The claim
Photo of a cat with yellow-black, snake-like fur markings: “Serpens cattus (snake cat) is the rarest cat species on earth. These animals live in inaccessible areas of the Amazon rainforests and are therefore relatively poorly studied.”
Our conclusion
There is no snake cat in the Amazon. The original posting was intended as a joke, the accompanying text is fictional. It comes from a FB group for AI-generated images and was created with the “dream by Wombo” app.
A picture is currently exciting the internet. It is said to show a rare snake cat from the Amazon. The picture appeared on Facebook and spread like wildfire :
Serpens cattus (snake cat) - the same red cat in the garden. This animal remains in the traditional region…
Posted by Alex Vasilev at the Wednesday March 8, 2023
Serpens cattus (snake cat) is the rarest cat species on earth.
Translation of the Russian accompanying text
These animals live in inaccessible areas of the Amazon rainforests and are therefore relatively poorly studied. The first images documenting the snake cat only appeared in the 2020s. The mammal weighs up to 4 kilograms and reaches a length of 50 centimeters. It is virtually impossible to domesticate the animal, although some tribes in the Amazon use snake cats to protect their homes from rodents. (THC Unknown Planet)
To cut a long story short, the sad news: There is no snake cat. The image was generated by an AI. The accompanying text is inspired by descriptions of real animal species, but is otherwise fictional.
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A viral image and its fact-checkers
Sometimes a picture is too beautiful, too perfect to be true. This is especially true in times of high-quality AI-generated images. Some people - like us at Mimikama - are happy about such "photos", but then want to know whether they are real. Since the photo of the snake cat appeared, the image has been shared countless times and fact-checked dozens of times.
Our colleagues at Snopes spoke to scientists and searched scientific databases. They searched for the genus name “serpens cattus” and could not find it in the Integrated Taxonomic Information System or other comparable databases. Lukas J. Musher of Drexler University in Philadelphia wrote to them: “The cat is indeed not real. […] There are many beautiful South American cats, but none that look like this”. Both Latin terms “serpens” (snake) and “cattus” (cat) exist and are also used in taxonomy (domestic cat: felis catus ), but not together.
10NEWS from San Diego also investigated the question of whether the viral image could be real in its “Fact or Fiction” format. They based this on the findings of Snopes:
Snake Cat: The Confession of Alex Vasilev
Surprised by the viral success of the image, the original poster Alex Vasilev recorded the video “About the birth of a snake cat” a week after publishing the cat image on Facebook and posted it on YouTube. If you don't speak Russian, go to targum.video with reasonably understandable subtitles.
Alex Vasilev explains how the posting came about: On March 8th, he was looking through photos on his cell phone and came across the picture. He states: “I don’t know the author of this picture. I found this picture in my phone and I know for sure that I downloaded it from Facebook”. To brighten up his re-posting, he wrote an appropriate accompanying text.
Google Translate translated the term “snake cat” into Latin for him: serpens catus. At first he wanted to write a fake, scientific accompanying text himself, but quickly realized that something like that isn't that easy if you're not a "natural scientist". Ultimately, he stole a description form from a cat breeding site and then filled it with his own made-up data. That's when he came up with the idea of the Amazon basin. He later created the descriptive text quoted above.
At the end of the video, Alex Vasilev addressed the actual author of the picture: The artist who created the cat picture should please contact him: “Whether you like it or not, we are a family because we have such a cool guy was born. Some are parent number one and others are parent number two, so write.”
Do androids dream of snake cats?
So Vasilev says the picture is not his. Then who created it? A reverse image search or Googling for “snake cat” reveals countless new locations for the yellow-black cat’s head. But none are older than Alex Vasilev's Facebook posting. But what's exciting is that it can be found in relevant groups in which AI-generated images are shared. For example in the Facebook group Midjourney cat . Many comments on re-posts of the snake cat also speculated: The image probably comes from an image generation algorithm.
We at Mimikama had a similar suspicion and therefore had the powerful AI Midjourney generate a few quick images with terms like “amazonian snakecat, yellow and black fur”:
So does the image of the serpens catus come from Midjourney? a search in the threads of the Discord server yielded no results and therefore no certainty. However, we still assume that the “snake cat” was generated or post-processed by this or a similarly powerful AI.
Update (3/22/23, 10:15 p.m.)
The snake cat is actually a fire salamander cat. We were able to locate original image It comes from Nikolaus Uhl and the Wombo Dream app. The yellow and black cat was shared on the AI Art Universe . The image was generated by dream by WOMBO .
Conclusion: There is no snake cat (serpens catus) from the Amazon. Alex Vasilev's original posting was intended as a joke, the accompanying text is fictional. According to his statements, Vasilev is not the author of the image himself, but only distributed it. The original comes from a Facebook group where AI-generated images are posted.
Sources: Snopes , bufale.net , 10news , New York Post , ITIS , Midjourney , dream by WOMBO , Discord, Facebook, YouTube, targum
More fact checks on the topic:
SCAM on Twitter with AI image of earthquake catastrophe
Cats of Pompeii: Are the mosaics real?
Artificial intelligence wins art competition
Note: This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication
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The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic.





