Forrest Galante Rediscovered Thought to be Extinct Caiman | Joe Rogan

I've been following your exploits on social media and the yellow caiman. Yes. Dude, that is a wild looking creature. Isn't it? It's unbelievable. It was thought to be extinct? Yeah, so this one's, it's a little confusing. It's a species that was last seen in, when the last one died in a zoo in the 80s and because of the region that it occupies in Columbia, which has always been controlled by FARC rebels, nobody had been back down there to look for it. And myself, and there's actually this amazing Colombian scientist named Sergio Riena. We're both kind of going and prodding and trying to see if we could get in and we both found it within a month of each other. Oh, wow. Yeah. Now, it's a beautiful looking creature. Look at that thing. Right. Such a wild green, yellow color. So wild looking. It's super unique. Dude, you're just holding that thing by the neck? Yeah, we just had a little wrestling match him and I, so. You don't even have body control. Don't you want to take mountain here? Maybe get a back mount, get some hooks in. No, he was good at, you know, reptiles, they tire out. So they're not like mammals. Once they expend all their energy, that's kind of it. But yeah, absolutely amazing. Are they similar to regular crocodiles with alligators and that they don't have to eat for like a year? Yeah. So Cayman, I mean, Cayman don't have the, as slow of metabolism as certain other species, but they are, they're a member of the alligator family, so to speak, and they can go very long times without food. What a crazy animal. Like looks like a monster. Yep. I mean, look at the teeth on that thing. Swallows things, basically holds, it spins to take chunks off of things, swallows them whole, it doesn't have to eat for a year, can go under water for how long without holding its breath? Like 40, 45 minutes, some of them. Yeah, some species. So you have no idea it's there. Right. It's just waiting for you. And they're fairly small, right? There's like a 90 pound animal when it's fully grown? Well, these ones, it's so little is known about this particular species of Cayman that it's hard to say. I would say, yeah, a hundred pounds is probably about right. There's a great photo, Jamie, from the Nature is Metal Instagram page from yesterday. That page is nuts. I love it too. I love that page. There's a great one of a jaguar with a Cayman in its mouth. That one. Look at the eyes on that fucker. Yeah. Go expand. Look at that. The thing of nightmares. Look at those bangs right in the throat, like just death grip. And you can see that that Cayman is death rolling in that scene, right? It's trying to get away. It's rolling and that jag is just locked in. The eyes on that thing. My God. Unbelievable. It's like nature has created like in those kind of eyes, that's the perfect, that's the perfect vision of terror. Yeah. Like those eyes, like you locked into those eyes, like there's no forgiveness. There's no emotions. There's just ferocity and aggression and death. It seems like nothing but testosterone is behind that. You know what I mean? Testosterone is probably the wrong chemical, but it just seems so focused and motivated. And like you say, it's just, it looks like death. Yeah. I'm sure there's some testosterone involved in that equation too, but there's a bunch of other cat shit in there. Totally. Literally. And they have, apparently the thing in the caption was saying that the Cayman has one of the greatest bites per pound of any of the big cats and they regularly eat these. The jag. The jag-wort rather has one of the greatest bites and they regularly eats these, these Caymans. Yeah. No, they're amazing. And, and you know, back to the one that we found, it's so great because like I'm the hide and seek guy, right? Like I look for them and now there's the scientist Sergio Riena down in Columbia who's going to manage that species ongoing existence. Oh wow. So it's really cool. So what is involved in that? Like managing their existence? I mean, you know, it's wildlife management. So it's, it's getting proper population dynamics, trying to understand them genetically, figure out what their food sources, figure out how much hunting pressure they can take or cannot take those kinds of things. And that's not my department. You know, I go in and look for them. That's someone like Sergio who's in the field, lives in Columbia, can work with the species. It's really cool. I remember there was a documentary about this guy who was a scientist who was obsessed. It was a biologist and he was obsessed with the giant sloth and he was spending all of his time down the Amazon. He'd been down there for years and the documentary was following him at this stage where he was getting really frustrated and not sure if he's wasting his career. Right. Like there was this feeling like, fuck, this thing might not be real. Yeah. Like, cause they were telling me, yeah, I saw it. It was over the hill. And he's like, are you sure you saw it? Right. And they, you know, they'd bring these people in, they would speak their native tongue and they'd have this discussion of this thing that they saw two years ago, big like a bear. Walks on a time leg. Like a mega-therium. Yeah. There, we discussed this briefly last time I saw you. I think it's funny. We got straight back to the same wildlife stuff. But yeah, no, it's, who knows, right? Who knows if it's still out there. There's definitely ongoing reports, so much so that, I forget what university, but some university actually launched an expedition to try and find the mega-therium. So it's not, I'd have to look it up probably 10 years ago now, not that long ago, but, if an academic institution is putting resources behind an expedition like that, there's a lot of faith and maybe even Intel that they're not releasing publicly to say this animal's still here. Wow. That would be crazy. Like how big was a giant sloth? Well, there's a couple of varieties. Like there was a North American one that was enormous, like bigger than a grizzly bear. Wow. Yeah. But so from what I've heard, what I've read, you're talking about saying that Stan's 14 foot tall, walking around the Amazon's like this. 14 foot tall. And when they're here, they're in a Kodiak grizzly. That's what the reports say. That's, you gotta take everything with a grain of salt. Exactly. I mean, you gotta take their existence with a grain of salt. But this page, whatever this page is, a Bigfoot cousin? What the fuck is this page? And look up there, Megalodon sightings. Is the Megalodon shark still alive? Yeah. And straight away that's like discrediting, right? You're like, okay. What is this website you pull up there? There's an article from June about just lots of information about them. It's not even saying like it exists. It's just saying this is all the information we have about this map and Guari sightings. People love finding undiscovered or mythical creatures that turn out to be like the Tasmanian tiger. Right. Like that's a perfect example. Like people, they love to try to find, what is it, thylacines? Thylacine. People love to try to find that thing. Like the idea that it's out there. It's like, what is it about people where it's so compelling to find a species that we thought didn't exist or we thought was extinct? Like whether it's Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or the thylacine, which we know used to be real. Right. Right. I mean, what do you think? I think that people, you know, they long for the unknown and there's this big question mark surrounding cryptids or surrounding extinct animals as to whether it's still out there. And that's so much more inviting to the general, to the general populace to get an answer to than knowing, oh, you know, there's 700 of them left and we're trying to get them up to 1400 or whatever the species dynamic is for some other animal as opposed to being like there could be one out there. Where is it? And I personally, I've been on two different expeditions looking for thylacine. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did one in Northern Australia up north of Cairns and then one I spent a couple weeks in Tasmania with amazing biologist Nick Mooney who he's adamant that he's seen thylacine and he's a biologist. This isn't, you know, someone who worked as a biologist that was out in the wilderness going, yeah, yeah, I've seen thylacine. And he was terrified to tell everybody. And that tells me that it's more credible, right? If you're scared to tell people because of your reputation as opposed to like going out there going, I saw it, I saw it, I saw it. That becomes more credible than the people who are just waving their arms in the air going, I told you it's here. When did he come out of the thylacine closet? Were you scared to tell people? When do you go, I gotta go probably with this. I'm not sure if he told us first or if it was public right before then, but not long ago. I mean, maybe 10 years ago. Yeah, that's such a cool looking animal too because it was a marsupial tiger, right? Yeah. Marsupial predator. It's like a marsupial wolf with tiger stripes. It's so bizarre and it had this amazing jaw that would open like a snake's, like way wider than its head should. Stripes on the back, just such a cool animal. Yeah. And the last one died in a zoo, right? The last one that we think. Yep. In Hobart, in Tasmania. Wow. But let me lay this on you. So my next expedition for that animal, because I'm like all those other people that are kind of obsessed with it. My next expedition for that animal is to pop with new Guinea. So this species, yeah, that's right. This species used to range all the way from Papua New Guinea down through mainland Australia and into Tasmania. When people came over and settled that area, they brought with them dogs, dingoes, and dingoes out competed them in mainland Australia and possibly in Papua New Guinea 4,000 years ago, but the thylacine remained in Tasmania where there are no dingoes to out compete them. But in mainland Australia, you've got a diversity of habitats. So there are places that thylacine could still hide, but in Papua New Guinea, the terrain is so crazy that the idea is that in certain regions, dingoes could have never made it there. So perhaps there's these isolated regions where very small thylacine populations continued for the past 4,000 years. Have there been sightings? Many, but just the same kind of sightings as a giant sloth. You know what I mean? It's all hearsay. People are so full of shit. Yes, they are. It's such a problem with going to be a guy like you actually looking for species. Yeah. You got to wade through so much bullshit. And it's funny because one thing can discredit the entire story that maybe it shouldn't because they're embellishing, or you can be on the hook for someone's story and be like, I totally believe this guy, it's all real and it could be complete BS. And it's just so hard to tell. You just have to go with instinct. Oh, God. But it is incredibly compelling. I mean, if you really did get an absolute photograph of a thylacine and you knew it was real or captured one. Yeah. I think it would be the discovery of the century. And I think it would kind of shift the scales for people that are on the fence about, why do I care about conservation? Why do I care about wildlife management? You know, those kind of things. To be like, check this animal out. Something that last saw when we put a bounty on its head and now it's back. It's hung on by a thread. That's such a message of hope. Let's save it. Let's bring it back.