What animal looks different in real life to what you expected?

ZooBinh said:
Magnificent Frigatebird- much larger than I expected!
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Concur with this, got my lifer sighting today, by chance; I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this huge yet simultaneously really slender form, like a skeletal pelican that I found myself comparing to both a red kite & a swift.
 
Although I haven’t seen it yet I suspect I’m going to feel this way about the emperor penguin. They’re hyped up as the largest penguin species and are among one of the largest birds in the world, when they’re only 3-4 feet tall. They dwarf all the other species, but I think I won’t help but be a little surprised when I see one for the first time.
 
Swanson02 said:
On the other hand, Giant Pandas, were quite small and especially slim in person. I expected them to be more rotund :D
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Where did you first see giant pandas, @Swanson02? The appearance of the pandas vary from zoo to zoo, but if you saw the pandas at Memphis Zoo back when they were still there, Ya Ya was always unusually small and slender for an adult panda at around 190 pounds. The pandas at Zoo Atlanta are rounder and fluffier and look more like how you might picture pandas. Lun Lun at her heaviest is over 240 pounds, which is pretty big for a female panda. Her mate, Yang Yang, is about as big as a panda gets, up to 300 pounds depending on the time of year. I feel like the pandas at the National Zoo are kind of in the middle size wise.
 
Swampy said:
Concur with this, got my lifer sighting today, by chance; I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this huge yet simultaneously really slender form, like a skeletal pelican that I found myself comparing to both a red kite & a swift.
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Yes! I was so thrown off when I saw them that I didn’t even recognize that it was a Frigatebird! By chance are you also staying in Mexico at the moment?
 
Today at Antwerp it really stood out to me just how big white-headed buffalo weavers are, compared to other weaver species like village and Vieillot's black weavers. Previously I mostly saw them housed with larger bird species, but today I saw them close to other songbirds, and their size stood out to me now.
 
Bactrian Deer said:
I thought Tapirs would be a little larger and that that Victoria Crowned Pigeons would be smaller.
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Which tapir species are you referring to. Malayan Tapirs are considerably bigger than any of the South American taxa, and I always find myself struck by the size of the former after a while of exclusively seeing the latter.
 
Kalaw said:
Which tapir species are you referring to. Malayan Tapirs are considerably bigger than any of the South American taxa, and I always find myself struck by the size of the former after a while of exclusively seeing the latter.
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Baird’s Tapir Tapirus bairdii. I have never gotten the chance to see other species.
 
Always imagined Komodo Dragons as larger than they are. Of course, they are sizeable lizards, but I always took the 'dragon' part and imagined them being closer to the size of an ankylosaur.
 
Scottish Wildcat said:
It's been mentioned before in the thread, but every time I tell myself that I finally know what size an aardvark actually is, it's still always way bigger than I expect it to be. And I haven't even seen one in real life!
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I understand this one as well, as I assume they're small (like tamandua size) while knowing they are much larger, but I have not seen one IRL.
 
Scottish Wildcat said:
It's been mentioned before in the thread, but every time I tell myself that I finally know what size an aardvark actually is, it's still always way bigger than I expect it to be. And I haven't even seen one in real life!
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Van Beal said:
I understand this one as well, as I assume they're small (like tamandua size) while knowing they are much larger, but I have not seen one IRL.
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I'm the opposite - I always think they're a bit bigger than they are, and find them a bit small on the occasions I see them.
 
Flamingos, cranes, storks and other long legged birds are so much shorter irl. Also expected king penguins to be tall. On the other hand, African spurred tortoises are so much bigger than I thought because of Zoo Tycoon 2
 
I recently saw my first ever Kirk's Dik-Dik, and was surprised at how small he was. I knew they're amongst the smallest antelope species, but didn't realize quite how small they actually are. I was expecting him to be closer in size to klipspringer.
 
Neil chace said:
I recently saw my first ever Kirk's Dik-Dik, and was surprised at how small he was. I knew they're amongst the smallest antelope species, but didn't realize quite how small they actually are. I was expecting him to be closer in size to klipspringer.
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Now this is interesting to me, I've seen dik-dik a lot but never klipspringer and I was under the impression they were dik-dik sized!
 
Neil chace said:
I recently saw my first ever Kirk's Dik-Dik, and was surprised at how small he was. I knew they're amongst the smallest antelope species, but didn't realize quite how small they actually are. I was expecting him to be closer in size to klipspringer.
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Wait klipspringers are larger than dikdik? The one I remember seeing at Brevard looked small albeit it was considerably far from me.
 
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