12 Animals That Were Actually Hoaxes

This legendary animal is as American as apple pie. It is a taxidermy hoax. Someone attached deer antlers to a stuffed hare.Jackalopes Are A Truly American Myth.Scientists found wild rabbits with horn-like warts growing on their faces. These warts result from a specific strain of HPV, a virus that causes warts on humans. These tumors can kill the bunnies, but they are not supernatural. However, rabbits with these warts inspired the original taxidermy hoax idea.

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed afterP.T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid was just a monkey sewn to a fish, a hoax lasting 146 years.Many point to animal rights issues surrounding the circus as a main reason the operation ended. Controversy always involved Barnum's circus, and controversy was part of Barnum's show.P.T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid was just a monkey sewn to a fish.The mermaid serves as a perfect example. The mermaid was an early entry into P.T. Barnum's hoax world and one of his most popular.

An American sailor, Samuel Barrett Eades, bought the mermaid from Dutch sailors who claimed a Japanese fisherman got it. Eades paid about $6,000; that was a huge sum then. He truly believed the mermaid was real and showed it off in London. Naturalists examined the creature, but the most respected one called it a fraud. Eades took this personally, claiming famed naturalist Sir Everard Home had confirmed his claim. This was false. Sir Home later damaged Eades's reputation in the press.

P.T. Barnum later bought the mermaid and showed it in his New York museum. He added a complex story to the mermaid. This hoax caused big arguments but became a huge financial success.

If you backpack through Australia, locals warn you to watch under a tree. You might fall victim to a vicious drop bear. These carnivorous koalas attack people from above, often without warning.

None of that is real. Drop bears are an urban myth designed to fool tourists. That is all.The Australian Museum discusses Australian Drop Bears, which are more meme than reality.The Australian Museum in Sydney has created a web page about these made-up animals. The myth might not be far from reality since an extinct marsupial looks very similar to the mythical creature.Thylacoleo carnifex is the Australian Drop Bear.This animal was a carnivorous, koala-like creature with sharp claws and the skills of a great climber.

The Brontosaurus, the famous long-necked dinosaur, never existed.Brontosaurus never existed.Brontosaurus, the famous long-necked dinosaur, never actually existed. This happened because the brontosaurus resulted from a mistake, a mismatching of fossils caused by a fight between two paleontologists. O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope competed to name as many dinosaurs as possible. Their rivalry was so intense historians called it the Bone Wars; they even destroyed fossil sites to keep each other out of the loop.

Marsh found the skeleton of a long-necked apatosaurus but missed the skull. He used a skull from a different dinosaur, the camarasaurus, instead. When he found an apatosaurus skeleton with an intact skull, Marsh thought he saw a different animal. Excited about a new species and beating his rival, Marsh named it the brontosaurus. The 1970s settled the mistaken identity case, proving brontosaurus and apatosaurus were the same animal.

A red-bellied pacu swam off the coast ofDenmark.People panicked over these fish. These invasive species are closely related to piranha and brought a bad reputation. They have human-like teeth, mostly using them to eat fruit and tree nuts. Rumors spread that they preferred aThis is a different type of nut.Pacus were apparently known for castrating fishermen in New Guinea.

Scientists stated these rumors wereThe claim is overblown., and Nordic swimmers faced no threat to their testicles. Experts who warned about these nut-nippers later admitted their warnings were a joke. The small panic was avoided, though saving the pacu's reputation might be too late.

Most paranormal creatures have a history spanning centuries, but theMost chupacabras are gross-looking coyotes.Stories of the blood-sucking creature began in 1995 on Puerto Rico. Soon, reports of the chupacabra, meaning "goat sucker," appeared across Latin America. People showed corpses of strange animals, often coyotes with mange, as proof the chupacabra existed.

Researchers tracked the first chupacabra sighting in Puerto Rico. They found a surprise: a local newspaper printed an eyewitness description of the creature blamed for livestock deaths nearby. Researchers quickly saw the picture looked like the alien from the movieSpeciesA recently released film influenced her description, leading to the chupacabra legend.

Fact often beats fiction. This is especially true for the story of this.A dragon in a jar.An Englishman found the dragon in his garage, complete with paperwork in 1890s German dialect. This discovery caused a stir. Friend Allistair Mitchell wrote a story about German scientists trying to fool the English with a hoax dragon.

The only hoax here involved being pulled by.Allistair Mitchell.He built the forgery. He hired a special effects company to make the dragon and bought paper a hundred years old to look like real documents. This stunt succeeded and earned him a book deal. His first novel...Unearthly History.This work is a fantasy epic about dragons.

Bigfoot remains perhaps the greatest hoax. The giant, ape-like creature captures global imaginations. Conspiracy theorists and cryptozoologists use it for many media accounts.

The most famous evidence for Bigfoot involves a minute-long recording called the...Patterson-Gimlin.In 1967, two men claimed they filmed a Sasquatch. The story went viral. Since then, thousands of Bigfoot sightings have occurred across the United States. Two men also claimed they found the body of a...Sasquatch in Georgia.They invited Bigfoot researchers to check the remains. Immediately, the body proved to be a rubber costume. The two admitted the hoax, which angered genuine believers.

Tales of a mysterious beast in Loch Ness have circulated since the time of the...Romans.Col. Robert Wilson, a London gynecologist, took a photograph. The image shows a plesiosaur-like creature with its neck sticking out of the water. The photographer did not claim it was the Loch Ness monster; he admitted seeing...Something.Out in the water.

That something proved much less impressive than a prehistoric giant. It was actually a...Hoax.a toy submarine dressed as a mysterious animal. Researchers traced the hoax to Marmaduke Wetherell, an eccentric man. Wetherell had previously faked the monster's "footprints" using an old umbrella. Investigators found that he hired his stepbrother, Christian Spurling, to build the fake monster. Spurling admitted he built the famous model. Still, many people believe a monster lives in Loch Ness.

The 1950s felt strange in America. The Soviet Union seemed near everywhere, and interstellar invaders posed a real danger. UFO obsession exploded in the US.Three Georgia boys.They used the fad. They found a dead monkey, shaved it, and dyed it green to look like a small alien.

Police found the three men by the road, surrounding the creature. They claimed to see a UFO. They even used a blowtorch on the ground near the dead monkey for a better look. Headlines spread worldwide. A scientist found out the con men were frauds after examining the body. He stated, "If it came from Mars, they have monkeys on Mars."

Most people think of Canadian wildlife as gorillas. However, aA Canadian newspaperpublished the headline, "A Strange Creature Captured Above Yale," in 1884. It described the half-man, half-ape hybrid later called Jacko. This was nonsense, but theDaily ColonistThe paper had fooled people. People went to the jail to see the beast. They felt let down when they learned the ape-man had escaped.

PranksterHugh TroyHugh Troy managed to fool a respected US university with a bucket. The notorious jokester made an elaborate trail of "rhinoceros" footprints in the snow around campus. This trail led to a large hole in a frozen pond. The creature became known as the Cornell rhinoceros. Hugh Troy would pull many more pranks.