May 7, 2025 • 11 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
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 each each.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Your head, yeah, might bite your skull open with its molars,
might use its bangs 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 six feet long, seven
feet long, laying between one hundred and two hundred pounds.
(00:57):
This is a big animal. The thing that makes it
so crazy is that it looks a lot like a koala,
except with orange, wy, wiry hair.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
From drop bears. Thank god it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, we made it out alive, basically, because if you
get dropped on by a drop bear, who are They're
very patient, they're very quiet. They'll wait for hours up
in the treetop for someone to pass by, and then
they drop out right on top of you. Like you said,
you're dead, You're you're toast. So had we met a
drop bear, one or both of us would not be
sitting here today.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I'm genuinely wondering how many Australians think that we're being
serious right now.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, they're like, don't these guys now.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Man that you do the best New Zealand accent?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
That was it? Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Sure it all sounds like Murray Mary. 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 long standing pranky joke that Australians play on newcomers
and tourists and travelers and visiting military that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, a lot of people think it started in either
Sydney or South Wales the early early settlers there, you know,
playing pranks on people who came, probably because they didn't
want them there, it would be my guess.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Sure, or just to humiliate them out of boredom.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Apparently the Australian Museum over the years has kind of
kept this joke going by fabricating sightings.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's sort of like a like here in America, like
a jackalope.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Oh yeah, you know, like creating these creatures, not like
a bigfoot. It's not a cryptid, but I guess a
jacolobe 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.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Well. I saw one of the things that as part
of this legend is that the Australian government does 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
(03:16):
jump on tourists basically people who don't have Australian accents.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Up thing exactly, So we said. The Australian government is
part of it. So a lot of other institutions have
contributed to kind of keeping this idea alive. I saw
an article in The Conversation about drop bears and surviving
drop bear attacks and it was totally straight from starting
to finish. There wasn't even a little disclaimer in italics
(03:47):
at the end. And they've even been given a scientific
name thy larctos plumatists. That's pretty funny, it is. It's great.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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, Thyloclio carnifex, or a
marsupial lion. Apparently the skull does resemble a koala or
(04:17):
maybe a wombat, but instead of grinder teeth, they have.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Shearing teeth and apparently at once belonged to a group of.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Marsupials called the dipper toodonts, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
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
(05:08):
prank is actually based on like a human knowledge of
the fact that there was something similar years back into
this 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.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Oh maybe, who knows. The first official mentions that people
know about were in the beginning of beginnings of the
nineteen hundreds, and it wasn't in a newspaper like the
words drop bear until nineteen eighty two, apparently, when there
was a message in the twenty first Birthday's column of
the Canberra Times on thirty one July. You know it's
(05:53):
from a different country if they say thirty one July, right,
we say July thirty first over here and apparently, yeah,
I say canber And.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
That's not right either, right, I think it's Canberra, Canberra, Okay,
I think not even Borah bruh like bruh.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
What's up? Bro?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, what's up Canbra?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Okay, I got you.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
But in this message, regardless of pronunciations, it was Tam tam,
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 this who these people were.
But the words drop bear first time in print apparently.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah. But the year before a post punk band called
the drop Bears had formed back in nineteen eighty one.
I went and looked up one of their videos for
a song called fun Loving Good. Yeah it's not bad, okay,
jump it out. But yes, so drop like drop bears
somehow just came out of nowhere. That term did. But
(06:51):
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 nineteen twenties. 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
(07:13):
a guy known in Australia as Hogues. His name is
Paul Hogan. Here in the United States, we know him
as Crocodile Dundee.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I say we take a break.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
That's quite a cliffhanger when you got Crocodile Dundee hanging
out there. And we'll be right back after this, all right,
(07:52):
we promised talk of Crocodile Dundee. In nineteen eighty one,
on his show The Paul Hogan Show, he did skit
where he starts talking about the untold horrors of the
Australian bush and although he didn't use the word drop bear,
he talked about killer koalas silently sitting and then dropping
out of trees and killing people.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, so within a few years this thing crosses over
to the mainstream. Drop bears are attached as the name,
and it just becomes an institution in Australia.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Apparently that's right, and we've gotten real tips because you know,
they like to play along with this stuff, and so
you can actually get real published tips on how to
avoid being killed by these.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Right apparently one so remember they're telling like soldiers in
Australia are telling like some American detachment that's visiting or
doing training exercises or something to do these things. Yeah,
and apparently they do. Sometimes One is to put dabs
of toothpaste behind your ears, James, I mean toothpaste, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, I'm surprised that's all it was, because why didn't
they say like human feces or something they want to
kick it up?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, yes, but I mean just the fact that you
did something that they can demonstrate you did that. That's
that's enough. When they tell you that this whole thing's
a joke and you're a total moron.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I guess they got a little closer to human feces
on the next but a little bit. Uh. They said
that you got to smear your cheeks and forehead with vegemite. Boy,
I'm gonna get killed for that one. You are, but
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Australia.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Australia, you should know by now, no one outside of
Australia likes vegemite. That's just your thing, that's.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Right, And you've all got great senses of humor, so
I know you'll take that with a plumb.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's right. So another one was putting forks in your hair,
which I mean you'd have to have thick, curly hair
to hold a fork in your hair.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah, fork would fall right out of my hair.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Same here. Yeah. And then you could wear a neck guard.
That would be the funniest one to me. That's what
I would try to get people to do. Remember, like
the old school neck guards that like in that episode
of The Brady Bunch where there's the car accident, the
person that Mike Brady hit was wearing like a neck
protector to keep them from turning their head.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
And then he throws the briefcase and they look really
quickly and Mike Brady Pruss's cave foiled. Yeah. Yeah, if
I could get somebody to wear one of those to
protect against a drop bear attack, I would feel pretty
good about myself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And if all these things fail, I believe so much
of what you say. If you told me I needed
to wear that for any reason, I probably would all right.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Well, keep sharp, man, because I'm going to try it sometime.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
You know, if you want a podcast, better put on
a neck break.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Apparently, if none of those things work, though, and you
were a visiting military soldier and you are attacked, to
protect yourself, curl into a ball and protect all of
your major internal organs and major arteries.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah, pretty great stuff, chuck.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, No, I mean that was kind of sad.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
If you look up drop Bear, there's some funny pictures
of like just photoshopped qualas that looked super scary And mean.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
What do you mean what was sad?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
No? No, no, no, did I say sad?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah? You said it's kind of sad? Did I either
that or I've just totally lost my mind?
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Finally, in my mind, I said funny.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I guess only the listener will know the truth of
which one of us just had a stroke.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Maybe you guys can write in and tell us in
the meantime, everybody short, Stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
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 each each.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Your head, yeah, might bite your skull open with its molars,
might use its bangs 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 six feet long, seven
feet long, laying between one hundred and two hundred pounds.
(00:57):
This is a big animal. The thing that makes it
so crazy is that it looks a lot like a koala,
except with orange, wy, wiry hair.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
From drop bears. Thank god it didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
No, we made it out alive, basically, because if you
get dropped on by a drop bear, who are They're
very patient, they're very quiet. They'll wait for hours up
in the treetop for someone to pass by, and then
they drop out right on top of you. Like you said,
you're dead, You're you're toast. So had we met a
drop bear, one or both of us would not be
sitting here today.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I'm genuinely wondering how many Australians think that we're being
serious right now.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, they're like, don't these guys now.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Man that you do the best New Zealand accent?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
That was it? Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Sure it all sounds like Murray Mary. 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 long standing pranky joke that Australians play on newcomers
and tourists and travelers and visiting military that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, a lot of people think it started in either
Sydney or South Wales the early early settlers there, you know,
playing pranks on people who came, probably because they didn't
want them there, it would be my guess.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Sure, or just to humiliate them out of boredom.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Apparently the Australian Museum over the years has kind of
kept this joke going by fabricating sightings.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's sort of like a like here in America, like
a jackalope.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Oh yeah, you know, like creating these creatures, not like
a bigfoot. It's not a cryptid, but I guess a
jacolobe 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.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Well. I saw one of the things that as part
of this legend is that the Australian government does 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
(03:16):
jump on tourists basically people who don't have Australian accents.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Up thing exactly, So we said. The Australian government is
part of it. So a lot of other institutions have
contributed to kind of keeping this idea alive. I saw
an article in The Conversation about drop bears and surviving
drop bear attacks and it was totally straight from starting
to finish. There wasn't even a little disclaimer in italics
(03:47):
at the end. And they've even been given a scientific
name thy larctos plumatists. That's pretty funny, it is. It's great.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
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, Thyloclio carnifex, or a
marsupial lion. Apparently the skull does resemble a koala or
(04:17):
maybe a wombat, but instead of grinder teeth, they have.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Shearing teeth and apparently at once belonged to a group of.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Marsupials called the dipper toodonts, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
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
(05:08):
prank is actually based on like a human knowledge of
the fact that there was something similar years back into
this 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.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Oh maybe, who knows. The first official mentions that people
know about were in the beginning of beginnings of the
nineteen hundreds, and it wasn't in a newspaper like the
words drop bear until nineteen eighty two, apparently, when there
was a message in the twenty first Birthday's column of
the Canberra Times on thirty one July. You know it's
(05:53):
from a different country if they say thirty one July, right,
we say July thirty first over here and apparently, yeah,
I say canber And.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
That's not right either, right, I think it's Canberra, Canberra, Okay,
I think not even Borah bruh like bruh.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
What's up? Bro?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, what's up Canbra?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Okay, I got you.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
But in this message, regardless of pronunciations, it was Tam tam,
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 this who these people were.
But the words drop bear first time in print apparently.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah. But the year before a post punk band called
the drop Bears had formed back in nineteen eighty one.
I went and looked up one of their videos for
a song called fun Loving Good. Yeah it's not bad, okay,
jump it out. But yes, so drop like drop bears
somehow just came out of nowhere. That term did. But
(06:51):
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 nineteen twenties. 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
(07:13):
a guy known in Australia as Hogues. His name is
Paul Hogan. Here in the United States, we know him
as Crocodile Dundee.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
I say we take a break.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
That's quite a cliffhanger when you got Crocodile Dundee hanging
out there. And we'll be right back after this, all right,
(07:52):
we promised talk of Crocodile Dundee. In nineteen eighty one,
on his show The Paul Hogan Show, he did skit
where he starts talking about the untold horrors of the
Australian bush and although he didn't use the word drop bear,
he talked about killer koalas silently sitting and then dropping
out of trees and killing people.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, so within a few years this thing crosses over
to the mainstream. Drop bears are attached as the name,
and it just becomes an institution in Australia.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Apparently that's right, and we've gotten real tips because you know,
they like to play along with this stuff, and so
you can actually get real published tips on how to
avoid being killed by these.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Right apparently one so remember they're telling like soldiers in
Australia are telling like some American detachment that's visiting or
doing training exercises or something to do these things. Yeah,
and apparently they do. Sometimes One is to put dabs
of toothpaste behind your ears, James, I mean toothpaste, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, I'm surprised that's all it was, because why didn't
they say like human feces or something they want to
kick it up?
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, yes, but I mean just the fact that you
did something that they can demonstrate you did that. That's
that's enough. When they tell you that this whole thing's
a joke and you're a total moron.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I guess they got a little closer to human feces
on the next but a little bit. Uh. They said
that you got to smear your cheeks and forehead with vegemite. Boy,
I'm gonna get killed for that one. You are, but
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Australia.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Australia, you should know by now, no one outside of
Australia likes vegemite. That's just your thing, that's.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Right, And you've all got great senses of humor, so
I know you'll take that with a plumb.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's right. So another one was putting forks in your hair,
which I mean you'd have to have thick, curly hair
to hold a fork in your hair.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah, fork would fall right out of my hair.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Same here. Yeah. And then you could wear a neck guard.
That would be the funniest one to me. That's what
I would try to get people to do. Remember, like
the old school neck guards that like in that episode
of The Brady Bunch where there's the car accident, the
person that Mike Brady hit was wearing like a neck
protector to keep them from turning their head.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
And then he throws the briefcase and they look really
quickly and Mike Brady Pruss's cave foiled. Yeah. Yeah, if
I could get somebody to wear one of those to
protect against a drop bear attack, I would feel pretty
good about myself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And if all these things fail, I believe so much
of what you say. If you told me I needed
to wear that for any reason, I probably would all right.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Well, keep sharp, man, because I'm going to try it sometime.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
You know, if you want a podcast, better put on
a neck break.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Apparently, if none of those things work, though, and you
were a visiting military soldier and you are attacked, to
protect yourself, curl into a ball and protect all of
your major internal organs and major arteries.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah, pretty great stuff, chuck.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, No, I mean that was kind of sad.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
If you look up drop Bear, there's some funny pictures
of like just photoshopped qualas that looked super scary And mean.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
What do you mean what was sad?
Speaker 3 (11:05):
No? No, no, no, did I say sad?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah? You said it's kind of sad? Did I either
that or I've just totally lost my mind?
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Finally, in my mind, I said funny.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I guess only the listener will know the truth of
which one of us just had a stroke.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Maybe you guys can write in and tell us in
the meantime, everybody short, Stuff is out.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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