"These things are enormous"

It has been a week of superlatives - earliest, smallest, largest, longest - so why not top it off with some enormous pine cones?! These monsters (1st image) began dropping from a
120-year-old bunya pine for the 1st time in 15 years - "And when they come down they don't give you any warning!" says the owner of a similar tree (2nd image). This tree stands above the Courthouse Hotel and Cafe in Warragul, Victoria, Australia, and has been dropping pine cones as heavy as 22lb (10kg) each. Even though it's on private property, the danger to the public prompted the Baw Baw Shire Council to send an arborist up on an elevated platform yesterday to remove the remaining 6 cones. “These huge pine cones have the capacity to be lethal if they were to fall on someone passing underneath from such a large height,” said Mayor Diane Blackwood. "They are the size of a watermelon, falling literally out of the sky from potentially 20m [65 1/2'] high. So you wouldn't want to be under one, I tell you."