These crabs can grow up to 3 feet - and hunt birds, a biologist's video proves
There is a theory that giant crabs submerged Amelia Earhart, dismembered her, and took her bones underground.
Speculative, at best. It looks crazy, we know it.
But the same is true of almost all other horrifying rumors about so-called coconut crabs - until science inevitably proves them.
They grow up to the size of dogs. They climb the trees and tear the solid material with claws almost as strong as the jaws of a lion.
And now, finally, we have video evidence that crabs - thousands of forts on an island - can climb trees and hunt adult birds in their nests.
"It would be absolutely impossible for a crab to open a strong coconut," wrote Charles Darwin, a father of evolutionary biology telling the stories of a "monstrous" arthropod wandering on an island of Indian Ocean.
"The crab starts by tearing the envelope, fiber by fiber, and always from that end under which the three eyeholes are located," wrote Darwin. "When that's over, the crab starts pounding with heavy claws on one of the eye holes until an opening is made."