The NASA Mars rover Curiosity has not photographed a thigh bone on Mars.
The $2.5 billion car-sized robot did not take a picture of the remains of a long-dead Martian animal during a routine sweep of the surface last week.
The picture taken by the rover , which is real, has been hailed by various UFO blogs and national news sites, science blogs and social media accounts as evidence that maybe there was something relatively large and vigorously alive once roaming the Martian wastes.
It is not.
The picture is just the latest instance of the Martian rover finding something that looks like something else but isn't that thing, since it landed on the planet on 6 August 2012.
The other findings which it did not make include a dinosaur, a lizard and an alien helmet. All of the above were rocks, or at best metallic rocks.