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And welcome back to George Nor with you. Let me tell you a little bit about Maria Mayor. Doctor Hail did by The New York Times as the female Indiana Jones and referred to as her Wildness Doctor. Maria Mayor as a world renowned primatologist, author pink books, Boots and a Machete, one of her books, Explorer, television host as
National Geographics first female wildlife correspondent. She has hosted dozens of documentaries, including her own National Geographic wild series Wild Nights with Maria Mayor, Mark Burnett's Expedition Africa for History Channel, currently starring in Discovery Channel hit series Expedition Bigfoot. A former NFL cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins, daughter of Cuban immigrants, and mother of six, She's not your typical scientist, Maria. Welcome the program, first time for you, right, Hi.
George, Yes it is. I'm so excited.
What a tremendous career you've had. How did you go from being a cheerleader to a PhD.
Well, let's see, that's an interesting trajectory and very unusual. I was a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins for four years while I attended the University of Miami, and while I was actually in a pre law program, I took an anthropology class just to fulfill a science requirement, and I just I fell in love when it came to primates that were critically endangered and on the verge of disappearing.
And that's what changed my entire life. I basically watched gorillas in the mist and I saw Diane Fosse just cuddling up to these majestic creatures, the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and I thought, right, that's what I want to do for the rest of my life. And so off I went, not to Africa at first, but to South America, and I went on my own expedition. That was the very first one when I was about twenty two years old. And well the rest is history.
Good for you now, the PhD is in what field?
It's an anthropology? Wow?
Okay, great of all the primates that are out there, how did you get involved with Bigfoot?
So my work has taken me all over the world, always in search of very rare and elusive animals. In fact, some of them had never even been photographed, they'd never been studied. Most people deemed it impossible that I would ever find them, and I did, and so on one particular expedition, I was in Madagascar and I discovered the world's smallest primates ay, a tiny little primate that weighs less than two ounces. It basically fits in the palm
of your hand. And one of the producers of the show that was assembling the team reached out to me and said, we really want you to join the Expedition Bigfoot team because you discovered the world's smallest primate. We want you to go full circle and possibly discover the world's largest. So that's all I'm involved.
Did you love science when you were a kid.
I loved animals. When I was a kid, I was not necessarily, I was very I was a little girly girl, and I was the daughter of Cuban immigrants, which you mentioned earlier, so my mom was extremely overprotective. I remember asking her if I could join the Girl Scouts when I was little, and she said, absolutely not, that's way too dangerous. So I never imagined I would become a scientist. I think I thought i'd have a more traditional career path like a teacher or a nurse. I was set
to be a lawyer when I got to college. But my past was actually a little bit of an obsession for animals. When I was a kid, I basically had a zoo at home with dogs and cats and chickens, reptiles, all sorts of creepy crawlis that I just love to observe. I spent all my time up in a mango tree, you know, observing animal behavior. So that was my little obsession. I just didn't know that that would ever lead into a career.
I'm going to assume your parents came here in the sixties.
Yeah, my mom was actually one of the first people out of Cuba. Apparently, when Fidel Castro made the announcement that, you know, anyone who wants to leave can leave tomorrow. My grandmother looked at my grandfather and said, we're leaving. We're leaving tomorrow, and they left everything behind and came to the US.
That's pretty gutsy to be able to do that, isn't it.
My grandmother was unbelievably gutsy. And it's funny because there's this there's a photograph that was taken of my mom boarding with with nothing, you know, obviously, just the clothes on her back, and she was looking out over the boat as she stepped on, and for as overprotective as she was on me, she was an explorer in her own right, because you know, there she was setting sale to a place she'd never been, a language she didn't speak,
and basically starting over with nothing. So yeah, very very bold.
Of all the primates you've studied, which one would you say you're a specialist.
In, Uh, well, lemurs, I suppose in Madagascar. I don't know if you've seen the movie Madagascar. There's a lot of animals in the movie that aren't actually in Madagascar, but the you know, King Julian, the Lemur, the ringtail Leamer, those are the ones that I spent the majority of my life studying. And then gorillas in Congo and Rwanda were probably the next second.
And lemurs kind of explain what they look like.
Lemurs are. They're odd creatures. I mean, they're primates, so there's one of our closest living relatives. But they look like something out of a Doctor Seuss book, if you will. They're all they're almost whimsical looking animals and there's a great variety of them, many of which are nocturnal, so they have these huge, huge eyes and typically smaller in size than you know, some of the larger monkeys or
the apes, of course, but they're just fascinating animals. I remember the first time I went to Madagascar, for as exotic as a place as it is, I stepped off the plane and it felt like home. And the lemurs just they captured my heart, they captured my imagination, and I ended up spending most of my adult life living there studying them.
In this little mouse lemur that you were able to find, how small are they?
How small are they? They weigh less than two ounces and they fit in the palm of your hand, So I would I would say, they're they're pretty small.
How about the size of a mouse.
Right about the size of a mouth.
Yes, then they look like little monkeys.
They actually if you saw it running through your kitchen, you would think there was a there was a mouse in your kitchen. But they have all the characteristics that make a primate a primate, like you know, five fingers and opposable thumbs, and you know, relatively larger brains compared to body size. You know, all the things that make primates primates, they have, but they look kind of like a little mouse.
Of all the expeditions you've been on, what has been some of the scariest for.
You, Oh gosh. I get asked that a lot, and most people think I'm going to respond with, uh, like an animal, But it's actually been people made it this. You know, I've been charged by, I mean really like dozens of silver backed gorillas, which you know, it gets your adrenaline up every time. It doesn't matter how many times you've been charged by gorilla, You're adrenaline goes up. They're incredibly you know, large, sort of imposing, very very
strong animals. And the same thing with forest elephants. I've been chased by forest elephants. That's pretty scary. But in Congo, you know, there's a lot of political warfare. It's it's it can be rather unstable and dangerous and sometimes you know, a little regard for human life. And so I've been
in some pretty precarious situations in Congo. One situation in particular, where there were about five or six armed soldiers and one of them took my passport from me and said that it wasn't me in the passport right and tossed it to the side into a ditch, and I really wasn't sure if I was making it out of there. And then in Congo again, I was taking a flight, just having left the expedition in the forest, and the plane went down and so I survived the plane crash there.
It turns out somewhat of a funny story, I suppose a because I survived, But also in hindsight, the plane was filled with nuns. And I remember when the when the plane started going down and all this airline storesses were in the sort of plane crash, you know position. I looked around me and all the nuns were praying, And somehow I think it worked because here I am.
If you're going to go down on a plane, you want to go down with a bunch of nuns, That's for.
Sure, you really do, you know? I'd never kind of orchestrated the idea of how would I want to go down in a plane? But that's that's the way. The funny thing is is that once we had to crash and we managed to get off the plane and we
were waiting around. We were in the middle of nowhere, I mean there were no villages to be found anywhere where we where we crashed, and somehow sort of words spread and a couple of vehicles, pickup trucks started coming in and getting people out, and finally a vehicle came that I was able to jump in the back of a truck of and they they dropped me off at a at a brothel where I spent the next, you know, a few nights trying to figure out how to how
to leave. But I'll tell you what it was. I put my head on that pillow and I smelled some sort of you know, cheap chanel number five it was. And just the fact that I could smell that made it the most amazing sense ever. Couldn't be happier to be alive at that point. Go ahead, No, I was going to say, the adventure didn't end on the plane crash.
No. Your website, of course. Do you take emails through your website?
I do, Yes, I do.
You've got a lot of people that want to reach you.
Okay, it sounds good. It's Maria Mayor dot com. And you can certainly send me an email through there also on Instagram a lot. I'm a lot better about checking the messages.
There are the great apes much like a human.
Absolutely, sometimes when I watch, especially gorillas, there's almost this feeling like I should turn away, Like you know, if you went up to your neighbor's window and you were peeking in and then be suddenly, you know, a family started fighting or something, and you started watching all these dynamics and overhearing things that you shouldn't be hearing. That's a lot of the times what it feels like when you're observing gorillas, Like their family groups are so similar
to ours. If you've ever gone to a zoo, you would see the Western Lowland gorilla, which is the gorilla that I mainly studied in Congo, but they're actually the least known ape in the wild, but in the zoos. If you've ever taken the time to stand there and look at a gorilla, you'll notice that they really look back at you, not just like they're not like other animals might look at you, but like there's thoughts behind.
Motion. There isn't there there.
Really is, there's intent. They're watching you in the same way that you're watching them. And primates in general are incredibly curious animals, and you know, gorillas like humans are are very h they're very curious. They all have very distinctive personalities. You know, there are some pretty funny gorillas, shy gorillas, mean gorillas, you know, bitchy gorillas like all of it.
Are they are they Are they aggressive?
I wouldn't say so. No, it feels like it when the silver back rate charges you, But they're they're really It's generally a bluff charge for the most part. I think I only had one incident where I was pretty sure the gorilla meant it and I was gonna, you know, rip my head off. But the rest of the time, they're they're just letting you know that they're in charge and that they're stronger than you, and you know, believe me,
that message comes across very clearly. But they're not aggressive animals. Chimps, on the other hand, can be terrifying.
Yeah.
I mean chimps for as just you know, incredibly beautiful and interesting to watch, they can be incredibly Machavelian in how they and how they decide to attack right like they're they're they're hunters in the wild, and they strategize their hunts. I mean it's like they have you know, animals that are in positions to chase the prey and others that are there to entrap the prey, and then the other one that's there to kill the prey. And they really can be They can be very aggressive.
They go after human body parts, don't they They can rip them off your body.
Like they would a little monkey that they're hunting for. Absolutely, Whereas you know, gorillas, they're known as gentle giants, which I really think they earned that title. I mean, they're pretty they're vegetarians, right, they're not interested in meat and they're not hunting, although you know, you could get injured
for sure by a gorilla. I had a gorilla in uh in Congo that got one of the trackers who she was very used to because we were out there every single day, and just grabbed him and bit him in the knee, you know, toward his kneecap. And it was just out of the blue shoes, in a bad mood that day, and he was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. So you know, they're certainly capable of it. But it's not like a chimp. I find I find myself more uneasy around chimps than I
do gorillas. I'm pretty relaxed around gorillas.
Have you come across a gigantapithecus, not that I know of, supposed to be it's supposed to be an ape in Florida. Cryptozoologist told us about that when he was looking for Bigfoot, he came across one of these things.
Well, the gigantopithecus has been extinct for for quite a long time, so I'm not sure how old he was when you interviewed him, but maybe he found a fossil or something. But that would be pretty remarkable. I mean, we've lost so many of sort of these great big animals, Like in Madagascar, for example, there was a lemur the size of a gorilla that was hunted out only a couple thousand years ago when humans first came onto the island. But what a spectacular sight that would have been to see.
So we've we've lost a lot of these major animals, which is kind of what makes Bigfoot so fascinating, right, the fact that there could be this North American ape, you know, larger by reports, right, larger than even the known apes that we already know about.
Yeah, we'll get into Bigfoot after the break that it's an incredible creature, but you've heard of the abominable Snowman in the Himalayas, I have, yes, is that similar to Bigfoot?
So there's a lot yes, in theory, there's a lot of different names of course that is attributed to Bigfoot, like, for example, in Florida it's the skunk Gape, there's the Yawie. In Australia uh sasquatch Bigfoot, and then there's the the Yetti And of course by by reports, it's different in color, right, it's always depicted as all white, and that would have
to do with the landscape and the habitat. And of course we do see that in nature where animals adapt to their environments and they use different you know, color patterns on the external of externally to camouflage and blend into their environment. So it would make sense that something like a Bigfoot living in in snow right in the mountain snow would be all white as it's described.
Murray, have you ever been in a situation where the place was laden with mosquitoes?
Oh, my goodness, so many times. I mean in the Amazon in Africa, but also even in our Bigfoot expeditions, you know in northern California, certain parts in Kentucky. It was mosquitoes and ticks, just completely laden with.
Them, two of the worst insects made by God.
Huh. I mean seriously, as much as I love animals, I am, I'm good to eradicate ticks and mosquitoes.
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