Manduca Sexta

Last Saturday I was digging up some potatoes and carrots in the garden and admiring the harvest when I noticed something moving. Turns out it was this HUGE moth pupa. At first I thought it was giant grub but grubs have legs and are generally white. They get as big as this bad boy but I've never seen a proboscis on a grub. After some research on the internet I found a professor at the UofU that studies the olfactory glomeruli of the noctuid pupa and he was kind enough to identify this brute as a pupa of a Sphinx Moth sometimes referred to as a hummingbird hawkmoth because of the proboscis that the moth uses much like a hummingbird. Anyway, this thing creeped me out.