Crasher Squirrel
You might remember it as squirrelizing
The archive does not hold a copy of this image that it may show.
2009·Early YouTube·unexpected
The photobomb that gave the photobomb its canonical example, and a verb of its own.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- squirrelizing
- Spread in
- 2009
- Began as
- A photograph
- Where it started
- publisher-site
- Format
- Photograph
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
Melissa Brandts and her husband set a camera on a rock at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park and stepped back for a self-portrait. A ground squirrel rose into the bottom of the frame at exactly the moment the timer fired, and the picture became a photograph of a squirrel with two people behind it.
It arrived at the moment photo editing became something anybody could do in a browser, and the internet spent months inserting the squirrel into other photographs — the Last Supper, the moon landing, the Beatles on Abbey Road. The practice acquired the name squirrelizing. It is the founding case of an accident becoming a reusable cut-out.
National Geographic published the original in its Your Shot gallery, which is what put it in front of the world; the CBC and other outlets covered the couple. It remains the standard illustration of what a photobomb is, twenty years into a century where everybody has a camera.
Why it is here: it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on publisher-site.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on publisher-site.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.