"Not A Potato": Guinness World Records Rejects New Zealand Couple's Application

A couple in New Zealand were heartbroken after the Guinness World Records told them that a potato they dug up in their farm is actually a gourd. Colin Craig-Brown and his wife Donna submitted an application with the Guinness World Records last August for the world's heaviest potato, but were told that a scientific study identified it to be a tuber of a gourd in the family Cucurbitaceae.

Affectionately named "Dug" by the couple, it was a giant potato-like mass, and had captured worldwide attention after Mr Craig-Brown and Donna found it in their garden. The man claimed it "looked and tasted" like a potato.

But months after completing the paperwork and submitting the photos, they got an e-mail from Guinness World Records last week which said, "Dear Colin, sadly the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application."

The husband and wife are feeling sad but can't do anything because the results were based on DNA samples.

"He just wasn't behaving like a potato should," Dr Samantha Baldwin, from New Zealand's Plant and Food Research, told The Wall Street Journal. "We couldn't identify DNA sequences that are specific to potatoes."

Dr Baldwin's team ran several tests on the samples of the tuber. She further said that the samples were sent to Science & Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) in Scotland, which said Dug's genetic sequencing closely matched those of gourds.

"He's still the world's biggest not-a-potato," Mr Craig-Brown told WSJ.

The tuber had become a local celebrity, as the couple posted photos of it on Facebook with a hat on and even built a cart to tow it around.

They also asked a local farming stone to calculate its weight, which came out to be 7.8 kilograms.

The existing record for the world's heaviest potato belongs to one grown in Britain in 2011, which weighed in at just under 5 kg.