Amelia Earhart is a name that is mentioned for many different reasons today. She made history with her many successes, from being one of the most important names in aviation history with her groundbreaking achievements as a female pilot, to being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
But one of Earhart’s most memorable moments today is her mysterious disappearance in July 1937 after she began her flight around the Earth. Since his disappearance, many different guesses have been made about his fate. But the claim that he was “eaten by giant crabs” has gained occasional popularity over the past decade.
13 bones that disappeared
In 1940, researchers at the International Historical Aircraft Recovery Group (TIGHAR) were searching on Nikumaroro, an atoll about 4,500 kilometers from Hawaii in the western Pacific Ocean. During their search, the team found fragments of a skeleton (just 13 bones to be exact) thought to belong to Earhart, who had been missing for three years. To confirm their findings, the remains were sent to Fiji for further analysis, but were later lost.
If these bones belonged to Earhart, Earhart and his navigator Fred Noonan suggest they may have lost their way and then landed on Nikumaroro (which Gardner called at the time), as the surrounding reef could be used as a sort of runway. It was believed that Noonan died and the plane got lost in the ocean, leaving Earhart alone. However, Earhart was not entirely alone.
Amelia EarhartNikumaroro is home to the giant palm crab, a massive land-dwelling invertebrate known to hunt and kill large birds for food. These crabs are so large that they could have a leg span of up to one meter. Even Charles Darwin described them as “monsters”, even though he thought they were delicious. Palm crabs get their name from their ability to shred coconuts, but they also prey on rats and other animals that come too close to their burrows. At night, flocks of giant crustaceans have been known to seek prey to eat.
The connection between the Earhart mystery and these crabs is revealed when 193 bones make up the human skeleton, but only 13 bones have been found.
Experiments with pigs also failed to solve the Earhart mystery
Palm crabs, also known as “thief crabs”, are so vicious in packs that they can scatter the remains of their prey over large areas, and these monsters are known to inhabit Nikumaroro. Since the idea was first conceived, TIGHAR has conducted various experiments using pig bodies to see where the crabs would take the remains and whether this could lead to more human remains being found. They discovered that crabs can rob a body and smuggle bones into their burrows in less than two weeks, which they believe may explain why there were only 13 bones in 1940.
While this is an interesting and frightening hypothesis, it remains only a hypothesis for now, despite being immensely popular on the internet and social media. In 2018, TIGHAR and a team of researchers and anthropologists from the University of Tennessee reexamined the mystery using dogs borrowed from the Canine Forensics Foundation to help find the bones. Although dogs claim they can smell human remains, nothing definitive has been discovered, National Geographic reported in 2019.
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