Science Channel's Strange Evidence asks biologist Raven Baxter to identify two creatures found on beaches in Asia

Raven Baxter appeared as the on-camera biologist in two Season 5 episodes of Science Channel's Strange Evidence. "Ghost Rider from Hell" aired April 8, 2021, and "Revenge of the Monster Wolf" followed on April 29.

In the first, Baxter examined video shot on the South China Sea coast on July 9, 2018. A man on the beach had filmed a squirming, human-shaped object. The episode weighed whether it could be the body of a burn or crash victim. "But biologist Raven Baxter examines the object and the footage, and decides this can't be a disfigured person," the narrator says.

"This thing is flat as a pancake and if this were a vertebrae, I would be looking for evidence of broken bones, but I don't think I see any," Baxter said. "So, this might be something else."

Season 5 premiered March 11 on both discovery+ and Science Channel, according to the network's release. Discovery had launched discovery+, its streaming service, on January 4, 2021. Both of Baxter's cases came from the sea, in the first months of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which runs from 2021 to 2030. A Pew Research Center survey of 20 publics, released in September 2020, found a median of 36% had a lot of trust in scientists.

The same segment turned to sponges. Marine biologist Carin Bondar said the object's texture reminded her of a sea sponge. Baxter then corrected a common belief. "Usually people think that sponges are plants, but they're actually animals and in fact, we are related," she said.

The narrator followed with the science behind her point. Sponges and humans share a similar genome, and humans are thought to have evolved from a sponge ancestor about 750 million years ago. The object was thrown back into the ocean before anyone could study it.

In "Revenge of the Monster Wolf," the case was a brown, writhing blob filmed by a tourist on Koh Lanta Beach, Thailand, on March 31, 2018. It seemed to have a snout. Marine biologist Eric Hovland raised pollution as a possible cause of mutation. "Biologist Raven Baxter tries to pinpoint the creature's species," the narrator says.

Its long shape marked it as a sea cucumber. Sea cucumbers are simple animals that normally move very little, so the pulsing inside this one pointed to a second animal. The narrator says Baxter believes that animal could be one of the nastiest fish in the ocean. The episode names it the pearlfish, which shelters inside a sea cucumber's anus by day and comes out to hunt at night.

Strange Evidence premiered on Science Channel on October 17, 2017. It is produced by WAG Entertainment, formerly Wag TV, and has experts apply forensic analysis to footage from cameras around the world. "Around the world, millions of surveillance cameras capture footage that defies reason," the network said when the series returned in 2018. Science Channel launched in 1996 as the Discovery Science Network, and that 2018 release put it in more than 63 million U.S. homes.

Baxter was then a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, where her research focused on science communication. She defended her dissertation that June.

"Ghost Rider from Hell" streams on Max, and "Revenge of the Monster Wolf" is on Apple TV.