CLAIM:
Photos show the skeletal remains of giant humans who stood 7 meters (23 feet) in height.
AP’S ASSESSMENT:
False. These images show the fossilized remains of a species of tropical ground sloth, now extinct, that lived tens of thousands of years ago and was similar in size to an elephant. The bones are on display for the public at a museum in Ecuador.
THE FACTS:
The photos shared widely on Instagram and Twitter this week showed enormous, brown-tinged bones laid out on a wooden floor, with a group of people posing nearby.
Social media users claimed the creatures, whose spines appeared to extend past their legs and who had far more rib bones than people do, were an ancient species of giant human discovered in an Ecuadorian town.
“The remains of GIANTS were discovered in the small Equadorian village of Changaimina, 7m in height,” the posts read. “Connected to an ancient human race exceeding 12m.”
But there’s no evidence such a giant human species ever existed – and the images show the remains of giant sloths, not people.
“These are images of giant sloth fossils from the Tanque Loma asphaltic (‘tar pit’) paleontological locality in Ecuador,” Emily Lindsey, associate curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
A reverse image search confirms the photos were captured at the Museo Paleontological Megaterio at the Universidad Estatal Peninsula de Santa Elena in La Libertad, Ecuador, where these fossils are on display.
The species of tropical ground sloth featured in the photos, Eremotherium laurillardi, “was about the size of an elephant” and lived across Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and up through Florida and the Gulf Coast during the late Pleistocene era, Lindsey said.
This and other ground sloth species have been extinct for thousands of years.
Lindsey said the online claims that the bones were discovered in Changaimina were also inaccurate.
“I looked it up on Google Maps and found that it is in the Andes mountains hundreds of miles southeast of the Peninsula where the fossils were found,” Lindsey said. “Eremotherium is a lowland species, no fossils have been found at high elevations.”
The AP has previously debunked the false claim that giant humans once existed, a myth that experts say has spread for “decades and decades” and occasionally has been perpetuated by fabricated images from Photoshop contests.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
