UPDATE: ‘Grieving’ Kangaroo Photos May Actually Show Brutal Murder Scene …

Once upon a time a few days ago, the world was shattered by a heartbreaking incident.

No, I’m not talking about the Christian kid in the Middle East whose limbs were brutally detached from his body or the Jewish teacher in France who was stabbed with a machete, or even Iran’s impending war with the U.S. as the Obama administration forced our troops to apologize after a more-than-humiliating captivity.

I’m talking about pictures of a dead momma kangaroo lying in the arms of a grieving papa kangaroo while her joey watched and prayed for momma to stay alive.

“It looked as if the marsupials were showing human-like emotion as the female kangaroo passed away,” Helena Horton of Telegraph observed.

The photographer of the image that went viral, Evan Switzer, had noticed the scene as he was taking a walk through a vegetation property in River Heads, Queensland, Australia. Switzer noted that he saw the mother dying under the shade of a mango tree while a male companion supported her as she reached out for her baby.

“I saw the male pick up the female, he looked like he was just trying to get her up and see what was wrong with her,” Switzer told the Daily Mail. “He would lift her up and she wouldn’t stand she’d just fall to the ground, he’d nudge her, stand besides her … it was a pretty special thing, he was just mourning the loss of his mate.”

After the female kangaroo died, Switzer related, the male kangaroo guarded her corpse and chased after any kangaroos that came near her. Switzer said he was unsure of how the female kangaroo died but that he had never seen anything like it.

Switzer’s photos gathered so much emotion via the internet that headlines were already naming it “tender-roo.” Because papa kangaroo has got the TLC that Michael Jackson was really talking about.

Turns out momma and papa kangaroo were not so “special” and “human-like” after all. Yep. Turns out momma and papa were marsupials doing as marsupials do while another starry-eyed human photographer mistook natural animal behavior as an episode of true love.

You see, experts are now saying that the male kangaroo may not have been lifting the female kangaroo’s head in mourning, but actually attempting to mate with her. Moreover, the male may have been the one to cause the female’s death.

“The evidence is here sticking out from behind the scrotum,” Dr. Mark Eldridge, the Australian Museum’s principal research scientist told the BBC. “Probably the whole situation is perplexing and frustrating for him, and he is getting… hot and bothered.”

Another expert, Dr. Derek Spielman of the University of Sydney, told the Guardian that this may have been a case of fierce competition between males to mate with females, sometimes ending in serious fighting.

“It can also cause severe harassment and even physical abuse of the target female, particularly when she is unresponsive or tries to get away from amorous male,” the veterinary pathologist said. “Pursuit of these females by males can be persistent and very aggressive to the point where they can kill the female. That is not their intention but that unfortunately can be the result, so interpreting the male’s actions as being based on care for the welfare of the female or the joey is a gross misunderstanding, so much so that the male might have actually caused the death of the female.”

The debate over what really happened has been pounding the internet, as behavioral experts discuss whether “tender-roo” is really just another symptom of the human tendency to project our own emotions onto animals, or as I’d like to call it, PETA.

Show’s over, children. Can we please get back to covering real news?