World of the Bizarre

Dinosaur cloning hoax circulates the Internet

By T.K. Randall
March 31, 2014 ·  19 comments

The story turned out to be a total fabrication. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Christoph Bock Despite appearing several days before April 1st, the imaginative piece published on controversial website 'News Hound' announced that scientists at Liverpool's John Moores University had successfully produced a baby Apatosaurus and were incubating it at their lab.

The story soon went viral, with links appearing all over social media. The 'news' was met with both excitement and dismay, with some commenters likening the ethics of the event to those explored in Steven Spielberg's classic movie "Jurassic Park".As it turned out however the story was, unsurprisingly, a complete hoax. An image of the alleged dinosaur included with the piece was actually that of a baby kangaroo and the quotes from the scientists involved were bogus.

While it isn't outside the realm of possibility that we may one day be able to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, there's still a long way to go before such an outcome becomes a reality.

Source: Independent | Comments (19)

Tags: Dinosaur, Prank, Hoax