If you visit Australia, sooner or later someone will warn you about drop bears. It usually happens around a campfire or at the start of a bushwalk, delivered with a perfectly straight face while everyone else in the group suddenly finds their shoes very interesting.
So, are drop bears real? No. The drop bear is a hoax and one of Australia’s best-loved tall tales. But the joke has a surprisingly official paper trail, including a museum fact sheet and a GPS tracking study in an academic journal. And Australia really did once have a large, tree-climbing marsupial predator, which makes the whole thing a little less funny.
What is a drop bear supposed to be?
According to the legend, the drop bear is the koala’s bigger, nastier cousin. From a distance it looks much the same, but instead of chewing gum leaves it waits high in the branches above bush tracks and drops onto the heads of whoever walks underneath. The details grow with every telling. Drop bears are said to prefer tourists, and to be able to pick an Australian accent from a foreign one, which is why locals are rarely attacked.
The recommended defences are where the fun really starts. Visitors are told to smear Vegemite or toothpaste behind their ears, or to stick forks in their hair. Every one of these “precautions” has the same real purpose: making the newcomer look ridiculous in front of everyone who is in on it.
Where did the drop bear legend come from?
Nobody knows for sure. Theories include a sketch on The Paul Hogan Show, a scary bedtime story for country kids, and a prank played on soldiers training in the Australian bush, as Wikipedia’s drop bear entry summarises. The earliest print reference I could find is in the Australian Army’s own newspaper, Army, on 12 October 1967, which mentions “a dreaded Drop Bear”. A 1976 Army article about the Kapooka training base refers to the legends of drop bears and hoop snakes that supposedly started there, so the joke was clearly a fixture of army life well before it became a tourist trap.
However it started, the drop bear works because it is a group performance rather than a story. One person raises the danger, a second backs it up with a tale about a mate’s cousin who was “dropped on” near Katoomba, and a third offers the Vegemite. The visitor is left wondering whether to laugh or keep one eye on the trees. North America has the same tradition with its “fearsome critters” like the jackalope. It is affectionate rather than cruel, and many Australians were told about drop bears as children, which is a big part of why it has lasted.
The Australian Museum’s drop bear fact sheet
What sets the drop bear apart from other tall tales is how many serious institutions have played along. The Australian Museum in Sydney, the country’s first museum, has a drop bear page laid out exactly like its fact sheets for real animals. It gives the species a scientific name, Thylarctos plummetus, and lists it at around 120 kg, 130 cm long and 90 cm at the shoulder, roughly the size of a leopard. It has coarse orange fur with darker mottling, waits up to four hours for prey to wander past, and drops as much as eight metres onto its victim.
The page dates back to December 2010. According to the museum’s own blog, staff were building an iPhone app about Australia’s dangerous animals and decided it wouldn’t be complete without the drop bear. They described it as taking the “silly season” seriously. The fact sheet drew more than 10,000 views in about four days, and the museum followed up with a small display of artefacts that may, or may not, relate to actual drop bears.
One detail on that fact sheet is worth remembering for later. The museum says the drop bear has no canine teeth and kills with broad, powerful premolars instead.
The scientific paper that tracked drop bears with GPS
In December 2012, Dr Volker Janssen of the University of Tasmania published “Indirect Tracking of Drop Bears Using GNSS Technology” in the journal Australian Geographer. GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) is the umbrella term for satellite positioning systems such as GPS. The paper is written in flawless academic style, and it is very funny.
The problem it sets out to solve is that drop bears can’t be tracked like other animals: the tree canopy blocks satellite signals, and the collars tend to get destroyed during attacks on prey. Janssen’s solution was to track the prey instead. Research assistants, described in the paper as thrill-seeking international students badly in need of money, were fitted with GNSS receivers, bike helmets and neck protectors, then sent walking off-track in the northern part of Morton National Park, about 120 km south-west of Sydney. The fieldwork began, naturally, on 1 April 2012. The attacks fell into six distinct clusters, leading to the conclusion that at least six drop bears live in the study area. Only 10 per cent of Australians were targeted, and those turned out not to be fond of Vegemite.
The jokes are hidden everywhere. Early radio tracking is said to have depended on whether the animals were listening to the radio at the time. The reference list cites a vampire subspecies study by “Lestat”, a government cover-up investigated by the Lone Gunmen, and a 1981 paper on spitting up into trees by Young, Young and Johnson, a nod to AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock. And in a twist I enjoyed, the paper cites the Australian Museum’s fact sheet but gives the drop bear large canine teeth, the very thing the museum says it lacks.
There was a serious purpose behind it. Janssen later wrote that the paper was meant to show how a research paper should be put together, prove that science can be fun, and raise awareness of GNSS. He expanded it into a longer article for Coordinates magazine and explained the method for a general audience in The Conversation. It’s worth knowing that the University of Tasmania’s own repository lists it as a non-refereed article, so it never went through formal peer review. Australian Geographic then ran the findings as a news story on 1 April 2013, under the headline that drop bears target tourists.
The real drop bear: the marsupial lion
Here’s where the joke takes a strange turn. Australia really did have a large, tree-climbing marsupial predator, and it belonged to the same broad group of marsupials, the diprotodonts, as the koala. Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion, weighed an estimated 80 to 100 kg, making it the largest marsupial carnivore that ever lived. It had powerful forearms, a huge claw on a semi-opposable thumb, and one of the strongest bites of any mammal.
Remember the museum’s drop bear teeth? Thylacoleo had tiny canines and enormous blade-like premolars that worked like bolt cutters, which is almost exactly what the spoof fact sheet describes. Whether that was deliberate or a happy accident, the museum’s imaginary predator has the real one’s teeth.
Those teeth have confused scientists for a long time. When the anatomist Richard Owen described the species in 1859, he called it “one of the fellest and most destructive of predatory beasts”. Within a decade another expert had reclassified it as a plant eater, and over the following 150 years it was variously pictured as a crocodile egg eater, a melon specialist and a raider of kangaroo pouches, as Arman and Prideaux list in their 2016 paper. Today the consensus is that it was a meat specialist.
That 2016 study, by Sam Arman and Gavin Prideaux of Flinders University, added some of the best evidence yet for how it lived. In Tight Entrance Cave, near Margaret River in Western Australia, the limestone walls carry thousands of V-shaped claw marks. The pair separated out 103 clear scratch sets and compared them with marks made by wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, a thylacine, a rock-wallaby and a replica marsupial lion paw. The largest marks could only have been made by adult marsupial lions, and most of the smaller ones appear to be from juveniles, which suggests the cave was used as a den for raising young.
Many of the marks sit on very steep surfaces up to about 3 metres high, even where gentler routes to the old exit in the roof were available, as Flinders University explains. These animals climbed confidently and habitually, which supports earlier arguments, based on their skeletons, that marsupial lions could climb trees. Palaeontologists have long suggested they may have ambushed prey by leaping down from above.
Did people ever meet marsupial lions?
Yes. The marsupial lion became extinct around 40,000 years ago, soon after people arrived in Australia. Prideaux told The New Daily that the two lived alongside each other for about 10,000 years. The Flinders team also pointed to Aboriginal rock art in northern Western Australia that appears to depict the animal, although Australian Geographic notes that some experts think those figures are thylacines.
Some people have wondered whether the drop bear could be a distant folk memory of those encounters. It’s a lovely idea, but the evidence points the other way: the paper trail for the drop bear starts in army camps and campfire yarns in the 20th century, not in deep time. Still, there’s something satisfying about it. The drop bear is fake, but a big, tree-climbing, koala-related predator that may have dropped on its prey really did share this continent with people.
So, should you worry about drop bears?
No. There are no drop bears, and the marsupial lion has been gone for around 40,000 years. The real risks in the Australian bush are much more ordinary: heat, dehydration, getting lost, snakes and, in spring, the occasional swooping magpie. Koalas are harmless if you leave them alone, although they do have serious claws and are best admired from a distance.
And if you’re an Australian with an overseas visitor in tow, the tradition is yours to carry on. Just let them in on the joke before they spread Vegemite behind their ears in public. If you enjoy animal stories that aren’t quite what they seem, my posts on why killer whales are actually dolphins and on pizzly bears have two more.
Sources
- Australian Museum: Drop Bear fact sheet
- Australian Museum blog: In the news – December (22 December 2010)
- Wikipedia: Drop bear
- Trove: Army newspaper, 12 October 1967
- Trove: Army newspaper, “Silver ceremonial at Kapooka”, 9 December 1976
- Janssen (2012): Indirect Tracking of Drop Bears Using GNSS Technology, Australian Geographer 43(4)
- University of Tasmania eCite record for the Janssen paper
- Coordinates: Tracking the prey rather than the predator with GNSS
- The Conversation: Can’t bear ’em – how GPS is helping to track drop bears
- Australian Geographic: Drop bears target tourists, study says
- Arman and Prideaux (2016): Behaviour of the Pleistocene marsupial lion deduced from claw marks, Scientific Reports
- Flinders University: Australia’s marsupial lion claws its way out of the darkness
- The New Daily: Prehistoric claw marks shine light on extinct Australian lion
- Australian Geographic: The original Antipodean lion