Claim: Japanese scientists have successfully cloned a saber-tooth tiger.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, April 2014]
Cloning of a Sabre-tooth tiger, real or not? There are not enough credible sources for this story.
Origins: In April 2014, the NewsHound web site published an article positing that scientists had, in a procedure similar to the one employed by characters in the fictional Jurassic Park novel and film, successfully cloned a "98% pure" saber-tooth tiger from a frozen specimen of that long-extinct species:
The baby, named "Ryu" is said to be in good health and is currently being monitored The team hope to begin work on the second cloned Saber-Tooth Tiger within the next
Japanese scientists have successfully cloned a
The story was easily spotted as nothing more than a hoax for a variety of reasons, chief among them that the NewsHound web site is not a news site at all, and it has, in place of reporting on actual events, reproduced a number of other hoaxes and spoofs as if they were real news, such as long-debunked stories about a Chinese man suing his wife over giving birth to an ugly baby, Apple paying Microsoft [sic] a
Moreover, NewsHound's saber-tooth tiger clone article is itself just a thinly-altered retread of another fabricated story the site published a month earlier, the latter about British scientists' supposedly having cloned a dinosaur from preserved fossils.
Last updated: 20 April 2014
