Episode description

The show takes a spooky turn as we go on a ghost hunt through the natural world. Sebastian shares his adventures finding fossils – the traces of animals that once lived, and Rutendo talks about her experiences in The Cradle of Humankind, the South African UNESCO World Heritage site containing early human fossils.

Deep in the Peruvian Amazon there is a species of wild dog so rarely sighted it has become known as the ‘ghost dog’. We hear from Renata Leite Pitman, one of the few scientists to successfully track down and study the elusive creature as it moves quietly through the forest.

Gravedigger turned ecologist Dan Flew leads Rutendo and Sebastian through Bristol’s Arnos Vale Cemetery in the dead of night, for a close and thrilling encounter with some of the UK’s rarest bats.

We venture to the world’s most northerly permanently inhabited place, Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, where TikToker Cecilia Blomdahl reveals the magical secrets of this isolated yet beautiful landscape, on a trip out on her boat with her dog Grim.

And we hear rare recordings of the Northern White Rhino, sadly now extinct in the wild, a recently departed ghost of a more biodiverse world.

Credits:

The BBC Earth podcast is presented by Sebastian Echeverri and Rutendo Shackleton.

This episode was produced by Rachel Byrne and Geoff Marsh.

The researcher was Seb Masters.

The Production Manager was Catherine Stringer and the Production Co-ordinator was Gemma Wootton.

Podcast Theme Music was composed by Axel Kacoutié, with mixing and additional sound design by Peregrine Andrews.

The Associate Producer is Cristen Caine and the Executive Producer is Deborah Dudgeon.

Special thanks to:

Renata Leite Pitman for the feature on the ghost dogs.

Dan Flew for leading the bat walk in Bristol.

Cecilia Blomdahl for her report from Svalbard.

Martyn Stewart for providing the sounds of the Northern White Rhino.

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