A random dinosaur just appeared in a Japanese weather report and people are baffled

Weather reports nowadays are rarely exciting – after all, it’s either rain or shine.

But a clip posted on Twitter by NHK – a news agency in Hong Kong – left viewers confused. It was just a clip of the weather report in Japan, but the first five seconds seemed like something out of a movie, with what looked like a dinosaur in the middle of the city.

People on Twitter were understandably confused, although nothing about the weather report seemed to indicate it was a mistake or had been a mix-up.

The rest of the clip was a straightforward weather report, with footage from the rest of Japan. A voiceover advised people to be on the lookout for floods and any overflowing rivers.

On Twitter, people pointed out that it seemed a little strange to ignore the dinosaur at the beginning of the clip.

Turns out there is a completely normal (depending on who you ask) explanation after all. The dinosaur wasn’t a collective hallucination – it’s a feature of the place that the footage was taken from.

It’s a moving, animatronic dinosaur outside of the Dinosaur Museum in Fukui, Japan.

Fukui is home to one of the world’s best dinosaur museums – it features bones and skeletons which are rare and incredibly hard to find anywhere else.

This particular dinosaur is outside Fukui station, and was installed towards the end of 2017.

It towers over 10 metres in the air, and lowers and raises its head as a kind of introduction to the rest of the museum.

People in the area may have gotten used to it, but perhaps next time it’s worth sticking a warning on a video before giving hundreds of people a heart attack.