Well, April Fools’ Day and I suppose that I have to pick up on the theme that I started on Sunday – of great hoaxes.  My favorites are images of great dictators and the people that they have airbrushed out of the photograph.  And there are a lot of those! But I always find these more and a little gruesome.  Afterall the people in question were usually “airbrushed” out of living as well – so a story more fitting for Halloween than April Fools’ Day.

So how about a photograph taken by Luke MacGregor for Reuters on June 7, 2010 showing an employee of Christie’s Auction house in London looking at a late eighteenth century hoax that was meant to be the mummified skeleton of a mermaid.  She was part monkey, part fish and part papier-mache. Ariel she’s not!