The Australian National University made headlines on Monday with a story about archaeologists from the university who had discovered the "ruins of an ancient city" near Uluru appearing on a satirical website.
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Worldnewsdailyreport.com, which carries the disclaimer "all news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction", reported that the "number of tombs and artefacts already discovered on the site suggests that it could have been the capital of an ancient empire, completely unknown to historians until now".
The story claimed teams of archaeologists had uncovered "what looks like a royal palace, a few temples, large rainwater reservoirs, workshops and dozens of houses".
Despite the sudden reporting of such an advanced discovery seeming wildly unlikely, and appearing on a news site full of more obviously fake 'news' stories, the story's lack of humour seems to have helped dupe thousands of curious people.
As of Thursday afternon, it has been shared nearly 58,000 times on Facebook, and more than 250 tweets have pointed to the news, without a hint of irony.
The story quotes a fictitious Professor Walter Reese, claimed to have led the dig.
"Professor Reese believes that the city could have been abandoned after some climatic changes in the 9th Century brought a dramatic decrease in the level of rainfall, making the city unsustainable," it says.
The University does have a School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Dr Duncan Wright, a lecturer there in Australian archaeology said his phone had been "running hot" with questions from various news outlets "asking about this new civilization springing up in the middle of Australia", as had those of his counterparts at other universities.
"It's obviously really grabbed the imagination," he said.
"They've obviously put in a bit of effort into putting [the story] together, there's not any obvious joke to it.
"They've clearly got a number of photos from all over the place – probably the near east … and they've got some information which sounds like they've done some research - it sounds reasonable, but not for this area."
The media team at the university said they fielded a handful of enquiries about the story earlier in the week, "playing a straight bat" to the news.
"We had a couple of email queries and we pointed people to the website where they admit all their stories are all fake," a spokesman said.
"It wasn't of our making, it wasn't our story, it wasn't true, the people they quoted didn't exist.
"I think a few people seemed to be taking it seriously, but to their credit they were checking it out."
Whether or not the publicity will result in a spike in archaeology enrolments remains to be seen.
"There is a case to be made about any publicity is good publicity - it's like Indiana Jones, as archaeologists, a lot of what he does we wouldn't stand for because it's pretty much grave-robbing, but it raises enthusiasm about archaeology and to be honest archaeology is an exciting sort of discipline, so it's no bad thing," Dr Wright said.
"And the stuff we're coming up with is way more exciting than anything that could be made up."
