Monster Moose

[R. Pare]

Picture sent to me by my brother back in Maine. Biggest damned moose I've ever seen.

Yes, that is a full size dirt road.....

Personally, I think that it's a truck in disguise.

[carnut169]

Does your brother have any pics of big foot?

[RobLav]

I was hiking at Baxter State Park (in Maine) about 15 years and about walked into one of these things (with it's little one) along a trail. OK STOP BACK UP SLOWLY!

[R. Pare]

Rob:

I know exactly how you felt! Moose can be a bit, shall we say, tempermental at times - they ain't the brightest animals on the planet!

40 years ago we were camping at South Branch Pond in Baxter. Another camper, from NJ with a suicide door Lincoln, headed down to the store about 20 miles away. The roads in the park are all dirt, and very narrow and winding. However, to the moose, they are a veritable superhighway.

Anyway, he got stuck behind a big bull moose for a couple of miles, and got the bright idea that that if he blew the horn he'd scare the moose back into the woods.

No such luck.

The moose wents nuts and started jumping all over the car, basicly destroying it.

After about an hour of this giant losing his mind, the park rangers happened along and had to shoot the moose.

They found the driver huddled up under the dashboard. Took them 20 minutes to convince him to come out.

They had to rent a car to get back to NJ!

No, you dont f*ck with a moose!

[glenn cooper]

that if you strike a Moose with your truck, it's not proper to say, "Last night I hit a Moose with my truck".
The correct verbage is "Last night I loaded up a Moose with my truck; the concept being, that it might just end up back in the bed!
Looking at that thing, I believe it!
GC

[dc]

Found another of that behemoth, from Vanceboro, Maine. Geebus.

[glenn cooper]

about 11' to the top of the shoulder blade?
I'd crap my pants if I came around the corner and saw THAT in the road.
Hell, it's scary just lookin' at the pic!
GC

[DB4 Tim]

I would hate to be riding...I should say flying along that road on a bicycle and ....we could not stop......it might take a team of doctors top get me out.....ug....and just sure as heck it would piss the moose off and we would take off running ...for like the high ground...

[Jim Garry]

If 11' tall, it's a record by about 4'.

http://books.google.com/books?id=cEt...age&q=&f=false

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose#Size_and_weight

[dc]

This bad boy is bigger than 7' tall...

[formulasuper]

I'm thinking that's alot of steaks & burgers.

[Beartrax]

With the first photo I was thinking, "that's a really good Photoshop job...", but now, with the tourists running to their RV, I am thinking that it is real (or a really, really good Photoshop job).

I saw a baby moose near the summit of Mt. Snow one day, but I have never seen an adult out in the wild.

[R. Pare]

I'd guess that that monster is about 10' tall at the shoulders, judging by the width of the road - typically around 9-12 feet.

That part of Maine - up at the Canadian border - has many areas that man has not set foot yet, so the fact that no one has seen a moose this big before doesn't surprise me at all.

Spent quite a few years as a kid camping up at various places in Baxter State Park, as well as up along the Allagash. Seeing moose that were at least 7' tall was typical.

[rickb99]

Lived in Windham, Maine for 6 years and traveled around the state plus NH and Vermont quite a bit. NEVER saw a Moose that big! That dude is way bigger then anything you'll see in Yellowstone!

But, I didn't spend much time up in 'the county' either

[DB4 Tim]

I'm thinking that's a lot of steaks & burgers.

YEA...but wrestling that burger away from him would be a big challenge...

[DanW]

He is bigger than any of the moose that I saw on the Dalton Highway in Alaska too.

We saw a young male feeding in a pond near Girdwood right off the highway. Idiot tourists had surrounded him by lining up around the pond. He looked up, stamped his feet and snorted, started to move towards the crowd in front of him and everyone finally scrambled to get out of the way. Absolutely stupid. They are completely unpredictable.

[Jim Garry]

I sent those photos to a wildlife biologist who works with the Department of Environmental Conservation. Here's his brief comment:

Something is amiss with these photos. Moose are large but not 8 or 9 feet.

Gordon R. Batcheller
Certified Wildlife Biologist

N.Y.S. Department of Environmental Conservation
Division of Fish, Wildlife & Marine Resources
625 Broadway
Albany, NY 12233-4754

But what does he know. He only has a masters degree in wildlife biology with 25 year of experience in the field.

[R. Pare]

Unfortunately, without the originals to examine, we'll never know if this moose is real or a good photoshop job. In the meantime, it still makes a good conversation piece!

Jim:

You have to remember that until recently, the "experts" also claimed that it was impossible for the bumblebee to fly. Throughout history, the experts have been proven very wrong on many things!

[Jim Garry]

Yes I agree. The one that bothered me a lot were the damn scientists in the 50s and into the 60s who said a curveball doesn't really curve and was just an optical illusion. Of course, when the models improved, that statement was retracted.

Having said that, the war against experts is very distressing. People study their whole lives in a specific area of expertise, and then we laymen look at it without much background and think we know better. For example, I (almost) always believe what YOU tell me about race car parts.

[Jim Garry]

As for the bumblebee, I believe the experts said they didn't understand how the bumble could fly and based on what they knew it seemed impossible. But again, when their understanding increased, they no longer said that.

[Stan Clayton]

As for the bumblebee, I believe the experts said they didn't understand how the bumble could fly and based on what they knew it seemed impossible. But again, when their understanding increased, they no longer said that.

Without consulting my aero texts...what the scientists said was that according to early lift models based on Reynolds numbers, bees' wings don't generate enough lift to fly. When Reynolds numbers were discarded in favor of better numerical methods that took into account the viscosity of air (yes, viscosity), the puzzle was solved.

[R. Pare]

Jim:

The is no war against experts that I am aware of. There is, however, too much of a tendency for people to take an "experts" word on something as the absolute final answer - if people didn't constantly question experts conclusions, mankind would still be in the dark ages (or they'd all be liberals! )

In this particular case, this photo could very well be fake - Mainers love to yank outsiders legs with pranks like this. If indeed a fake, remember that it got passed on by a Mainer!

The unrecognized problem in this sort of debate lies in proving that this sort of oversized animal is absolutely not true - no one actually has that sort of proof, and they never will until the technology exists to simultaneously scour every square inch of the worlds' woods.

Simultaneously, there is the problem of being able to find the proof that one this size can actually exist without the public, and the "experts" knowing about it, for the same technological reason as stated above - there are huge swaths of the northern Maine/southern Canadian woods where man has rarely, if ever, set foot, so the possibility that an oversized animal like this might actually exist and no one know about it would not surprise me at all, but it still cannot as yet be proven as fact or fiction.

I doubt highly that every single supposedly large moose that has been seen or shot has actually been measured, verified and logged into the "size of moose" database; therefore my own personal tendancy to take an experts opinion that it can't possibly be true with a bit of a grain of salt - in reality a real expert would recognize the limitations of his knowledge and state that while he doubted it was real, he also has no proof that it isn't.

If indeed it is a fake, it's been fun reading the reactions to it at least!

Stan: Isn't it something to do with vortices and wing rotation that allows the bee to fly? Been a while since I watched a PBS program that explained it.

[R. Pare]

I see I have now somehow been switched from being a "Senior Member" to "Big Moose" !
Hillarious!

[-pru-]

I see I have now somehow been switched from being a "Senior Member" to "Big Moose" !
Hillarious!

I think the switch can be traced to "The Big Keyboard"...

[Jim Garry]

I always suspected something like this Richard. Now we know thanks to the experts at Apexspeed!

[R. Pare]

Definetely better than the nickname the wise guys I went to college with pinned on me - it started off as "Dick for Short" and then of course immediately morphed into "Short Dick" !

No, Doug, you do NOT have my permission to change it to that!

[DB4 Tim]

...hum being galled BigMoose...could have some advantages...

[dc]

I think the switch can be traced to "The Big Keyboard"...

I have no idea what you're talking about.

[D.T. Benner]

So a Moose this big could Fly if it had wings like a Bumblebee?

[Jim Garry]

Only if the air was viscous enough.

[R. Pare]

And if he had strong enough stomach muscles!

I'd hate to see the size of the stinger on a Moose Bee!


Actually just spent a few minutes looking at and comparing the splotches of light on the ground. There are some definit changes from one picture to the other in the areas that the moose would be shadowing, and in fact, there looks to be a shadow cast by the right foreleg, shadowing caused by the rump, shadowing possibly caused by the right antler, and also the correct direction of lighting on the moose itself.

Normally, this sort of lighting detail would not be bothered with. Too bad none of us have access to the photo forensic programs that would settle the question !

[dc]

I can't speak for the originals, but the ones I posted are fakes.

[dc]

Actually, after blowing them both up in Photoshop, they definitely are all 4 faked Photo-chopped images.

[R. Pare]

Now why doesn't that surprise me!

[Stan Clayton]

Stan: Isn't it something to do with vortices and wing rotation that allows the bee to fly? Been a while since I watched a PBS program that explained it.

Yes, but I was just addressing the 'urban myth' aspects of the original question.

For those curious, there is a good explanation of bee flight here.

[glenn cooper]

Initially I was gonna call BS on this, but I quickly remembered -

Everything on the internet is real

(Phew, that was close...)

GC

[R. Pare]

Looks like there actually are moose big enough to take out a tractor trailer:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06...ts-up-the-sky/

They grow them big up in Canada!

[Rick Kirchner]

I was up at an Army base outside of Fairbanks and upon approaching a small bridge, a moose stepped out of the creek and crossed the road directly in front of my car - a Suzuki $#!tbox of some 3-cyl sort. He was probably about 8 feet away.

I could have driven under him and the only thing I would have hit would have been his tallywhacker.

[rave motorsports]

No wonder Boris and Natasha always got their butts kicked !