Brazilian aardvark

Common card · No. 491019

In July 2008, Dylan Breves, a seventeen-year-old student from New York City edited the Wikipedia article on the coati, adding the false nickname "Brazilian aardvark", which he had invented as a private joke. Breves and his brother had encountered coatis during a trip to Iguaçu Falls in Brazil, where they mistakenly believed the animals were aardvarks. The false information remained on Wikipedia for six years and was propagated by hundreds of websites, several newspapers, books published by university presses, and academic books on natural history.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife, CC BY-SA 4.0