Fact Check

Is This the Horngus of a Dongfish?

The dongfish lives in the online world, but in no other habitat.

Published Jan. 5, 2021

 (Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Claim:
An image shows the "horngus of a dongfish," which is "attached by a scungle to a kind of dillsack (the nutte sac)."

How many testicle-related jokes can one slip into a single meme? Someone managed to squeeze several of them into the following footnoted scholarly graphic, purportedly showing the "horngus of a dongfish," which is "attached by a scungle to a kind of dillsack (the nutte sac)":

horngus of a dongfish

But this image does not depict a horngus (or anything else) attached to a dongfish — a creature that does not exist. It's an altered version of a Wikipedia entry for Aristotle's theory of biology, which includes a site note describing that "Aristotle recorded that the embryo of a dogfish was attached by a cord to a kind of placenta (the yolk sac)":

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994 as a creative outgrowth of his wide-ranging interests in a variety of subjects (particularly folklo ... read more