'It's a tuber, not potato': Guinness World Records confirms, refuses New Zealand couple's application

A New Zealand couple named Colin Craig-Brown and his wife Donna submitted an application with the Guinness World Records last August claiming for the world's heaviest potato they found in the garden of their small farm; however, they were informed that a scientific study showed it's a tuber of a gourd belongs from a family of Cucurbitaceae. 

The couple named the giant potato-like mass "Dug." The man claimed it looked and tasked like a potato, and soon it captured worldwide attention post-Craig-Brown and Donna discovered it in their garden. 

After completing the paperwork, the couple received an email from the Guinness World Records last week stating that the specimen is not a potato, in fact, the tuber of a type of gourd. For the same reason, the application gets disqualified.

However, the couple is sad as they cannot do anything with the results are based on DNA samples. 

While talking to The Wall Street Journal, Dr Samantha Baldwin of New Zealand's Plant and Food Research stated that it was not behaving like a potato; they could not find DNA sequences that are specific to potatoes. 

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

Craig-Brown told the WSJ that it is still the world's biggest not-a-potato. The tuber had turned into a local celebrity when the couple posted images of it wearing a hat on Facebook and even built a cart to carry it around.

When the couple asked a local farming stone to calculate its weight, the Dug weighed around 7.8 kg. The current world record for the heaviest potato is held by one grown in the United Kingdom in 2011, weighing little under 5 kg.
 

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• Colin Craig-Brown
• Cucurbitaceae
• Donna
• Dug
• Guinness World Records
• New Zealand
• Potato
• gourd
• tuber
• world's heaviest potato