Zoological inaccuracies & mistakes

Everyone likes to say that Lions and Tigers would never meet in the wild, but they both occur in the same area of India.
 
I often read that the Virginian opossum is the only native marsupial in North America. An additional 7 species live in Mexico.

Unfortunately this doesn't really come as a suprise to me. :rolleyes:

I've sometimes heard people from the US and Canada refer to Mexico as being a Central American country and even on a couple of occasions as a South American one. o_O

Mexico is indeed culturally part of Latin America and has more in common in this regard with Central America than the US or Canada but it is most definitely geographically speaking a part of North America. :mad:

*Mind you , you do get Brazilians who do not want to be associated as being part of Latin America too. This due to an unfortunate superiority complex and apparent shame with being lumped together with Hispanic countries and cultures rather than being seen as culturally distinct (there are some obvious cultural and historical differences but the main distinctions are of course linguistic).
 
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Not really a mistake but I suppose I should share it.

in 2006 a redback spider stamp was designed by the Australia Post to be apart of a 'Dangerous Australians' series but was withdrawn from the collection as apparently, "the realistic depiction would scare people from opening their letter boxes".

This gives me a laugh every time I read it.
 
Also, recently, New Zealand supermarket chain Countdown started distributing the "Super Insects" card game, which was created to educate children about the insects that are found in New Zealand. A newspaper advertisement for the game featured a Lucanus species, or something similar. New Zealand does not have any stag beetles that closely resemble it. Fortunately, the "Super Insects" webpage does not reproduce this mistake.
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If they're on to the mistake, it may be withdrawn from circulation and become an ultra rare card. :D
 
By Dreamland Publications, India
"Canada lynx" is Bobcat, "Jaguarundi" is Mountain lion, "Marble cat" is a domestic cat, and "Leopard cat" is a Snow leopard.
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Spiders, scorpions, myriapods, ticks and daddy long legs (named spider) as insects
"Eyed hawk moth" is some species of Saturniidae moth
"American cockroach" is Blaberus
"Hornet" is other wasp, presumably Polistes sp.
"Tiger beetle" is Ground beetle
"Bug" is Eurasian Bee Beetle
Not a Giant dragonfly
Simply "insect" is Pterochroza ocellata
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By Smile Publishing, India
Fruit bat is not a bird, ''eagle" and "falcon" are other birds of prey, and a toy kiwi
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That cat poster does nothing to help the cause of trying to educate the general public that white tigers are NOT a separate subspecies of tiger; the same for the white lion/lioness and black panther.

Also, that's a ludicrously overfed tiger and Puma. :D
 
I could list a LOT of errors from movies and TV shows, but I guess it's not worth it unless it's a documentary or educational program, since Disney's Tarzan (which features ring tailed lemurs living on mainland Africa) doesn't pretend to be an educational reference.

Anyway. Some years back I found a book on drawing whales and dolphins, and it included "facts" about each species. The creator of the book seemed to be under the impression that bottlenose dolphins and bottlenose whales are the same thing. The name, genus, and drawing depict a bottlenose whale, but the description calls it a dolphin and (mostly) lists facts that are more accurate to bottlenose dolphins.

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That cat poster does nothing to help the cause of trying to educate the general public that white tigers are NOT a separate subspecies of tiger; the same for the white lion/lioness and black panther.
The poster doesn't say that black panthers and white tigers and lions are subspecies. There are also pictures of 'cubs'.
 
That is how Siamang is pronounced. I guess this year is when we learnt that Zoofan15 can't pronounce Siamang :rolleyes:

See-ya-mung? That grates on me like people who say shedule instead of skedule.

I’ve never heard the start of Siamang pronounced anything but Sigh-ur/Sigh-ah.

Luckily these people know the score:




And of course the team leader of Auckland Zoo’s primate team at 8.57:
 
The poster doesn't say that black panthers and white tigers and lions are subspecies. There are also pictures of 'cubs'.

It’s implied - as when disregarding cubs and the lion/lioness, there’s one of each felid. What would be truly educational would be to have a melanistic Jaguar cub next to the golden Jaguar. Melbourne Zoo always went to great lengths to illustrate they are one, when talking about their melanistic and golden pair in guidebooks etc. and we were all the better for it.
 
See-ya-mung? That grates on me like people who say shedule instead of skedule.

I’ve never heard the start of Siamang pronounced anything but Sigh-ur/Sigh-ah.

Luckily these people know the score:
Yes, people commonly mispronounce it as "sigh-uh-mang" - with a long "i" and a hard "a" - but a word being commonly mispronounced does not make that the correct pronunciation. And you saying "Auckland Zoo can't pronounce Siamang" when it is, in fact, being pronounced correctly in the video simply makes you 100% wrong.

Siamang is a Malay word, not an English word. It is pronounced roughly as if the vowels were Maori vowels.
 
In Zoo Tycoon 2's Zoocyclopedia, the Warthog (African Adventure)'s page lists the warthogs in the game as Phacochoerus africanus aethiopicus. However, said subspecies doesn't exist. I believe that this was meant to be the Desert Warthog, Phacochoerus aethiopicus, but was instead rendered as a non-existent subspecies.
Also in Extinct Animals, many of the animals, likely due to get it released by October 2007, were just reskins of animals that came before. The American Mastodon is a reskinned (possibly remodeled) Asian Elephant, the Short-Faced Bear a reskinned Polar Bear, similarly the obscure Titanotylopus, rendered as 'Giant Camel', is simply a cop-out reskinned Dromedary model. I believe this is the reason all this obscure fauna was in the game - simply because they were easy to create.
However, the most bizarre one of these was Protoarchaeopteryx. It was a reskinned secretary bird, which meant it did things Protoarchaeopteryx didn't do, such as fly. Ironically, the Zoopedia states that Protoarchaeopteryx didn't fly, but in other parts treats it as Archaeopteryx itself, regarding it as the birds' ancestor. It even uses the iconic German Archaeopteryx fossil in the Zoo Tycoon 2 fossil minigame as the puzzle to be reassembled.
So there's that I guess :P
 
In Zoo Tycoon 2's Zoocyclopedia, the Warthog (African Adventure)'s page lists the warthogs in the game as Phacochoerus africanus aethiopicus. However, said subspecies doesn't exist. I believe that this was meant to be the Desert Warthog, Phacochoerus aethiopicus, but was instead rendered as a non-existent subspecies.
Also in Extinct Animals, many of the animals, likely due to get it released by October 2007, were just reskins of animals that came before. The American Mastodon is a reskinned (possibly remodeled) Asian Elephant, the Short-Faced Bear a reskinned Polar Bear, similarly the obscure Titanotylopus, rendered as 'Giant Camel', is simply a cop-out reskinned Dromedary model. I believe this is the reason all this obscure fauna was in the game - simply because they were easy to create.
However, the most bizarre one of these was Protoarchaeopteryx. It was a reskinned secretary bird, which meant it did things Protoarchaeopteryx didn't do, such as fly. Ironically, the Zoopedia states that Protoarchaeopteryx didn't fly, but in other parts treats it as Archaeopteryx itself, regarding it as the birds' ancestor. It even uses the iconic German Archaeopteryx fossil in the Zoo Tycoon 2 fossil minigame as the puzzle to be reassembled.
So there's that I guess :p
And also the Velociraptors are classified as Sauropods XD
 
Here's some inaccuracies I found in a DK animal encyclopedia.

Perhaps the worst was classifying a butterfly and octopus as part of the "chordates" pylum

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Pretty sure this isn't a Borneo fruit bat
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You can't really see the text here, but it labels this as and emperor penguin
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"mountain goat"
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Not sure about this one. Could it be a snapping turtle?
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The funniest part about this one, is the same picture later in the book is labeled as a rhea
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That's not a bottlenose, even my mother could decipher this one, and she thought a hornbill was a toucan...
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Pretty sure this is a spider monkey. Labeled as a gibbon
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Um...
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Could be Eurasian, but I'm leaning towards North American
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Here's some more

Hanging parrots mislabeled as lovebirds
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I guess they have a point, sometimes they are called bush pigs, but can't we just call them red river hogs so we don't confuse them with potamochoerus larvatus?
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c r o c o d i l e
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When there's a hooked lip section right above, but you still mislabel your rhino
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I think by Andes tapir, they are referring to the mountain tapir, if so, that's a South American tapir.
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Any section on white tigers makes me laugh
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These just seem way to dark and textured to be juvenile desert tortoises.
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(Ignore my gross legs) I understand most people group orcas with whales, but they had the chance to teach kids the truth
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That's not a bottlenose, even my mother could decipher this one, and she thought a hornbill was a toucan...
I guess they didn't have much more pictures of dolphins caught in nets? :P
But even so, they could've but the correct species name there.
Bit unrelated, but the Eyewitness Periodic Table book describes Beryllium as being radioactive, which it isn't. Maybe they meant reactive but it's pretty stable in air and water so :P
 
also a series that might strike the old nostalgia bone for some of you: Henry's Amazing Animals.
In Extinct Animals /spoilers/ as a rebuttal to Henry's report on the Elephant Bird, the narrator tells of the legend of the Roc that caught elephants to eat. They also tell this as a primitive explanation for how Madagascar's pygmy elephants went extinct. The odd things here are that Madagascar never had Pygmy Elephants. I believe that there may have been a break between writing the script up to the part about elephant birds, and then the people may have forgot, so they just put something else there. But either way, an odd error :p
 
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