The jokes started rolling through Dave Stringer's head almost immediately. "I thought it might be the rare and elusive 'yellow-striped Bakersfield skunk,'" he said with a chuckle. He had to make sure.

So Wednesday evening, Stringer diverted from his dinner, whipped his truck into a U-turn on Harris Road and went back to see if construction crews had truly painted a dead skunk into the roadway.

"There's no way someone is lazy enough to not kick that out of the way," he thought.

But someone obviously had been.

Harris Road's fresh new double-yellow line crossed right over the skunk corpse.

Stringer snapped a photo.

"I drive by periodically," Stringer said. "I think that skunk has been there a week or two."

The skunk suffered its final indignity Wednesday morning when city of Bakersfield road crews painted over its mortal remains on Harris just east of Buena Vista Road.

City construction superintendent Stuart Patteson said paint crews typically drive each segment of road to look for problems before they turn on the spray guns.

But the road crew left the city lot Wednesday morning at 5 a.m. and did the segment of Harris first. In Bakersfield's summer heat early work schedules are the rule.

"It was dark. They probably didn't see it," he said.

Patteson said the city will remove the skunk and paint over the gap.

But the chuckles might be a bit more difficult to remove.

"I was just laughing at some (similar) pictures on the Web over the weekend," Stringer said.

He was sure the photos, funny though they might be, had been faked with some digital trickery.

Surely nothing like that would happen in the real world, he thought.

He was wrong.

Patteson said he's seen the same photos online. When he heard about the skunk in Bakersfield, he thought his leg was being pulled.

"This is a first here," he said.