Photo of giant ‘human-sized bat’ isn’t actually fake
Hanging from the roof, the enormous mass lurks in a manner most sinister, unless of course you're a huge fan of bats.
Or in this case, a fan of huge bats.
There's a famous photo which claims to show a 'human-sized bat' and depicts the creature dangling upside down as bats like to do, while it seems to dwarf other examples of its species given how it comes across at first glance.
However, all is not as it seems with the image of the giant bat, as while the photo is very much real it's not always a good idea to believe absolutely everything you see.
The 'human-sized bat' photo
The photo itself depicts what looks like a truly huge bat hanging upside down from a roof.
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It's the sort of thing you probably wouldn't want to wake up and discover in your garden one morning, though you don't have to worry about a new species of man-bats coming for you.
People looked into the matter to fact check it and found that it was not a fake picture, but it was using some forced perspective to make the giant bat seem larger than usual.
The animal is real, but looking at the image might give you the wrong idea about its size, since it looks like it's halfway to the ground as it hangs from the roof.
They said that some people circulating the image had called it a 'Golden Crowned Flying Fox', but that it might actually be a 'Large Flying Fox' instead.
How big is the bat?
It's not quite as big as the picture of it might suggest, since forced perspective makes it seem larger in comparison to the window behind it.
If you look, it's actually quite a distance away from that picture, so this animal is not going to stand as tall as a human.
As with many flying species, they're very light and if they were to stand up they're only about 30cm tall so they're not actually that big.
If you wanted to get them 'human-sized', then you'd need the flying fox to extend its wingspan, which reaches out to an impressive 1.5 metres, as tall as some adult humans.
If this thing stretches its wings out fully then it can enjoy an impressive dimension as far as width is concerned, but humans can stretch their arms out pretty wide as well and we have the height advantage over them.
At least until it starts flying.
Why is a bat called a flying fox?
Despite being referred to as a 'flying fox', it's very much not a fox.
However, the creature's face has some features which people thought looked fox-like and so the creature ends up getting the nickname.
The flying fox is officially titled the 'Pteropus vampyrus' by scientists, but despite the name it doesn't drink people's blood and actually only eats a diet of fruits and flowers.
While we think of bats having spectacularly good hearing to make up for their poor eyesight, flying foxes don't possess this incredibly good hearing or a talent for echolocation.
Instead they can actually see rather well.
Joe Harker