MORE APRIL FOOLS

I dunno how we missed these ones, but as regular readers will know, the last few days have not been the easiest that we have experienced since the beginning of the CFZ. However, when we did our round up of April Fool's jokes for this year we missed the two best:

A paper by Dr Daz, entitled Recently discovered late-surviving carnivorous reptiles probably explain the origin of the dragon myth can be found at the following page on the increasingly excellent Tetzoo blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/04/paris_and_pickled_dragon.php

It starts:

It has often been proposed that large reptiles, such as monitor lizards and crocodiles, might have provided the origin for the dragon myths of the world. There might be some truth to this, but the possibility that rather more spectacular reptiles might have played a contributing role is rather more plausible. Confirmation for this hypothesis comes from Hypoblanpied whartoni, described in 2003 from the Pleistocene of France (Freeman 2003).

It is gloriously convincing and full of in-jokes which would do a lot to fool most people not in the know. Well done dude..

The second great cryptojoke this April was pubished by Birdchick and can be found:

http://www.birdchick.com/wp/2009/04/extinct-carolina-parakeet-rediscovered-documented/

Long believed to be extinct,--the Carolina Parakeet, North America's only member of the parrot family -- has been discovered in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in the Mosquitia region of northeastern Honduras. A photo of a Carolina Parakeet researchers named "Coqueta" now living in captivity in Honduras.A little fewer than 100 years after the last confirmed sighting of the species in the United States, a research team today announced that a small non-migratory population survives in vast areas of neotropical forest in Honduras.

This was so well done, I was convinced until I realised not only the date, but the fact the the accompanying photograph was a Jenday Conure that had been photoshopped.

Bloody brilliant, both of you