Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer

In fifth grade, my friend Vanja and I were working on a project in which we were supposed to research and profile an animal. Of course, being elementary school boys, we wanted to find the weirdest-looking, most deadly, scary creature on the face of the earth. During the initial brainstorming session, Vanja recommended an animal he'd read about. He described it as being able to melt ice with a heated bony plate embedded in its forehead. This sounded pretty cool to me, but a thorough search of the school library turned up absolutely nothing. The only logical thing to do was to head to the public library and try to track things down.

Since Vanja remembered reading about the thing in a magazine, we searched for relevant keywords in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. We found something that seemed promising which referred us to the April 1995 issue of Discover magazine. We found the copy in micro cassete format, got a crash course in the use of the micro cassette viewer, and fired it up. The article was pure gold. It reported the recent Antarctic discovery of the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer. This mole-sized creature burrowed through the ice at high speeds. For food, these pernicious little guys would melt the ice under a passing penguin and then devour the helpless penguin when it fell into the water. The magazine even reported that a famed Antarctic explorer may have fallen victim to these mean critters. However, there wasn't much information in the story (not even a scientific name for the animal), so we turned back to the Reader's Guide for further research, inspired by our initial discoveries. We found only one more reference. The article, when we found it, recounted how hundreds of Discover readers had been duped by a cleverly written hoax article written for April Fool's Day. Shocked and disappointed, Vanja and I wrung our hands and chose another animal to profile: the terrifying viperfish, which was later featured in the Pixar film Finding Nemo.

I like the borer because it is such a believable lie. It's the kind of thing we desperately want to exist, like space aliens or renewable energy. This property wraps people up and makes them believe it. Discover received more mail about that article than any other it has ever written, and most of the respondents didn't realize it was a hoax. Some were zookeepers hoping for specimens; others were simply excited amateurs like you and me. Until the ice borer is discovered for real, it will live on in my heart.

For further information...

• The original article in Discover magazine.
• Wikipedia article on the borer.