Last week a group of teenagers from the town of Cerro Azul in Panama claimed to have come across this unidentified creature as they were playing near a lake. Hoax or X-file?

The frightened youths say they threw stones at the creature, then ran away. They later returned, with their parents, and found it lying dead.

A fœtus, an alien or Gollum from the Lord of the Rings? The Web is abuzz with endless speculation, including the wildest theories. Meanwhile, experts are examining the images to try to identify the strange being.

Update on September 22, 2009 : FRANCE 24 contacted the National Environmental Agency of Panama (ANAM), in charge of the examination. They found that the creature was in fact the decomposing body of a dead sloth, which lost its fur as a result of rotting in the water for too long. The teenager's account of throwing stones at a live animal and returning to find it dead was presumably a hoax. Reports of it being a huge sloth foetus were untrue.