By Tim Binnall
A nightmarish image circulating online purportedly shows a human-sized bat in the Philippines, however the true nature of the creature is a little more complicated than that. The unsettling photo initially popped up online last Wednesday when a Twitter user shared the image and wrote "remember when I told y'all about the Philippines having human-sized bats? Yeah, this was what I was talking about." Unsurprisingly, the post quickly went viral with over a hundred thousand horrified social media users sharing the photograph.
Alas, as is often the case with images that capture the imagination of the internet, there is more to the story than meets the eye. The creature featured in the photo is species of bat native to the Philippines and known as a giant golden-crowned flying fox. While they do grow to tremendous size, the description of this particular animal as 'human-sized' is generous at best and, as later noted by the individual who posted the photo, the bat is about the size of a six-year-old child.
That clarification is likely to provide little solace for people unnerved by the image, since the idea of a youngster-sized bat existing in the world is still pretty unsettling. To that end, for those who may have been hoping that the photo was a hoax, what appears to be the original source for the picture was found online (seen in the video below) and we regret to inform you that, indeed, the monstrous bat is quite real.