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This Australian hoax fools tourists every year
The terrifying “drop bear”
Australians are some of the best-humored people who love a good laugh. They also love to mess with tourists who are visiting their beautiful country for the first time. A fictional animal was created to instill terror into tourists solely for entertainment purposes. While it isn’t known exactly how the fun began, we can all get a laugh out of the notorious drop bear (sometimes dropbear) hoax.
The myth
In Australia, locals like to tell tourists cautionary tales about an animal called the drop bear. The drop bear was supposed to be a larger, more deadly cousin of the lovable koala bear (which isn’t actually a bear). Locals would claim that the drop bear would sit high in the trees, waiting for its prey to walk by. They warned tourists to look up in trees as they passed under them so that this terrifying drop bear didn’t fly out of the tree and attack them.
The locals used to tell tourists that drop bears attacked people frequently.
Drop bears obviously do not exist, but tourists don’t always know that. Since the tourists who believe the hoax are understandably scared, they wanted to know if there was a way they could protect themselves.
They were told to put toothpaste behind their ears to keep the drop bears from attacking. And people did it.
Possible origin
The exact origin of the drop bear hoax is unknown. The hoax has been used to scare tourists for many decades. However, the National Library of Australia had a passing mention of the drop bear in a classified advertisement called The Canberra Times in 1982.
While it was typically just a good laugh for the locals, is it possible that the drop bear was named after a real animal?
Some have speculated that the drop bear may have come from an ancient animal in Australia called the Thylacoleo Carnifex. The animal was also known as a marsupial lion and went extinct roughly 46,000 years ago according to one source.
During an episode of Nature’s Weirdest Events in 2016, specialists theorized that the drop bear hoax could have come from deep memories of the marsupial lion. The episode claimed…
