Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park explodes. Spectacular hydrothermal explosion Video of the violent eruption went viral around the world on Tuesday.
The news made headlines again on Wednesday due to a “huge discovery” that never actually happened.
At that time satirical Casper Planet We posted an article about the preserved remains of a young mammoth discovered after the Black Diamond Pool explosion. Hundreds of people quickly shared and celebrated this important scientific discovery. The article uniquely captured the mammoth’s fascination.
While most people quickly got the joke – that the story was a complete parody and no baby mammoths had ever been found – some did not.
“It was 100 percent satire, as always,” said Justin Hathaway, the satirist who wrote and posted the story, which has now become “a locomotive with no brakes.”
Satirical Sense
Hathaway said,Baby mammoth discovered in Biscuit Basin eruption in Yellowstone National Park” he posted Wednesday in the Casper Planet Facebook group, Wyoming’s version of The Onion.
He also published another fake news story about the eruption on Wednesday, accompanied by a doctored photo of a dragon emerging from the eruption, but it did not garner as much attention as the mammoth story.
“When people find out it’s a hoax, they get a funny mix of anger,” he said.
The news garnered a fair amount of attention on Casper Planet’s page, but didn’t make a big splash until a Texas politician reposted it.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller did not share Casper Planet’s post, instead copying and pasting the text and photos without giving credit to the site.
Miller has more than one million followers on Facebook, and the satirical story quickly became a huge hit on social media, generating a huge response.
Miller’s post garnered more than 6,000 reactions and 9,000 shares before being taken down, but the damage was already done.
A message left with Miller’s campaign office was not immediately returned by the time this article was published.
Fact and fiction
Hathaway’s photo of the baby mammoth that accompanied the article is completely real.
The mammoth, called Nun Cho Ga, is a remarkably well-preserved one-month-old woolly mammoth discovered in the permafrost of the Klondike Goldfields in the Yukon Territory of Canada in 2022.
But there are hints of satire all over Hathaway’s stories. Just look at the names.
Lisa Jenkins is considered the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, and her promotion will likely come as a surprise to Cam Sholly, who has served as the park’s superintendent since 2018.
Another fabricated source is paleontologist Dr. Emily Hart of the University of Wyoming, who is not on the faculty roster of any department at the university.
That’s because Lisa Jenkins and Emily Hart are fake names given to fictional characters created for the story.
There are also some logical inconsistencies.
For example, how could anything else, let alone a mammoth calf, remain frozen in ice for 40,000 years if it was buried beneath a thermal pool with an average water temperature of 148.5 degrees?
The frozen remains of Ice Age animals, such as mammoths, rhinos, wolves, and lions, have been found in the permafrost, but 30,000-year-old animals can only be preserved in 30,000-year-old ice, and there are no places in Yellowstone National Park where ice remains for that long.
30,000 years ago, mammoths lived in Yellowstone Might come back in the future, However, no trace of these remains within the park today, and no amount of hydrothermal explosions is likely to change this.
Is this too much?
Hathaway doesn’t seem surprised that his satirical, mammoth tale has been such a big hit: He’s used to his work being viewed by some as too serious.
“Unfortunately, some of these posts reach a lot more people than they’re meant to. My favorite is the one where scientists discovered a massive tree root system beneath Devils Tower. The original post had a reach of about 4 million,” he said.
Yahoo News mentioned Casper Planet. June 21st article on “Yellowstone Lava Geyser” Hathaway is a fictional character, and despite being featured on the Casper Planet page (where it has been repeatedly labelled as satire), hundreds of people in the comments section believed it to be real.
“Since 2016, I’ve been featured in many local news outlets, in USA Today, and on numerous fact-checking sites,” he said. “I even have a section on Snopes dedicated to me.”
Hathaway believes his spectacular story fooled many people because Miller, a legitimate politician with a million followers, reposted it as his own, which spread it far more widely than the article by Casper Planet, which has 67,000 followers on Facebook.
Casper Planet wasn’t created to deceive people, Hathaway said, and he hopes the massive post serves as a wake-up call for people to be more discerning about the media they consume and the “facts” they accept without verifying them.
“One of my goals for many years has been to use Casper Planet as a tool to remind people that they should check up every now and then,” he said. “The mammoth story has now been copied and pasted all over Facebook and is hard to track down. I hope that Mr. Miller won’t be too embarrassed and that a lesson will be learned about checking up.”
Andrew Rossi contact address Email: arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
