Remember the weird half-cat photo captured on Google Street View that stormed the Internet with viral fury today? It’s a fake.
Dangerous Minds was the first online publication we know of to post the picture , which showed an all-white cat correction: half of an all-white cat just strolling down the street having a good ‘ol time being a freaky biological abomination.
The cat was a head with no ears, a front-right leg and a rear-left leg with a little tail dangling in back.
The picture caused a minor stir online today, with MSN Now posting a tongue-in-cheek article in an attempt to figure out the origin of the monstrosity. And, another correction: They posted a tongue-in-cheek article that outsourced identification of the creature to their readers.
No big, we do it all the time here too .
Most commenters reacted with wonder, some with horror, but the most rational explanation I could find was that the half-cat photo was just some kind of photographic anomaly.
Street View is not an exact photographic science, and sometimes things get cut off or possibly merged, I guess.
But that actually wasn’t it at all, because the whole foundation of the story was flawed.
This never came from Google Street View at all … it came from Photoshop. The original was posted to imgur to clear up the confusion.
“Thumbelina. taken in 2003. around Parliament Hill, Ottawa, looking north across the Ottawa River,” reads the caption with the photo.
So there you have it. The half-cat photo supposedly from Google Street View is really just a pic of Thumbelina from Ottawa.