Did you hear about the dinosaurs?
“Scientists at Liverpool’s John Moore University have successfully cloned a dinosaur, a spokesman from the university said yesterday” is the first sentence you see in this article titled “British Scientists Clone Dinosaur” on Newshound. A little further in, they claim they were informed by specialists at the university that the DNA was incubated in an ostrich womb due to similar genetics to dinosaurs. Initially, this seems like a significant breakthrough for the scientific community, but upon further research, it is apparent that this is just another fake news article making temporary headlines with no factual evidence.
After searching Google for “British Scientists Clone Dinosaurs” almost the entire first page is filled with articles and some fact checking websites, such as Snopes, disputing the claim. According to Snopes, the article on Newshound was first published in March 2014. Newshound has not been known to be a reliable news website, however it is widely known for other fake news articles popularly circulating around the internet. After the Newshound article, there are only a couple more sites that republished the article verbatim without offering additional information. Despite the lack of republications, the story did stir up controversy for a while on Twitter and Facebook, so much so that the Liverpool John Moores University released a video related to this fake news on their own YouTube channel in late March of 2014.
Reader in Environmental Studies from LJMU, Dr. Dave Wilkinson, explains in the video a “recipe” and “kitchen” metaphor, that we simply do not have the complete DNA chain (recipe) of a dinosaur or a way to recreate it (kitchen). Although scientists around the globe have modern versions of dinosaur DNA, the oldest source of DNA in human hands is from a horse that died less than a million years ago in the ace age in extremely peculiar conditions. The last generation of dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and DNA’s half life is 521 years, which makes it impossible to have harvested a full dinosaur DNA strain and replicate, thus refuting the original claim.
Secondly, Snopes points out the image associated with the article (see Fig. 1) is not an image of a dinosaur, but that of a newborn kangaroo. Originally, the images of the kangaroo were used to accompany an Australian article on rescuing injured Macropods, however in this article it was listed without a source. This image has been seen on multiple fake news sites claiming it to be all sorts of things such as an alien. Furthermore, the fact that there have been no follow up stories for 6 years after a supposed groundbreaking scientific discovery further proves that the article was created for only temporarily captivating people to generate website traffic.
With social media evolving daily, it is important to evaluate news resources and think on a critical level. Many social media platforms are biased and push their own agendas, such as Houndnews. Without applying critical thinking skills daily and checking facts first, the spread of false information grows exponentially. Most fake news articles can be commonly recognized and broken down quickly.
“British Scientists Clone Dinosaur.” News Hound, web.archive.org/web/20140402044303/news-hound.biz/british-scientists-clone-dinosaur/. Date accessed 17 October 2020.
Mikkelson, David, and David Mikkelson. “British Scientists Clone Dinosaur.” Snopes.com, www.snopes.com/fact-check/dino-might/. Date accessed 17 October 2020.
Wilkinson, Dave. LJMU Scientists Clone Dinosaur- Fact or Fiction?, 31 Mar. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6weVhtllZ8. Date accessed 20 October 2020
