Did Yellowstone camera capture image of mountain lion raising wolf cubs?

In mid-September 2025, an image appearing to show a mountain lion raising wolf cubs in Yellowstone National Park circulated online. 

The purported photo and accompanying story primarily spread on Facebook. One post, from the Facebook page StoryTime, had over 30,000 reactions as of this writing. The caption of that post read:

Snopes readers sent emails asking us to look into whether the story was true. 

However, numerous issues with the image indicated that it had either been heavily altered or generated with artificial intelligence. Furthermore, in an email, a spokesperson for Yellowstone National Park, Linda Veress, said: “This story is fake and there are no mountain lions raising wolf pups in Yellowstone National Park.” As such, we concur with the park and rate this image fake.

StoryTime, which has nearly 200,000 followers on Facebook, has previously posted fabricated stories, many of which include artificially generated images taken from other places. In this case, however, the picture and story appeared to originate with the StoryTime page, according to a reverse-image search. StoryTime’s “Intro” section defines a story as “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.” 

We have been unable to reach StoryTime for confirmation as to whether it created the image and if the account used artificial intelligence to do so. 

While AI detector tools determined the image did not appear to be generated by AI, these tools are not foolproof. A closer inspection of the picture with human eyes — in comparison to real photos and videos of mountain lions — showed various red flags. 

For example, real nighttime camera shots are not usually as high-definition as the fake photo, nor do they often include an animal or object’s shadows, given that the photos have been taken at night. Furthermore, big cats have reflective eyes in pictures and videos of them taken at night, which the alleged mountain lion in the fake image did not. 

While the issues above could be explained away as the result of digital editing, such as placing a black-and-white grain filter over a real image taken during the day, one of the wolf pups in the image appeared to have a distorted leg near the mountain lion’s tail, a telltale sign someone used artificial intelligence to generate the picture.

For further reading, we previously looked into a rumor that a video authentically showed mountain lions mysteriously migrating south from Yellowstone National Park to Utah in July 2025.

Sources