Abstract: Christiansen and Mazák (2009) reported a new species (Acinonyx kurteni) of the cheetah based on a skull from the Late Pliocene loess deposits of the Linxia Basin in Gansu Province, China. As a vertebrate paleontologist working on the late Cenozoic mammals of the Linxia Basin for many years, I naturally had particular interests in reading this paper. Unfortunately, I found that they studied a fossil forgery, the sole foundation of the paper.