The news that an Indonesian woman gave birth to a lizard took the digital news forum by storm a few days ago but in all honesty, it is just a hoax - a well fabricated lie.
It was reported that an eight-month pregnant woman - identified as 31-year-old Debi Nubatonis - delivered a gecko with the help of a midwife, in the remote village of Oenunto, Indonesia.
The outlandish birth caught the imagination of readers the world over but medical experts are now calling it an elaborate hoax. In the meantime, the Indonesian research have also launched an investigation into the matter.
Reports claim that local villagers in Oenunto are outraged with the birth and angry at the woman. Reports suggest the angry villagers want to publicly lynch the woman for giving birth to a gecko.
Nubatois is understood to have gone into labour during her eighth month of pregnancy at her home in Kupang, with the assistance of midwife Josephine Lydia Hellen Wadu.
The incident has gained wide publicity both in Indonesia and other countries. The midwife reportedly informed Indonesian news site Kompas that instead of a baby, a lizard - coated in mucus and blood - slithered out of the birth canal of the expectant mother.
A senior Indonesian government medical officer also raised his suspicion on the authenticity of the birth, during a press conference.
"Basically there's something not right here. We are looking into whether this was intentional or not. Clearly the womb must have been empty and this is what's known as pseudocyesis," said Messe Ataupah, Chief Medical Officer of the region, the local news source reported.
Ataupah also stressed that such a birth is medically impossible as lizards belong to the reptile family. The human cells normally contain 23 pairs of chromosomes, which is not the same for reptiles, and hence an inter-breeding is out of question.
It is widely suggested that the incident could be a case of Pseudocyesis, also known as false or phantom pregnancy. It's a rare phenomenon where a woman experiences all the symptoms of pregnancy, without an actual foetus. And the chances are that a lizard that might have landed near the woman during the 'delivery' might have been mistaken to have come from the womb.
The bizarre footage of the lizard being ceremoniously weighed at the local hospital has also gone viral.
This, however, is not the first time that such a bizarre birth has been reported. Back in September 2012, a general hospital located in Jigawa, Nigeria was in the spotlight, when a woman, who had labored for nine months, gave birth to a child that had a human head and goat's legs, the Nigerian local-Daily post had reported.
