size and Reproductive Season of the Dwarf Caiman, Paleosuchus palpebrosus, in Brazil’, Journal of Herpetology, 49:1, (2015), 95-98
Z. Campos, T. Sanaiotti, F. Muniz, I. Fariasc and W.E. Magnusson, ‘Parental care in the dwarf caiman, Paleosuchus palpebrosus Cuvier, 1807 (Reptilia: Crocodilia: Alligatoridae)’, Journal of Natural History, 46:47-48, (2012), 2979-2984
Clint’s Reptiles, ‘Cuvier’s Dward Caiman, The Best Pet Crocodilian?’, YouTube.com, (16/05/2020), [Accessed 18/09/2026]
W.E. Magnusson, Z. Campos, and F. Muniz, ‘Paleosuchus palpebrosus, Dwarf Caiman’, IUCN Red List, (30/04/2018), [Accessed 20/09/2026]
F. L. Muniz, Z. Campos, S. M. Hernández Rangel, J. G. Martínez, B. C. Souza, B. De Thoisy, R. Botero-Arias, T. Hrbek and I. P. Farias, ‘Delimitation of evolutionary units in Cuvier’s dwarf caiman, Paleosuchus palpebrosus (Cuvier, 1807): insights from conservation of a broadly distributed species’, Conservation Genetics, 19, (2018), 599-610
B. D. Vasconcelos, F. Camurugi, J. R. Mudrek, R. A. Brandão, and D. J. Santana, ‘Rivers and spatial distance are drivers of genetic diversity in the South American dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus)’, Journal of Zoology, 325:1, (2025), 36-48
Tensions had been rising in the British colonial city of Boston for several years. Anger at British troops being positioned in the city and a wave of new taxes had set people against the British. On March 5, 1770, a cold day with snow covering the ground, a crowd amassed outside the Boston Customs House which was being guarded by British soldiers. One accidentally fired a shot causing his fellow soldiers to fire into the crowd. Within a few minutes five protestors lay dead. This was the Boston Massacre. Today we will look at the Massacre and, linking with our History Through Cities series, why Boston became such a focal point for anti-British activity.
Background to the Massacre
Bostonians reacting to the Stamp Act
Events in both colonial America and Britain were shaping the scene in colonial Boston. Many of these we have covered on this series so for further details please see our previous posts. The Seven Years’ War and its aftermath was the bedrock from which issues would grow from as, despite British victory in the war, the British Empire had been left in serious debt, around £72 million. A series of new taxes were passed by the British parliament as a quick way to raise revenue which disproportionally impacted the new emerging capitalist class and the colonies. As the war had broken out due to Anglo-French conflict in the Ohio Valley, and resulted in the expulsion of the French from continental North America, the British parliament took the view that the war was for the colonials, so they should pay for it. A series of acts, commonly called the Townshend Acts, were passed enacting new taxes on goods entering the colonies and implementing the enforcement of these taxes. Popular anger crossed classes uniting the middle-class with the colony’s poor. An economic depression following the end of the war had impacted the lower classes who found access to coinage depleted and the cost of living in general rising.
The colonial elite began protesting the imposition of these taxes, and they began using the same language that was being used in Britain at the time. You may have heard of the phrase ‘No Taxation without Representation’ which was used by the colonialists, but this idea was also being discussed back in Britain. Much of the British population were barred from voting – only landed men over a certain age could vote and sit in parliament. American colonialists were in direct conversation with writers in Britain who were also excluded from parliamentary politics. In particular, the figure of John Wilkes who had been imprisoned over slander received a wide following on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the figures behind the newly formed group, the Sons of Liberty, William Palfry was in direct correspondence with John Wilkes. A clean break with Britain was not yet on the table – these merchants had economic ties to Britain and still viewed themselves as ‘British in America’ instead of ‘Americans’. As devoted Brits they should have representation in the British parliament, not simply the ‘indirect representation’ currently afforded to them.
By the late-1760s tensions had been rising across the colonies. This is mainly the case in the northeast Atlantic colonies who were reliant on trade and a growing manufacturing industry that was directly impacted by the new taxes. Of course resistance was not limited to the Atlantic cities – at the same time the Regulator movement had risen up in South Carolina. They protested unfair taxation, but were united for being tenant or landless farmers who were being pushed out by the large enslaved-labour based plantations of the south. While in the north the protests managed to cut across class, in the south the Regulator movement was a lower class movement. Certain cities became focal points for protest, and this brings us back to Boston.
Boston and the Crucible of Revolt
Colonial Boston
Boston was one of the major focal points of the protests and the eventual American Revolution. Of course, it was far from the only one with Philadelphia and New York also being major centres of protest, and later, revolt, but Boston was almost lightning in a bottle. Boston was disproportionally reliant on sea trade, from April to December 1720 about 428 ships docked in Boston harbour, most of whom came from other parts of the Thirteen Colonies. Trade and movement was key for Boston becoming a major centre of protest. The post-war depression had hit Boston hard and wealth disparity was growing rapidly – by 1770 49% of Boston’s taxable assets were owned by just 5% of the tax payers. Families of merchants had prospered from monopolising trade, insuring cargo, and ensuring the flow of goods across the colonies. The increasingly mobile and depressed working-class in Boston, of which included free people of color, could have led to a movement similar to the Regulators in Carolina, but what differed was a noticeable British presence. Boston’s mercantile industry was a key revenue source to be taxed so British agents were stationed in the city to ensure tax was collected. This ensured the British became the focus of popular anger instead that of the local colonial elite. Unpopular and conservative British-imposed governor Francis Bernard wrote in 1768:
Early the next Morning, the Shireff came to me to inform me that the Effigys of Mr Paxton and Mr Williams were hanging upon Liberty Tree. I had the Day before appointed a Council to meet, & I now sent round to get them together as soon as possible it might be. Before I went to Council I learnt that the Effigys had been taken down by some of the neighbours without any Opposition. At Council I set it forth in Strong Terms the notoriousness of this Insult, the Danger of it being followed by actual Violence and the Necessity there was of providing for the Defence of the Town. But all I could say made no Impression upon the Council: they persevered in treating the Affair as of no Consequence and assuring me that there was no Danger of any Commotion. After they had given their Opinion as in the inclosed Copy of the Minutes, I received a Letter from the Commissioners setting forth the Insults they had received, the Danger they apprehended, and desiring the Protection of the Government. I communicated this to the Council and proposed that they should reconsider their Business, but finding them not inclined to depart from their Opinion as before given, I adjourned the Reconsideration till the Afternoon. In the afternoon the Question being again put to them, They adhered to their former Opinion.
I should have mentioned before that under all the Assurances I had that there would be no Disturbances, it was never understood, that the Day, the Anniversary of the Repeal of the Stamp Act, should not be celebrated. Accordingly at Break of Day there were beating of Drums and firing of Guns heard, and the whole Town was adorned with Ships Colours: and to add to the Celebration, the Feast of St. Patrick being the Day before was postponed to this Day. However great Pains were taken by the Select Men of the Town & some other Gentlemen that the Festivity should not produce a Riot in the Evening, and so far it succeeded that it produced Terror only and not actual Mischief. There was a Number of Gentlemen dined at the Tavern near the Townhouse, upon the Occasion of the Day. These broke up in good Time, after which many of the same and other Gentlemen kept together at the Coffee House (one of the Taverns) all the Evening. These prevented the lighting a Bonfire in that Street, which was several Times attempted, and would probably have been a Prelude to Action. But the assembling a great Number of People together of all Kinds, Sexes and Ages, many of which shewed a great Disposition to the utmost Disorder, could not be prevented. There were many hundred of them paraded the Streets with Yells and outcries which were quite terrible. I had in my House Mr Burch (one of the Commissioners) and his Lady & Children, who had the Day before moved to our House for Safety. I had also with me the Lieut Governor & the Sheriff of the County. But I had taken no Steps to fortify my House, not being willing to shew an Apprehension of Danger to myself. But at that Time there was so terrible a Yell from the Mob going by, that it was apprehended that they were breaking in: but it was not so. However it caused the same Terror as if it had been so; and the Lady, a stranger to this Country who chose our House for Asylum, has not recovered it as yet.
Quoted in The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents
From this quote we can see how effective British overstepping was in uniting Bostonians against the British instead of the elite. The burning of effigies was a public display, one that created community juxtaposed against a common, and more importantly, distant figure. A domestic printing industry and the vibrant tavern system in Boston further cemented class solidarity as local people were integral to spreading ideas that could not be censored like the press coming from Britain. As protests against taxes and closing smuggling loopholes grew the British responded more forcefully, and thus created more resentment. To enforce the new laws parliament passed a further act which stationed troops in Boston and other cities, and even forced residents to house occupying soldiers in their homes. In 1768 local merchant John Hancock, one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in Boston, had his ship the Liberty seized by the British under accusations that it was engaged in smuggling. A Bostonian mob protested this and forced the customs officers to flee the city. This led to the British sending four regiments to occupy Boston. Future rebel leader Paul Revere would write about the arrival of the British regiments:
On Friday, Sept 30 , 1768, the Ships of WAR, armed Schooners, Transports, &c. Came up the Harbour and Anchored round the TOWN; their Cannon loaded, a Spring on their Cables, as for a regular Siege. At noon on Saturday, October the I the fourteenth & twenty‐ninth Regiments, a detachment from the 59 Reg and Train of Artillery, with two pieces of Cannon, landed on the Long Wharf; then Formed and Marched with insolent Parade, Drums beating, Fifes playing, and Colours ying, up KING STREET.
For many Bostonians this was their own countrymen coming to occupy them. Even more galling was that these regiments had been shiped from Halifax and Ireland – two colonies that had only just become British subjects for the former, or the Catholic rebellious colony for the later. Tensions were at a boiling point.
The Massacre
At the start of March 1770 tensions were high. On March 2 British soldiers had a scrap with rope-makers after rope-makers insulted a British soldier who was looking for extra work to supplement his pay. One of those soldiers, Matthew Killroy, was eager to get back at Bostonians who had just beaten him. On the evening of March 5 Killroy and several other British soldiers were stationed on King Street guarding the Customs House, one of the symbols of British taxation. King Street was a major centre of life in Boston including many taverns and stores, so it was not unusual that someone recognised one of the soldiers. A potentially drunk apprentice called Edward Garrick pointed out and began taunting Private Hugh White for refusing to pay a bill, a bill White had already paid. Then White did one of the worst things possible – he smacked Garrick across the face with his gun. The apprentice fell down and into the snow yelling he had been assaulted. The cries led to a crowd forming who were naturally angry. For months soldiers had been occupying their city and one had just smacked a boy across the face with a gun for insulting them.
The crowd was a cross-section of Bostonian society. Lawyer and future president John Adams wrote that they were ‘a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and mullatoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.’ He wrote this as a way to disparage the crowd, but it reflected the cross-class unity that had been created through the anti-British protests. Soon snowballs, oysters, and trash were being hurled at the soldiers and Captain Thomas Preston yelled at the mob ‘Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you Lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, G-d damn you, fire & be damn’d.’ One figure in the crowd, potentially a man called Crispus Attucks, threw a snowball at Private Hugh Montgomery which caused him to accidentally fire his musket. Tragedy then ensued. The soldiers lost their nerve and fired into the crowd. Eleven people were hit of which five were killed. Three died instantly – Crispus Attucks, a rope-maker Samuel Gray, and a mariner called James Caldwell. Two would die in the week – 17-year-old apprentice Samuel Maverick who was hit by ricochet and died the next day, and Irish worker Patrick Carr who was hit in the abdomen and died a week later. There was one last fatality, an apprentice called Christopher Monk who would be disabled by the shot and would die in 1780 due to complications caused by the musket fire.
History Rhyming – Boston and Manchester
The position of the working-class in British society would continue long after the Boston Massacre, and for most of the nineteenth-century protests over the disenfranchisement of working-class men and women would shape British politics. In 1819 working-class men and women gathered in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field to protest the lack of political inclusion, especially after so many working-class people had fought and died for Britian in the Napoleonic Wars. As the crowd was listening to the main speaker, Henry Hunt, an arrest warrant was issued and the head of the Yeomanry enacted this warrant with utmost violence. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, sabres drawn, and by the time the crowd had dispersed the Yeomanry had killed 18 people, of which included women and children. The press soon named this the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, ‘Peterloo’ coming from St. Peter’s Field and Waterloo. The fight for enfranchisement would continue for another century when universal suffrage for everyone over the age of 18 was enacted in 1928.
Aftermath
The soldiers involved in the Massacre were arrested in the morning and sent to a jail outside of the city. There was a fear that a mob would rush into the prison and enact their own sense of justice. The shooting would divide Boston in two between the ‘Loyalists’ and the ‘Patriots’ where the printing press became an integral tool in the new political battle. Thomas Pelham had created an engraving depicting what he called The Bloody Massacre which gained more popularity through Paul Revere’s engraving, depicted above, that was widely reprinted. Revere added a feature to Pelham’s engraving, above the British soldiers was a sign reading ‘Butcher’s Hall’. Members of the Sons of Liberty began publishing turning the shooting into the Boston Massacre, most notably through A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre by James Bowdoin. This short piece turned the dead into martyrs of liberty cut down by British force. However, it was not only the Patriots publishing. As the crowd had assaulted the soldiers, and as the crowd was working-class and multi-racial, conservative elements of society portrayed the crowd as brutes. In particular, conservatives focused on Crispus Attucks. We will return to Attucks in depth later, and he has already made an appearance in this series – in one of our first posts we looked at how he escaped from slavery. Crispus Attucks was a mixed-race mariner who escaped enslavement, so his position among the crowd ignited colonial elite fears of working-class and black resistance to ‘law and order’.
This brings us to the trial of the soldiers. It was one of the most controversial trials to hit the colonies since the end of Bacon’s Rebellion a century earlier. Strangely enough it would be one of the future presidents of the US that would defend the British soldiers – John Adams. Officially, Adams defended the men under the grounds that everyone deserved a fair trial, later writing:
The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right. This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest Proofs of the Danger of Standing Armies.
While Adams may have been driven by a liberal idea of fairness and equality as awarded to any Englishman his conservative ideology was also at play. He would be a noted conservative Founding Father who had opposed military action until it was unavoidable, so the appearance of a mob led by Irish migrants, free men of colour, and workers epitomised everything Adams opposed. During the trial, which began in November, he was keen to portray the crowd as unruly, who had provoked retaliation, and focused on Attucks as a ‘terrifying figure’. Captain Preston was trialed separately in October and was quickly acquitted as his troops had fired against his orders. The prosecution had argued that the troops had fired on an unarmed crowd and that several soldiers had wanted revenge following the fight with the rope-makers. However, Adams’s argument of self-defence against a mob won out, only two were found guilty of manslaughter whose punishment was to have their thumbs branded. The rest were acquited.
Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre
The Thirteen Colonies and future American republic were built on racialised slavery, one where black Africans and Native Americans were deemed inferior. The figure of Crispus Attucks, therefore, offered a problem for elite Patriots. He was a martyr, he had died by British bullets defending Bostonians of which one had just been assaulted. As a former enslaved man he knew what slavery was like, and what it meant to be free. Yet, his race and willingness to fight was unsettling for elites who relied on unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Many of the future Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned men, women, and children as property. As Mitch Kachun and Stephen Browne have argued, Crispus Attucks would be intentionally buried and resurrected by American collective memory. The memory of Attucks was subsumed into a wider martyrdom in the early republic, even by free people of colour. After independence the Boston Massacre was sidelined in the wider memory of the Revolution as more positive events, namely the Boston Tea Party, were held up instead.
Things began changing in the 1840s and 1850s. The question of slavery was coming to ahead, and African-American thinkers and radical white abolitionists turned to Crispus Attucks for inspiration. In particular, black Bostonian William C. Nell pushed for the memory of Crispus Attucks in the 1850s to be an inspiration in the fight against slavery. Attucks had bled and died fighting the British, so how can Americans keep so many people who looked like him in chains? When the Civil War broke out Attucks’s memory crossed racial lines – white Republicans in Boston formed the Attucks Guard to perform at pro-Lincoln rallies, and African-American Bostonians enlisted as the Attucks Guard. The white supremacist resurgence following the end of the Civil War cast Attucks back into obscurity, but like the abolitionists a century prior the Civil Rights Movement used Attucks as a symbol. Schools, community halls, and parks were named after him. Writing in 2026 we may need to enter another fight to preserve the memory of Attucks. Trump’s war of public displays of ‘wokeness’ threatens casting black figures like Attucks out of public imagery, something we cannot let happen. Attucks died fighting against oppression, we have to take up his fight as well.
Other Events:
Other events happened in the first quarter of 1770. Here are some of them:
February 1, Thomas Jefferson’s home would burn down in Shadwell, Virginia.
February 14, James Bruce would arrive in Gondar in Abyssinia becoming one of the first Europeans to set foot in the kingdom.
February 22, Ebenezer Richardson, a British officer in Boston, would kill 11-year-old Christopher Seider causing a wave of protests setting the scene for the Boston Massacre we have discussed today.
March 21, the newly unified Kingdom of Nepal would shift the seat of power to the Basantapur Palace in Kathmandu.
March 31, famous philosopher Immanuel Kant would gain a position at the University of Konigsburg.
Bibliography:
Brooke Barbier, Boston in the American Revolution: A Town Versus an Empire, (Charleston, NC: History Press, 2017)
Stephen Browne, ‘Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, rhetoric, and the politics of commemoration’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 85, (1999), 169-187
Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Jonathan Dull, The Path to the American Revolution: British-American Relations in Peace and War, 1721-1783, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2024)
Mitch Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Mitch Kachun, ‘From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon: Crispus Attucks, Black Citizenship, and Collective Memory, 1770–1865’, Journal of the Early Republic, 29:2, (2009), 249-286
Jeremy Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776), (Leiden: Brill, 2023)
Peter Messer, ‘“A scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti, as must astonish the Public”: The Creation of the Boston Massacre’, New England Quarterly, 90:4, (2017), 502-539
Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)
Neil York, (ed.), The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents, (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2010)
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present, (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2010)
In 1832 a young Charles Darwin on board the Beagle landed in Bahia Blanca in Argentina. There, he excavated some strange teeth, and when the expedition moved north to Uruguay some local farmers sold him a strange skull that the teeth belonged to. The extinct animal puzzled Darwin and when he returned to England he gave his notes and fossils to Richard Owen, the head of the zoology department at the British Museum who, in a few years time, would coin the word ‘dinosaur’. In 1837 Owen described the beast as Toxodon and Darwin would edit his notes to reflect the analysis:
Lastly, the Toxodon , perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered: in size it equalled an elephant or megatherium, but the structure of its teeth, as Mr. Owen states, proves indisputably that it was intimately related to the Gnawers, the order which, at the present day, includes most of the smallest quadrupeds: in many details it is allied to the Pachydermata: judging from the position of its eyes, ears, and nostrils, it was probably aquatic, like the Dugong and Manatee, to which it is also allied. How wonderfully are the different Orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in different points of the structure of the Toxodon!
Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 87
Toxodon would be a puzzle to zoologists and palaeontologists for years to come, mainly as it belonged to a group of mammals that has gone extinct.
Discovery and Fossils
As we have just mentioned, the first fossils belonging to Toxodon were named by Richard Owen based off of the findings that Charles Darwin made on his trip on the Beagle. The first specimen to be described was given the scientific name Toxodon platensis meaning ‘Bowed tooth from La Plata’. The ‘bowed tooth’ came from the strange teeth that would puzzle Darwin and Owen, and ‘La Plata’ from Argentina. Due to how recently Toxodon platensis lived we have a lot of fossils belonging to this species, with some specimens that are nearly complete. Since then other species have been identified, but how many species there are has been debated. Up to 12 species are seen as valid by the Paleobiology Database, although some sources only classify six species as being valid. This post will largely be focusing on T. platensis, being the species we know most about, although do note that we are largely focusing on the largest Toxodon species.
Taxonomy and Evolution
A big reason why Toxodon was such a puzzle to palaeontologists was due to it belonging to a branch of mammals that has gone extinct. It was a member of the order Notungulata, or the ‘southern ungulates’. Ungulates are the hoofed mammals currently split between the ‘odd-toed’ ungulates like horses, rhinos, and tapirs and the ‘even-toed’ ungulates like deer, cows, boar, hippos, and even whales. Notungulata emerged as far back as 61 million years ago and evolved to become so unique due to where they evolved. Notungulata evolved in South America which had been isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, only ending its isolation around 3 million years ago with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama. Notungulata would come to fill the void filled by other hoofed mammals and other herbivorous mammals in other continents with Toxodontids like Toxodon filling the role of rhinos, archaeohyracids filling the role of horses, and mesotheres taking the role of rodents. In 2015 DNA analysis finally answered the question of which mammals the Notungulata are most related to. They diverged from the odd-toed ungulates like rhinos and tapirs.
Biology
Toxodon were massive animals. They reached between 2.7 and 3 metres (8 to 10 feet) in length and weighed around 1,500 kilograms (3,300 pounds). This puts them at a similar body size to Indian rhinos, although white rhinos are much larger than Toxodon. A shoulder hump, which was the tallest part of the Toxodon, existed which would have limited movement of the neck. As a result, Toxodon would have been unable to lift its head too high so it would have kept its head low to the ground. The adults were so large that it would have been unlikely that they had many predators. For a long time it was believed that Toxodon lived like a hippo, mostly based on the nose, eyes, and ears being placed on top of the head like in hippos. The theory had it that Toxodon would have spent most of the day lounging and swimming in water, but this theory has fallen out of favour. Largely this is due to where Toxodon fossils being found which was not suitable for a hippo-like lifestyle. Isotope analysis also found that its bones contained isotopes more closer to that of terrestrial animals than amphibious or aquatic animals. Instead, Toxodon would have lived more like a rhino than a hippo.
Toxodon had a massive head, one almost comically large for its body. Equally unusual was its teeth which seemed to combine the teeth of both horses and rodents. The teeth were high-crowned like a horse with thick enamel and large molars. However, the top teeth and incisors were chisel-like, almost like a rodent, that seemed to constantly be growing. This is what really confused Owen and Darwin as this animal seemed to combine features from rodents and rhinos. It did also help Darwin to begin thinking about the nature of extinction and how animals were related to one another before he could arrive on the Galapagos Islands to study the unique finches and tortoises. These teeth evolved to let Toxodon eat as much vegetation as it could. The horse-like teeth were good for grinding with thick enamel allowing it to eat plants made of hard cellulose, as well as containing grit, without the teeth immediately being worn down. We do have evidence of teeth being worn from grinding. The rodent-like chisel teeth allowed them to snip off other species of plant. They were adaptable and from looking at isotopes in their molars we can find out what they ate. Toxodon were mostly grazers, but the type of plants they ate depended on where they lived. Those in southern Brazil and the Chaco ate more C4 plants, whereas those closer to the Amazon switched to browsing on C3 plants.
It is difficult to know about the behaviour of animals from just their bones. We do not know if they lived in herds, how aggressive they were, or when they were most active during the day. We can make a few assumptions – based on similar sized mammals they likely only had one calf at a time. While typically depicted with bent knees we now know that they walked with their legs straight, and we have evidence of strain on their legs in older specimens.
When and Where
Toxodon fossils first appear in the fossil record during the Pliocene, around 5.28 million years ago, and managed to survive until very recent times. The last Toxodon went extinct around 12,000 years ago at a time when humans were firmly starting to settle South America. They were found over a wide area in South America ranging from northern Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay in the south up as potentially as far north as Pernambuco in northern Brazil if a set of footprints turn out to belong to Toxodon. Toxodon and toxodontids managed to survive the ecosystem changes that came with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama. As northern mammals moved south many notoungulates went extinct, but the toxodontids continued to thrive with a relative of Toxodon called Mixotoxodon moving north to colonise Texas.
Habitat and Extinction
Reconstruction by Velizar Simeonovski
Toxodon were mainly found in grasslands and the edges of forests where they lived alongside a wide range of animals both familiar and bizarre. Some of the animals can be seen today like javelinas, jaguars, anteaters, and rhea, as well as truly unusual animals. These included the giant ground sloths, llama-like Macrauchenia, and giant armoured armadillos like Doedicurus. Smilodon would have potentially hunted Toxodon as their relatives in North America were hunting as equally large animals like bison. Around 12,000 years ago Toxodon began vanishing and eventually went extinct. The obvious answer is the arrival of humans, after all Toxodon bones have been found in a human habitation site at Tres Arroyos, Argentina. Human hunters would have introduced a new dynamic that resulted in Toxodon being unable to survive. However, this was not the only reason. As older and older archaeological sites are found in the Americas pushing back human habitation further the period of co-existence between humans and the now-extinct megafauna lengthens. Climate change associated with the end of the Ice Age impacted the entire planet, and this would have impacted Toxodon numbers. The mix of human hunting and climate change would have been enough to drive Toxodon to extinction.
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