After months spent on Mars doodling giant dicks in the sand and doing little else, the world was ready to give up on the Mars Curiosity Rover’s rummage around Mars and get back to ruining Earth instead. That was until someone in Japan spotted a familiar shape amidst the vast field of rocks on Mars – a lizard or rat crouching on the planet’s surface:

This led people to believe that the ‘major discovery’ that NASA was hyping up a few months ago is that they’d found life on Mars. The excitement was premature though, as months later they hadn’t announced anything.

Some experts reckon that there is just enough water on Mars to possibly sustain such animals, while others say given what we know about Mars’ geological make-up and an atmosphere over 95 percent carbon dioxide, its not likely any form of rodent or lizard can exist there.

☛ Next: What Would The New York Skyline Look Like In The Atmosphere Of Other Planets?

NEWSFLASH: It’s just a rock. Sorry to ruin everything. I haven’t checked but I’m willing to bet that conspiracy theorists reckon the government is trying to hide some kind of Martian discovery. I want to believe, really I do, but logic indicates that this lizard in the sand is the result of our cognitive ability to produce familiar patterns and shapes out of random ones (see Pareidolia).

Still, please spend some time checking out this super poor quality close-up so that the hours the guys at UFO Sighting Daily spent super zooming wasn’t a complete waste of time:

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