An amazing and shocking discovery for 46 year old Lujan Eroles that she left after she found a strange creature in her garden in the tranquil town of Santa Fe, Argentina.
She thought it was a snake, which turned out to be nature’s incredible mimicry – an 10 cm long creature dressed like a serpent.
Eroles and her neighbours were shocked by this finding, and conversation about the odd creature ensued.That is when Lujan Eroles recounted the moment she made the startling discovery, saying that her immediate reaction was to scream.
Then, neighbors had gathered, and quite literally seen the unusual creature, with snake-like features and strange eyes, with the creature’s appearance having captured her attention.
“I’ve never seen anything like it” Eroles shared her amazement to National Geographic. “And its eyes were so strange; it was like a snake”.
”They say it was strange animal, and I looked down and I encounter it. And I know it could have been poisonous.”
”That’s how we shot it because we all thought it was a mutant animal so we just put it on the Internet just to get people’s ideas for it.”
Elephant hawk-moth (Deilephila elpenor) caterpillar, by the River Great Ouse, Priory Country Park, Bedford, Bedfordshire, 26 August 2017.
His eyes were peculiar, but he somehow resembled a snake. “The thing … I was afraid it was poisonous.” But the gravity of it was heightened, it was almost deadly, and Eroles realised that this was not your average discovery.
A video of the strange caterpillar, being the only person able to actually provide answers and being too anxious to keep it to herself, Eroles uploaded it to the internet.
The footage became so popular so fast that it had people debating and wondering what the creature was and where it came from. Internet forums were piqued with the snake like look and diminutive size and there followed a succession of discoveries about its true origins.
Fans and professionals alike conjectured about the creature’s genuine identity as the internet community flocked to Eroles’ video. Later on, it was identified as a caterpillar of a rare Central American moth species. The species, which many mistakenly believed to be an Elephant Hawk-Moth Caterpillar, even featured an unexpected defense mechanism: it dissuaded potential predators by imitating the appearance of a snake.