THE controversy over the authenticity of a photograph of the believed-to-be-extinct wild South China tiger seemed to have come to an end Friday when an Internet user posted online what he claimed was "convincing proof" that the picture was fake -- a poster of a tiger that hangs on a wall of his home.

The man, who uses the Internet nickname "panzhihua-xydz," posted :"It's the same picture. Even the stripes are identical." The posting also said he had purchased the New Year poster last year, but did not specify the date.

The poster was found in stores in Zhejiang, Beijing, Shandong and Yunnan on Saturday, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.

Luo Guanglin, general manager of Vista Print Packing Co., publisher of the poster, said his company purchased the copy right of the tiger photo from a Beijing company in 2002, the Daily said.

The newspaper said its reporters also found the poster in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan on Saturday.

The discovery has encouraged skeptics who have always believed the picture was a hoax.

When contacted by reporters, Zhou Zhenglong, the farmer in Shaanxi Province who claimed to have photographed the tiger, refused to comment but insisted that his photo was real, according to the Web site Sina.com.

A researcher with the Research Center of Extinct Animals in South China said it was highly likely that the photograph of South China tiger was fake, adding that the tiger's stripes in the photo and the poster were identical.

"The stripes are unique to a tiger, just as finger prints are unique to an individual. So the stripes are the main criteria to identify a tiger in the wild. The chance is 99 percent that the photo is fake," Hu Huijian, the researcher, was quoted by the Nanjing-based Yangzi Evening News as saying yesterday.

The photograph, purporting to be the first sighting of a South China tiger in more than 30 years, became the topic of much debate among scientists and scholars, after it was released Oct. 12.

It was chosen from 71 photos reportedly taken by Zhou in early October in Zhenping county, Shaanxi Province.

Internet users first suspect the irregular effects of illumination and focus, and the unreal color of the tiger's fur. Some doubt whether the tiger is a wild one because its eyes look white, not crystal. Others say the tiger's skin and hair seem too shiny, without any three-dimensional effect, and speculate that the digital picture might have been another picture featuring a South China tiger, or even that a picture of a tiger was enlarged, made into a cardboard cut-out and placed in bushes before being photographed.

(SD-Agencies)