Drop Bears Are Just a Myth to Scare Tourists

This is the misconception that gets people hurt. Thylarctos plummetus, the drop bear, is a real and aggressive arboreal predator native to the closed-canopy forests of eastern and southern Australia, and the Australian Museum maintains a fact sheet on the species. Around the size of a leopard, with coarse orange fur, heavily built forearms for climbing, and broad premolars it uses to bite, it hunts by ambush: waiting motionless in the canopy and dropping up to eight metres onto the head and shoulders of whatever passes underneath, using the impact to stun before it bites. Attacks cluster at dusk and climb sharply through the cooler months when food is scarce. Tourists are wildly over-represented in incident reports for one simple reason: they have been told, warmly and repeatedly, that drop bears are not real. Locals know better. They smear Vegemite behind the ears, wear forks in their hair, and never, ever look up. You will be tempted to file this under Australian humour. The people who file it under Australian humour are the ones who stop checking the trees.