You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [42]
Other scientists have theorized that the god-bear is actually a colony of enormous black polar bears that found their way too far south and found the villagers delicious enough to stick around. One way or another, Siberia sounds entirely too much like a frozen version of the island from Lost.
Even if reports of a real, live god-bear are false, anthropologists agree that they probably didn’t die off that long ago. But why would there still be stories about the creatures if they no longer exist? In most cases, we’d go with “people are full of shit,” but when you’re talking about a giant man-eating bear, we’re willing to make allowances for post-traumatic stress disorder so severe it’s become hereditary.
2. BUAJA DARAT: THE LAND CROCODILE
The myth
The East had always been a strange and mysterious place in the eyes of the West, and many tall tales emerged to keep whitey baffled and entertained while he butchered the locals. One of these legends was the Indonesian land crocodile, or buaja darat: A fearsome lizard-monster that lived on the nearby islands. The buaja darat could eat a man whole if necessary, but even a single bite from the creature was fatal. That’s why nobody survived to verify accounts firsthand.
But then the tales started to come true: In 1912, a group of fisherman docked on a small Indonesian island called Komodo and came back half-eaten and raving about monsters. After a 1926 expedition by W. Douglas Burden yielded twelve preserved specimens science finally woke up and realized there are actually dragons. They are a thing that exists. They’re just over in Southeast Asia. And they hate you.
The reality
The Komodo dragon is not only the largest lizard in the world; it’s also one of the few animals that will just up and eat you. We’re not talking about incidents born out of self-defense; we’re talking about an animal that is a hard-core fan of murder and not such a hard-core fan of your uneaten face.
That stuff about a single bite killing you? The dragon’s saliva has venom that will prevent your blood from clotting. Even if you escape, it can just follow you at a leisurely pace, eyeing you with that dickish, lizardy expression while you panic and bleed out into delicious human jerky.
The only reason Komodo dragons haven’t eaten everyone you care about yet is because there are so few of them, and they all exist on the one island. But then again, we remember a movie about a bunch of giant carnivorous lizards contained on a small island, and that didn’t exactly end in hugs and milk shakes.
1. POUAKAI: MAN-EATING EAGLE
The myth
The Maori people of New Zealand are basically a death-metal video in human packaging and have the most hard-core monster legends around. Like Pouakai the bird god. Or, as we prefer: the giant man-eating eagle (of death). The Maoris have many stories about this sky demon. They say it would perch out of sight of villages and swoop down to pick people off one by one until entire tribes were killed off. It was said that the last thing the victims heard was the deafening beating of its immense wings, possibly followed by whatever sound a skull collapsing makes, and then the mournful drizzle of fear urine. Surely such a monstrosity never existed under the same sun as human beings, for our God is a kind god and not prone to creating stealth bombers carved from flesh that think men are delicious, right?
The reality
Roughly one hundred thousand years ago, Australia was populated by megafauna, which basically means that all the cute and cuddly animals of today were huge and terrifying. New Zealand, probably overcompensating for millennia of being overshadowed by Australia, had something called Haast’s eagle: the largest bird of prey to ever exist.
When human beings finally breezed in from the wider