A Bicycle Eaten by a Tree. - Neatorama

On Vashon Island (near Seattle, Washington), a tree grows carrying a rather unusual passenger - an old bike. Apparently some kid chained a bike to the tree decades ago and never picked it up, leaving the tree no choice but to grow around the bike.

The tree and island gained some level of notoriety when Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County, wrote a children's book inspired by the bicycle eating tree entitled Red Ranger Came Calling.

Story found via The Museum of Hoaxes (but this was not a hoax), pic via Arborsmith.

A bicycle-tree hybrid. Genetic engineering has GONE TOO FAR!

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It is hoax. Trees only grow by their tops

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How many years has the tree? Look at the bike. Is that a 50th years old bike?

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I think the kid still on the bike. Where is the X-ray picture?

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Lola, I agree that it's a hoax, but if trees only grew by their tops, there would be a whole lot of really skinny trees in the world...

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I thought this looked familiar, that's my step-mother's favorite childrens book. It's cute, you should read it.

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It's actually not fake. I couldn't find it on snopes, but I found it elsewhere:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==1412

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The tree is actually NOT eating the bicycle. It is simply growing around it.

If this is real, it was obviously set up a long, long time ago, and never touched since. Dubious, but not impossible.

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This is too good.

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Not a hoax, I've got a news clipping from the Oregonian (November 15, 1993) about the bike, with a pic of a man grasping the front wheel of the bike. The man, who lived in Vashon at the time, theorized that the bike had been there some 40 or 50 years.

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we have old trees around my house that have old barbwire (from the farm boarder) in them much like this bike

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I've been there - it is real, and very cool to boot. This isn't a hoax, staged or anything of the sort - just an example of what Nature will do if need be.

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