He is supposedly over 130 years old, his forecasting record is worse than a coin flip, and his professional career began as the main course at a banquet. This deep dive is a biography of Punxsutawney Phil, tracing the tradition from German Candlemas lore and the real meteorology behind it, through European bears, badgers, Scottish snakes and Irish hedgehogs, to Pennsylvania Dutch settlers substituting the local groundhog, an animal once classified under a Latin name meaning bear rat.

We cover newspaper editor Clymer Freas and the 1887 Elks Lodge trek to Gobbler's Knob that was originally a hunt ending in a groundhog feast washed down with a vodka, milk and egg punch, the 1961 naming of Phil, the elixir of life myth, and the 1993 Bill Murray film that swelled crowds from about 2,000 to 40,000. Then we audit the science: accuracy ratings of 3 ...