During the past few years a huge controversy has emerged accusing the Smithsonian (and a host of skeptics and archaeologists) of covering up the discovery of hundreds of giant skeletons from Native American Indian mounds. Jim Vieira is one of the key people who began uncovering hundreds of newspaper accounts of giant skeletons after he became intrigued by his visits to stone chambers found primarily in northeastern states. To date, Vieira has pulled together about 1,500 accounts from newspapers and books published in the 1800s and early 1900s. 

The newspaper stories relate that the skeletons ranged in size from 7 feet to well over 18 feet in length. Vieira began issuing the reports, one at a time, every day on a popular Facebook page called Your Daily Giant. Vieira was subsequently attacked by skeptical bloggers. One of the skeptics, Jason Colavito, related that the giant reports came from misidentified mastodon/mammoth bones to outright hoaxes. However, Colavito didn't cite a single example of a hoax or a giant skeleton found in America that turned out to be a mastodon or mammoth. Colavito also wrote that modern paleopathology textbooks could explain other reports because repeated freezing and thawing of buried bones would expand bones "enough to turn a slightly average body into a gigantic one." Both of Colavito's assertions are astonishing claims evaluated below.