Space - "Who knows just how spooked that Martian iguana was?" was one International Space Station astronaut's comment today at NASA headlines back home about the discovery of a 'petrified reptile' in the red planet's Cydonia region.
Images of the fossilised beastie were being beamed to Earth by the space agency's Curiosity Rover - a high tech gizmo with an awesome knack for finding weird alien
artefacts all over the cosmos, including Adolf Hitler's tomb on the Dark Side of the Moon if the Brits' Sunday Smearer is to be believed.
At NASA's Jet Convulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California astrophysicists examining the Curiosity footage concurred the mystery object's appearance is certainly animal-like although bio-recognition scanners have been unable to differentiate between the possibility of it being an extraterrestrial carving of a dog - eg. a Portuguese Water Dog like young Bo Obama - or a two million year-old fossil of a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Next week Curiosity will attempt to get up close and personal with the archaeological ruin before giving it the old prod and grope routine to see what kind of space junk it's actually made of.
Catch live coverage of the sampling process right here on this website from 9pm GMT next Monday.
