In March 2023, a message spread on social media with the above-displayed image that supposedly showed "the rarest feline species on Earth." After many Snopes readers asked us to investigate the legitimacy of the post, we found there is no evidence the animal is real.
On Facebook, this was the message that users were copying and pasting, and appeared along with the "photo" of the animal:
Serpens catus (snake cat) is the rarest feline species on Earth. These animals live in difficult-to-access regions of the Amazon rainforest, which is why they are relatively little studied. The first images capturing the snake cat appeared in 2020! A mammal that weighs up to 4 kilos and reaches 50 centimeters in length. The animal is virtually untamed, although some Amazonian tribes use snake cats to protect their homes from rodents.
The image also spread on Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.
When searching to verify the image, we only found various social media posts sharing it. There were no credible reports from news publications breaking the news about scientists supposedly discovering the species.
"The cat is indeed not real," Drexel University postdoctoral researcher Lukas J. Musher wrote when we reached out via email. "There are many beautiful South American felines, but none look like this."
The alleged scientific name for the animal also doesn't appear to be real. The Integrated Taxonomic Information System, which is a U.S. federal database of species' scientific names, did not...
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