…And if so, in what original language?
It’s attributed to a Dennis Engel, in the article linked here.
The site looks like some sort of news/article aggregator. But do these aggregators now try to compose their own content?
The last three paragraphs of that article are also strangely-written. No clue about that first sentence though!
ETA his brief bio:
OK, in skimming a few other articles on that website it’s a content site written by people who don’t speak English as a first language. The names and photos of the contributors are most likely fake.
Go to the home page and you’ll see what I mean.
Yeah, I looked at the author’s ‘bio’ and home page as well. Couldn’t make sense of any of it and concluded it was some sort of aggregator. But the sentence structures are so bizarre that I can’t imagine it’s written by anyone with even the most basic ESL skills. So I’m tempted to think it’s ‘bot’ content as well.
The article is probably a computer rewrite of a human-written article. There are many sites which take articles and headlines from legitimate sites, rewrite the whole thing, and put them up on their own site. The goal is to make a buck from advertising, but they can’t just copy the content word-for-word because Google penalizes that. Once upon a time, people rewrote the articles, but nowadays, most of it is done by automated programs that use word cyphers. So you wind up with abominations like that.
Yeah, and “Dennis Engel” is actually Michael Engel of University of Michigan.
Someone should probably let him know.
I agree. Out of curiosity (and because back in the 2000s I wrote masses of content myself) I checked the whois domain page. Site owner shares a name with an Indian film director, site is registered in Karachi Pakistan, was started in September 2014 and oddly enough, the phone number in the privacy statement goes to a Greek restaurant in Detroit.
Since the content there is clearly a mish-mash of plagiarized content and weirdly translated English, the whole site could probably be taken down under the DMCA law, if anyone were to pursue it.
Good catch! I just emailed Michael Engel.
Wow. I don’t even know what “mustard apples” are, but I’m disgusted too! I hope I don’t subsequent to demise!
It must have originated with a human. Machines would produce much more comprehensible text.
It may be a bit of both, actually.
If a person who didn’t speak English tried to use Google Translate to put something together, that kind of looks like how it might come out. Translation software can really screw up a sentence (it can help a lot, too, but you have to know how to use it and know at least a little bit about the destination language.)
The real Michael Engel just emailed me back - at least one other person had also let him know. He’s called it a form of identity theft and will be contacting the site owner asking that they take the photo down. Which means that all of the “author bios” on that site are fake (as I said in post 3).
Entire site is stupid and bogus anyway; I can’t seeing them staying viable for very long.
QuickSilver I am curious, how did you stumble across this gem?
The article appears to have been completely rewritten, making me thing that this was originally an automatic translation of an article in another language, which is posted to get the information out there, and then rewritten by humans later. It still clearly is not written by a native speaker, but it now makes a lot more sense.
I’ve found an article that seems to be the original, or, more likely, a better translation of the original, since it’s still not written like native English.
Analysts have gone over a strange fish which is totally new to scientific community. The odd part is that this fish has been found in the deepest waters on the planet, setting another record for fish profundity by living 26,715 feet underneath the sea surface.
If anyone knows a language where “consume diagonally” can mean “gone over,” you’d have the original language. I’d hoped that 26,715 feet was an overly precise conversion from metric, but no such luck. It’s a pretty good conversion for 3,143 meters, and suggests that the original was probably in feet.
As for the author, that’s probably just a fake bio to cover up for less reputable writers.
The quote in the OP sounds strangely similar to a number of fairly recent OP posts by a certain user right here on this board. Could it be . . . ?
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Or off my keyboard anyway 
I use Google News app to catch up current events and one of the sections is News in Science. This was the top article. Which makes me question how good Google News is at selecting reputable news sources. Others have complained that the app has become quite poor as far as selecting reputable sources. I think I’m starting to see what they mean.
P.S. the “other” person that reported this to the owner of the photo was me. Normally I’d just mind my own business but this seemed like such a weird article and turned out to be such an egregious form of identity theft, I just thought I’d do the man a kindness. I’m sure it’ll come to bite me in the ass in some way or another. 