By Suzanne Ma
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MIDTOWN — When was the last time anyone saw a moose in Manhattan? Or a caribou?
When a large animal bust reportedly fell off the wall of a Lower East Side restaurant and struck a woman on the head, many press reports identified it as that of a moose because, well, it had antlers.
John Youngaitis, a 56-year-old taxidermist in Brooklyn, remembers reading the news reports and shaking his head.
"I said, 'these people don't know what they're talking about,'" he told DNAinfo. "It's obviously a caribou, not a moose. If you look at the two next to each other, there's no mistaking."
Several other taxidermists, hunters and other self-described animal experts wrote in to DNAinfo, some from as far away as Australia, to chasten the Web site for misidentifying the animal bust.
Many of the out-of-town experts bashed city-dwelling New Yorkers for not knowing the difference.
So, DNAinfo went on the streets of Manhattan to conduct an unscientific survey to find out if New Yorkers can tell the difference between a moose and a caribou.
Both Dwight Crooms and Eric Scarabaggio, working in Midtown, were shown a picture of the bust from the White Slab Palace that Raina Kumra, 32, claims is a "150-pound moose head" that fell off a wall, causing her to suffer chronic neck pain, dizzy spells, fatigue and anxiety.
When Scarabaggio learned he misidentified the head, he went on the defense.
"Unless you sit there and watch National Geographic all day, if you ain't got a job and have to work and everything, then you would have known the difference," he said. "What matters is that this thing fell on the lady's head."
Nana Greller of Midtown got it wrong, too.
"We need to have more shows on caribou, have them parade through the street perhaps," she told DNAinfo. "We aren't exposed to this. Not many of us are in Alaska that often."
On Park Avenue, near the edge of Central Park, one man also believed that the bust looked like a moose head.
"How many do you see in Central Park?" asked the man, who did not give his name. "Unfortunately, we don't go hunting them in New York City."
