Animal
Unbelievable Picture Of ‘Human-Sized Bat’ Isn’t Actually Fake
You’ve nothing to fear as the bat is completely herbivorous.
You wouldn’t want to spot the human-sized bat in a darkened alleyway, as it’s pretty damn terrifying. A picture of the creature has gone viral on Twitter, with many speculating that it is actually fake or perhaps photoshopped, but in fact, it’s 100% real. Whilst calling the bat “human-sized” is something of a reach, it’s certainly one of the world’s largest bats.
Of the reach, the bat does have a wing span that could be thought of as human-sized, because their wings can be up to five and a half feet wide.
The photo, shared by Twitter user @AlexJoestar622 showed the creature, a giant golden-crowned flying fox hanging upside down, as they tend to do, in the outbuildings of someone’s house. A text on the pic read: “Remember when I told y’all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about.”
Currently, the creature is classed as an endangered species due to deforestation and poaching for food.
What’s more, they are completely herbivorous, eating mostly figs and occasionally chowing down on some leaves. As the Twitter user had said, they are exclusively found in the Philippines and were initially discovered in three subspecies, but one has since gone extinct. However, while no editing has been applied to the pic, it turns out it was taken from a perspective that makes the bat look 5ft tall.
The bat isn’t really that BIG but that doesn’t mean it’s not an absolute unit of a bat.
Specifically, the actual body of the flying fox, which looks huge in the pic, is probably only around one foot tall, therefore the photo is just a clever example of forced perspective. As per Ladbible, this is when you take a picture in a way that makes something seem massive or quite small when it’s actually just normal-sized and in a slightly different perspective.
Forced perspective had been heavily used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to make the hobbits seem tiny when they are actually probably the same size as the actors standing close to them.
