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Meet Graham, the hideous creature built to survive car crashes

Happy nightmares! Australian road-safety commission creates the perfect man for car-accident survival. Let's all be thankful we did not evolve in his image.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper

Here's Graham. Let's suppose you met Graham at the corner store, or at a bar, or he sits next to you on an airplane. Once you stopped screaming, you might say to him, "Hey, don't wanna be rude, but I have noticed that you have no neck."

And he would say, "Why, yes, this is true. I also have a gargantuan skull, to better cushion my brain. I have a flat face, with lots of fatty tissue to absorb impact. I have hoof-like legs to quickly jump out of danger, ribs reaching up to my skull to protect my head, fleshy little airbags between each rib, and for some reason, about a dozen nipples."

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GAAAAAAH! Graham may be able to survive a car accident, but he's not making it through a beauty pageant.

Victoria's Transport Accident Commission

"Our bodies are just not equipped to handle the forces in common crash scenarios," said David Logan, a road-safety engineer at Monash University in Melbourne.

A video shows artist Patricia Piccinini working to engineer Graham with all kinds of David Cronenberg-esque body horror elements, all just terrifying. There's also a 360-degree interactive site where you can click on his various body mods to learn why they were designed in a certain way, and what that means about regular humans.

Graham will be on display at the State Library of Victoria until early August, and then will travel around the country. That sounds like a threat, Australia. I'd start double-locking your doors, if I were you.