A Facebook story involving a 200 million year old dinosaur egg as it hatches in Berlin has been flittering across our feeds this week, drawing fascination from users who wonder, “didn’t these people see Jurassic Park?”
However, the story depicting a dinosaur egg as it hatches — complete with adorable baby dino — is, as you probably suspected, a whole cloth hoax. Not only did no dinosaur egg hatch, the tale isn’t even remotely based in truth of any sort … it’s a complete hoax.
Social News Daily doesn’t like to link to satire or hoax sites and boost the rankings for misinformation on the internet, but we’ll quote a bit of the story so you can get a feel for how legit (hint: not at all) this claim is:
“‘This is an incredible opportunity for science’ explains Gunther Warburg, paleobiologist at the museum. ‘The Gasosaurus is classified as a carnivorous tetanuran dinosaur of the therapod family originating from China. It remained a mystery because all we had to study upon were a few remains. But now we have a live one! I feel like I’m in Jurassic Park the movie!’ explains the specialist, visibly enthusiast. [sic]”
While the dinosaur egg hatching claim was posted to the hoax or satire site in February, it didn’t hit Facebook hard until mid to late March. Expect to see it pop up in your feed for the next few weeks — but according to debunking sites like Snopes (and some common sense), it’s safe to say that no rampaging T-Rexes are in our immediate future.
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