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  • 2017-05-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Man in Montana Catch a Three-Foot Long Grasshopper? (en)
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  • For several years, a black-and-white photograph purporting to show a man holding an enormous grasshopper has been widely shared on social media: The most obvious sign that the image is doctored, of course, is that grasshoppers simply don't get that big. The average grasshopper is only an inch or two long. Even the giant weta, a larger insect that resembles a grasshopper, only weighs about as much as a gerbil and grows to about four inches long. Moreover, if the image were real, the grasshopper would cast a shadow on the man's pants and on the ground, in the same direction as the man's shadow. An uncropped version of the photograph shows that it was copyrighted in 1937 to Coles Studio: The use of the copyright and the fact that other variations of this image were attached to various locales (such as North Dakota), indicate that this image may have originally circulated as a postcard. In fact, giant grasshoppers were a recurring theme in exaggerated postcards from the early 20th century. Here's an image created by photographer Frank D. Pop Conard featuring a similarly large (and unreal) grasshoppers: The Kansas Historical Society explains: Although Conard was the giant grasshopper guru of the 1930s, he did not create the postcard featuring the hunter holding a three-foot grasshopper. However, we found two other examples of the work of Coles Studio: Instagram user Blake Nass shared an interesting, although unverified, story about the photograph in 2015. Nass claimed to be the grandson of the man in the photograph, Joseph Nass, and said that the picture was taken after an unsuccessful hunt: At least part of Nass's story is verifiable. In September 1937, the Tomah Moniror-Herald published a story claiming that giant grasshoppers were terrorizing a local farmer's land. Leland Gregory recounted the story of the hoax in his book Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Through the Ages: The image showing a man holding a three-foot long grasshopper is not real. This picture was created as a prank in the 1930s and continues to fool viewers today. (en)
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