Fact Check: “Scientists Successfully Clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex”

Jurassic Park is becoming real? Or is there perhaps something completely different behind it?

The website Newsspezial.com shocked its readers with the following headline: “Scientists Successfully Clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex.” This headline is accompanied by an article that explains the circumstances in detail. Among other things, it says:

"We often think of the T-Rex as this giant crocodile-like bipedal reptile, but in fact its closest relatives are birds and the T-Rex was actually the dinosaur equivalent of a chicken," explains Linda Rushmore, research director at North Carolina Paleontology Natural sciences research laboratory.

If you would like to view this article, you can do so here (do-not-link) .

But it is not enough to simply name any researchers and quote any clever sentences. You should also provide sources for this, which Newsspezial does here in a very special and misleading way.

Instead of truthfully writing about where you got this fib from, you prefer to refer to the FAZ and try to legitimize yourself in this way:

But NewsSpecial doesn't get away with it that easily!

Faux tire!

The entire story was taken from the Worldnewsdailyreport website and simply translated from English to German. Including the pictures, the article was poorly copied. The original article appeared on Worldnewsdailyreport in April 2016 ( compare ).

What not everyone may know, but should keep in mind: Worldnewsdailyreport practices a type of misleading satire. This is also mentioned at the bottom of every article. Worldnewsdailyreport has essentially created its own genre called “fauxtire”.

We repeat: Fauxtire is a portmanteau that consists of the terms “faux news” ( faux is French and means false, fake, fake) and “satire”. In fact, fauxtire stories are a mixture: they always have a satirical component and consist of a proportion of “fabricated content” – which classically belongs to the area of ​​fake news. In the end, satire is intended to entertain, while fake news is intended to deliberately deceive and manipulate. Faux tires are exactly in between.

Worldnewsdailyreport is known for publishing exactly such content. Worldnewsdailyreport now points out under every single article that the content is fictitious.

The German version, Newsspezial, on the other hand, makes it quite difficult for readers to grasp the character of the article. On the one hand, Newsspezial redirects you to an advertising page after a few seconds of reading, and the article itself has to be reloaded. On the other hand, Newsspezial only reveals on the homepage at the bottom of the page that the content on the entire page is made up:

News special. However, com assumes no responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in articles on this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional. Any similarities to any person, living, dead or undead, in our posts are purely coincidental.

This is also a characteristic of a faux tire: you only admit, very secretly and grudgingly, that you are publishing fictitious content.