Australia is home to all sorts of things that can kill you, but perhaps the deadliest is the drop bear, a vicious cousin of the koala.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are drop bears and why should you be cautious?
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us. No Dave, no Jerry, no nothing. But we are here, and being tourists walking through the Australian bush right now, we need to be careful of drop bears.
That's right, because, you know, if you're especially a tourist, or maybe a foreign soldier, you're walking around the outback... Look up because if you walk under a tree, a drop bear might drop down, knock you on the head, and eat your head.
Yeah, might bite your skull open with its molars, might use its fangs to bite your neck, and you're dead. You're dead when a drop bear drops on you because they can get fairly big. I saw about the size of leopards. Leopards average something like 6 feet long, 7 feet long, weighing between 100 to 200 pounds. This is a big animal.
The thing that makes it so crazy is that it looks a lot like a koala except with orange wiry hair.
Yeah. And luckily, you know, we toured Australia and did some great shows all over that wonderful country. And we both checked in as safe at the end of it from drop bears. Thank God it didn't happen.
No, we made it out alive, basically. Because if you get dropped on by a drop bear, they're very patient. They're very quiet. They'll wait for hours up in a treetop for someone to pass by. And then they drop out right on top of you, like you said. You're dead. You're toast. So had we met a drop bear, one or both of us would not be sitting here today.
That's right. I'm genuinely wondering how many Australians think that we're being serious right now.
I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, they're like, don't these guys know? Man, you do the best New Zealand accent.
Oh, is that? Okay, sure.
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Chapter 2: How did the myth of drop bears originate?
Yeah. So, yeah, we should probably tell everybody who isn't from Australia that drop bears are made up. They're a myth. They're a joke, really, a longstanding, pranky joke that Australians play on newcomers and tourists and travelers and visiting military, that kind of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people think it started in either Sydney or South Wales. The early settlers there, you know, playing pranks on people who came probably because they didn't want them there. It would be my guess.
Sure. Or just to humiliate them out of boredom.
Yeah, exactly. Apparently, the Australian Museum over the years has kind of kept this joke going by fabricating sightings. It's sort of like a like here in America, like a jackalope.
Oh, yeah.
You know, like creating these creatures, not like a Bigfoot. It's not a cryptid, but I guess a jackalope probably technically is. But, you know, just sort of a humorous thing to keep going. And the official government even gets involved and kind of plays along.
Well, I saw one of the things that is part of this legend is that the Australian government doesn't recognize the existence of drop bears in reality because they don't exist. But as part of the legend, it's because the Australian government is covering up their existence because they don't want to harm the tourist industry in Australia.
Because, again, they jump on tourists, basically people who don't have Australian accents.
Well, and I'm sure they're also like, there's all manner of things that'll kill you. Like the last thing we need is a made up thing.
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Chapter 3: Are drop bears based on any real prehistoric animals?
There actually is, like, evidence that there could have been some sort of ancient animal in Australia during the last ice age that is similar to a drop bear. That does have a real scientific name. Thylacoleocarnifex, or a marsupial lion. Apparently the skull does resemble a koala or maybe a wombat. But instead of grinder teeth, they have... shearing teeth.
And apparently it once belonged to a group of marsupials called the diprotodonts. And with today's koalas, they're in that same group of marsupials. So possums, wombats, kangaroos, and koalas, they were all part of this group back in ancient times. But whatever this more fearsome one was, A, it wasn't a drop bear, but it was similar enough for people to reference it at least.
Yeah. And people were living at this time. This is during the last ice age. So there were people in Australia at the time. Aborigines were there and they would have seen and possibly interacted with this marsupial lion. So it raises the question, like, is this actually like an echo from the past? Like this is this drop bear prank is actually based on like a human knowledge.
of the fact that there was something similar years back and it just got passed down all this time and then morphed into the prank. Some people say no. I think there's a possibility. It just seems weird to have come up with that. independently, I could also be overthinking it.
Oh, maybe. Who knows? The first official mentions that people know about were in the beginning of beginnings of the 1900s. And it wasn't in a newspaper like the words drop bear until 1982, apparently, when there was a message in the 21st birthdays column of the Canberra Times on 31 July. You know, it's from a different country if they say 31 July. Right. We say July 31st over here.
And apparently I say Canberra, and that's not right either, right?
I think it's Canberra.
Canberra? Okay.
I think, not even burra, bra, like bra.
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Chapter 4: When were drop bears first mentioned in popular culture?
Yeah, what's up, Canberra?
Okay, I got you. But in this message, regardless of pronunciations, it was Tam, T-A-M, beware of drop bears in the future, for sure, totally, love, Clint. And no one knows who these people were. We'll never find out who these people were, but the word's drop bear, first time in print, apparently.
Yeah, but the year before, a post-punk band called The Drop Bears had formed back in 1981. I went and looked up one of their videos for a song called Fun Loving. Good? Yeah, it was not bad. Okay.
I'll have to check that out.
But, yeah, so Drop Bears somehow just came out of nowhere. That term did. Yeah. But there had been this idea of a koala-like animal dropping from trees and attacking people. That had been around at least in print since the 1920s. It seems to have been a military prank. Like that's where it kind of was kept alive all of the decades.
But it eventually made the leap to pop culture thanks to a guy known in Australia as Hoag's. His name is Paul Hogan. Here in the United States, we know him as Crocodile Dundee.
I say we take a break. That's quite a cliffhanger when you've got Crocodile Dundee hanging out there. And we'll be right back after this. Crocodile Dundee
This week on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler. Ed Helms is here. I, of course, was drawn to the LSD story. In the 1950s, a CIA scientist secretly bought the entire world's supply of LSD, embarking on a horrific attempt to discover the secrets to mind control.
This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.
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