Picture of super-rare ‘serpent cat’ is a hoax

Well, it is a brilliant bit of photo-editing but that’s all it is. There are some very clever photo-editors nowadays. This looks like a photo of one of the small wild cat species such as the leopard cat or even the rusty-spotted cat which has been extensively photo-edited in great detail to dramatically alter their appearance to one which is unheard of or unseen in the cat world. They’ve dressed up the image by saying it is found in the deepest recesses of the Amazon jungle to give the impression that it is a new species. But they don’t say it is new. They say it is the rarest cat species. This is not true because humankind has discovered all the cat species and this ‘serpent cat’ is not listed in any shape or form. I know the wild cat species very well.

UPDATE MARCH 28TH: “As far as I understand, an artificial intelligence system was used to create it, which one I don’t know, because I could not find the author of the drawing,” Vasilev revealed to MailOnline.” So, I was correct and AI was used to meld an image of a mangrove snake and a domestic cat.

It is remarkable that its authenticity is being debated on social media. It is clearly a fake. It is a bit tiresome to have to say that.

This image-maker if they are the person who tweeted the image is not English because their English is not great and they’ve got the weight wrong for the image. Notice that he/she says that the cat ‘weighs up to the 4 stone’. Impossible as this is the head of a small wild cat species. I can recognise the small wild cats. Four stones is 56 pounds, the weight of a medium-sized wild cat.

This is the caption:

“Serpens catus is the rarest species of feline on Earth. These animals live in hard-to-reach regions of the Amazon rainforest, and therefore they are relatively poorly studied. The first images capturing the snake cat appeared only in the 2020. Weighs up the 4 stone.”

Here is the tweet. It may disappear because it is out of my control.

Here is an example of the painted cats I refer to. This was a hoax about 10 years ago that went viral.