Last night, I watched what I thought was a brand-new episode of Josh Gates’ series, Expedition X. It was titled “Beast of the Everglades” and it was about the skunk ape in the Florida everglades. Turns out the show originally aired in 2024, so I’m a little behind. You might want to watch it first before reading this post, because I’m going spill the lima beans about it.
Expedition X is all about chasing cryptids and in this episode the quarry is the skunk ape in the Florida. The skunk ape is a Bigfoot which desperately needs deodorant because it stinks to high heaven. Right from the beginning of the show, I thought of Dave Barry’s book, Best State Ever. A Florida Man Defends His Homeland. It was published in 2016. I used to have nearly every nonfiction book he published up until several years ago.
The aptly named relevant chapter in Barry’s book is “The Skunk Ape.” The book and the TV show intersect in the guy who sort of invented the story of the skunk ape, Dave Shealy, because his video of the cryptid is shown on the show and is widely available on the internet. He has a bit part in the show. He and the co-star Heather Amaro talk about the skunk ape briefly and he does have a piercing gaze, just as Barry describes in his book. Barry’s photo of Shealy in the book shows him wearing a pair of high boots—and he wore the same boots on the show. He didn’t talk about using lima beans as bait to attract the skunk ape on the show but he told Dave Barry about having used the vegetable.
That reminds me of the highly evolved and fancy technology that the stars, Phil Torres and Heather Amaro used in the show. Phil used a really cool, high-tech slingshot to shoot scent balls infused with the stink of 3 different animals (skunk, wild boar, and bear) into the brush to attract the skunk ape. It’s a lot more impressive than tossing out lima beans.
They also used a very expensive looking drone with a camera and caught video of something which looked to them like it was hustling across the marshes on two legs. I thought it looked like it was on four legs, but what do I know about drone video footage?
On the show, Phil and Heather found a few stinky nests which they suspected or at least wondered whether the skunk ape built and sat in. One or two of them I think were in tree tops although the trees were not that tall. I wondered about the relatively small size of the nests, given that the large size of the skunk ape—about 7 feet tall and over 400 lbs. (so, about the size of a typical NFL lineman), if I remember correctly (if that matters). It looked like the nest was about the size of a baby’s car seat.
There were small skeletons in it and one of them Phil identified as a baby alligator gar. That’s a prehistoric-looking animal resembling an alligator. They can grow to massive size. The little one was probably a snack which the skunk ape munched on while watching reruns of My Favorite Martian on the little portable TV, which was on the fritz at the time Phil checked. There were no lima beans in the nest, which means the creature cleaned its plate, which was neatly stacked with others in the tiny dishwasher.
Primates will eat stuff like that, according to a local animal expert on the show. But he politely speculated that the animal bounding across the everglades in Shealy’s video moved more like a person than an ape.
Phil got a few hairs from the grass out in the swamp, which was tested for DNA. It came back human. But since humans and apes share more than 98% of their DNA, that means the skunk ape legend remains intact.
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