[ocfnash]

As others have pointed out, these are indeed just analogues of (fundamental) monopoles.

IMHO, this is an example of a deliberately-slightly-misleading abstract for a paper. The authors write: "Although analogues of magnetic monopoles have been found [in others' work] there has been no direct experimental observation of Dirac monopoles within a medium described by a quantum field [...]. Here we demonstrate the controlled creation of Dirac monopoles in [...]. Monopoles are identified, in [...]"

If I were a referee for the paper, I would have registered the following objection: When referring to others' work, the authors use the phrase "analogues of monopoles" whereas they reserve the phrases "monopole" and "Dirac monopole" for references to their own. Their terminology seems especially egregious on account of their earlier statement: "The existence of even a single Dirac magnetic monopole would have far-reaching physical consequences, most famously explaining the quantization of electric charge". In fact they too have only discovered analogues of monopoles and the abstract is confusing for non-specialists, as evidenced by this thread.

Nature is a journal that has been known to give in to the temptation to sensationalise so I am not all that surprised.