Zoological inaccuracies & mistakes

Here's some more
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?
I think the book was published at a time when the red river hog was included as a subspecies of bush pig, rather than as a distinct species
I understand most people group orcas with whales, but they had the chance to teach kids the truth
I don't know when various authors referred to 'whales and dolphins' as I have understood dolphins to be whales. Orcas were placed in the dolphin family, but are now often classified with pilot whales in a separate family. I'm a bit more bothered about river dolphins being placed alongside dolphins in books as if they belonged to the same family.
 
upload_2020-9-12_20-35-52.png
Definitely a Nine-Banded Armadillo
found the book on Arkive.org :P
I think the book was published at a time when the red river hog was included as a subspecies of bush pig, rather than as a distinct species
Bush pig | mammal
This article from 1999 describes the RRHog as a subspecies, but this book was published in 2000.
However, the bush-pig and RRHog were distinguished as different species around this time (1990-2002).
References here
 

Attachments

  • upload_2020-9-12_20-35-52.png
    upload_2020-9-12_20-35-52.png
    411.1 KB · Views: 98
A lot of authors copy information from other books and don't realise if any of it is out of date. I regularly read about mammals being descended from reptiles. David Attenborough made this mistake in his updated 'Life on Earth' even though he had updated other data.
 
Juliet Clutton-Brock's 'Mammals' was published in 2002, but didn't incorporate the Afrotheria and still considered the Marsupialia to be an order, thus enabling the shrew opossums and monito del montes to be ignored - 2 orders that could easily have been incorporated. The book also included the Pinnipedia as a separate order from the Carnivora.
The common pipistrelle was placed in the Phyllostomatidae and the Angolan free-tailed bat in the Vespertilionidae.
The western tarsier was included in the Prosimians and the weasel lemur in the Lemuridae. I was a bit surprised that the Bornean orang-utan was placed in the Pongidae and not the Hominidae.
The two-toed sloth was placed in the Bradypodidae.
The banded mongoose and meerkat were placed in the Viverridae.
The collared peccary was placed in the Suidae.
 
In Brown Watson's The Big Book of Animals (2005 reprint), the Satyr Tragopan has its English name confused with its scientific name, and the English name is also misspelt. More notably, the Spruce Grouse is labelled as the, "Spruce Goose"!
Big Book.png

Ramen's Birds of the Mascarene (2012) labels the House Crow as the Carrion Crow.
Mascarene.png
 

Attachments

  • Mascarene.png
    Mascarene.png
    794.5 KB · Views: 99
  • Big Book.png
    Big Book.png
    1,008.5 KB · Views: 94
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

View attachment 456576

Pretty sure this isn't a Borneo fruit bat
View attachment 456577
You can't really see the text here, but it labels this as and emperor penguin
View attachment 456578
"mountain goat"
View attachment 456566
Not sure about this one. Could it be a snapping turtle?
View attachment 456567
The funniest part about this one, is the same picture later in the book is labeled as a rhea
View attachment 456573
That's not a bottlenose, even my mother could decipher this one, and she thought a hornbill was a toucan...
View attachment 456568
Pretty sure this is a spider monkey. Labeled as a gibbon
View attachment 456579
Um...
View attachment 456580
Could be Eurasian, but I'm leaning towards North American
View attachment 456581

Here's some more

Hanging parrots mislabeled as lovebirds
View attachment 456582
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?
View attachment 456583
c r o c o d i l e
View attachment 456584
When there's a hooked lip section right above, but you still mislabel your rhino
View attachment 456585
I think by Andes tapir, they are referring to the mountain tapir, if so, that's a South American tapir.
View attachment 456586
Any section on white tigers makes me laugh
View attachment 456587
These just seem way to dark and textured to be juvenile desert tortoises.
View attachment 456588
(Ignore my gross legs) I understand most people group orcas with whales, but they had the chance to teach kids the truth
View attachment 456589
Yes, that is a snapping turtle, nothing wrong there.

What's wrong with that white Tiger section?

You know Orcas are whales, right? I mean they are dolphins, but dolphins are just a type of whale?
 
thesearentemperors.png
Minor nit-pick, but this picture is labelled as 'Emperor Penguins'. Based on beak-shape and colouration I am 98% inclined these are King Penguins :p
 

Attachments

  • thesearentemperors.png
    thesearentemperors.png
    468.7 KB · Views: 94
Last edited:
What's wrong with that white Tiger section?

First of all it says there are eight subspecies of tiger. Unless this book was published before the Bali, Caspian and Javan tiger went extinct (it obviously wasn’t); it would be more accurate to say there once were eight subspecies of tiger (three are now extinct). If published today, that should be amended to nine (to include the Malayan tiger).

It’s debatable whether it says the white tiger is a subspecies on it’s own, technically it doesn’t; though it’s implied and has surely misled many readers. It would be better to have it under the section we can see to the right ‘Bengal Tigers’ - as they are a genetic mutation of this subspecies.

On a side note: I’d say amongst non zoo people, the biggest misconception of the white tiger is that it’s it’s own subspecies; the second is that this colour mutation occurs in the Siberian subspecies, so that it blends in with the snow.
 
Yes, that is a snapping turtle, nothing wrong there.

What's wrong with that white Tiger section?

You know Orcas are whales, right? I mean they are dolphins, but dolphins are just a type of whale?
I am aware that they are the same thing, but there was a dolphin section that they could be more appropriately put into

For the white tigers, it was the fact that one, they said there are 8 subspecies of tiger, two, they basically said whites were one of them and three, some of the ways the word it make it seem like it's an endangered species only found in zoos.
 
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

Another Extinct Animals inaccuracy is the Deinosuchus. The game model is covered in spikes, but there's no indication of Deinosuchus looking like that. Also, the raptors in the game all have pronated wrists. Although I admit, I'm not sure when scientists figured out the wrist thing so maybe it was accurate for its time. Same goes for the feathering inaccuracies. Shoot, the spinosaurus skeleton in Animal Crossing: New Horizons was rendered outdated like, a month after the game got released, lol.

When I get the chance I should go dig my childhood animal books out of storage and look for inaccuracies.
 
One of the big problems with pictures of prehistoric animals is when species are known from a few bones and/or teeth. Reconstructions may be based on relatives of the species or on living, sometimes unrelated animals.
Below is a reconstruction of Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus haroldcookii) based on a tooth.

Nebraska Man was called North America's first higher primate until the tooth was shown to belong to a peccary (Prosthennops serus). You are more likely to read about this in a Creationist book than in an Evolutionist book.
 
I have seen a drawing of a red-bellied lemur using its 'prehensile' tail to hang loosely from a tree.
 
I have read several creationist books. Several of these seem to rely on finding faults with evolutionary ideas and say this proves that the biblical account of creation is true. The authors also fail to take into account other theories of the origin of life and then use fallacious arguments to say that if the creation account is true, so is everything else in the bible.

When I was at college, a tutorial group was asked to show how 'living fossils' 'prove' that evolution occurred. Unfortunately, 'living fossils' can also be shown to 'prove' that creation occurred.

While I find a lot of creationism 'proof' to be irritating, I agree that some reconstructions of fossils are based on guesswork and can be used to 'prove' missing links. Unfortunately, pictures of a 'Hesperopithecus family' were a mistake.
 
On the topic of creationism, I guess we can discuss more zoological misconceptions from them.
-Archaeopteryx was not a dinosaur, but just a bird. This is because birds in the creationist view were created on day 5 of creation.
-Humans and (non-avian) dinosaurs co-existed.
-Neandertals were humans. Human as in Homo Sapiens.
-The main cause of fossilisation was a global flood 4000 years ago. Whilst floods do cause fossils, there is no geological evidence the flood was global.
-After this great fossilisation, the dinosaurs lived on. Usually attributed to the behemoth of Job, but said creature is not described as reptilian.
-As above, this further confuses the dinosaurs' extinction. Since they only have 6000 years to work with, they cannot attribute the extinction to an event 66 million years ago!
-And so on...
 
I have read some creationist books as well. There is actually a debate among them on how to classify Neanderthals. Some do classify them as their own species.
 
Some more creationist zoological inaccuracies!
-Humans are not animals. Definitely due to the whole 'Image of God' thing. Then what are we? Do we belong in our own class, then?
-Mutations are always negative. Funny enough, the notorious AiG actually did an article on good mutations, crediting them as divine.
-"Kinds". Attributed to the various use of 'kind' in the Bible. However, this is unlikely to be a classification of animals such as cats, dogs, etc. At the very most classifying things back then was very basic, such as things that fly, things that crawl, etcetcetc.
-Everything Ken Ham has ever said in regards to evolution and/or paleobiology.
-Carnivores did not exist before sin. However, in Genesis, dominion is not only applied to cattle of the Earth, but also to birds of air and fish of sea. So was Adam going to have a whale plough his fields?
-The Creationist definition of 'Evolution'. Said word only applies to macroevolution in the creationist world. Microevolution is totally okay though :p
-Dragons are proof of men living with non-avian dinosaurs. Whilst Dragon myths were based off dinosaurs, they saw dinosaurs just as much as we see dinosaurs today. As skeletons.
Don't go bashing a belief if you don't understand what they actually say! As someone who has visited Ark Encounter and read a few books I can tell you several of these are no what creationists believe. First of all, no one is calling mutations negative. After all, they are a large part of how species change over time (no one is denying that species do change. Secondly, creationist "kinds" (generally referred to as baramins) usually follow the family level, no "things that crawl, ect".
 
Don't go bashing a belief if you don't understand what they actually say! As someone who has visited Ark Encounter and read a few books I can tell you several of these are no what creationists believe. First of all, no one is calling mutations negative. After all, they are a large part of how species change over time (no one is denying that species do change. Secondly, creationist "kinds" (generally referred to as baramins) usually follow the family level, no "things that crawl, ect".
My apologies :confused:
 
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

View attachment 456576

Pretty sure this isn't a Borneo fruit bat
View attachment 456577
You can't really see the text here, but it labels this as and emperor penguin
View attachment 456578
"mountain goat"
View attachment 456566
Not sure about this one. Could it be a snapping turtle?
View attachment 456567
The funniest part about this one, is the same picture later in the book is labeled as a rhea
View attachment 456573
That's not a bottlenose, even my mother could decipher this one, and she thought a hornbill was a toucan...
View attachment 456568
Pretty sure this is a spider monkey. Labeled as a gibbon
View attachment 456579
Um...
View attachment 456580
Could be Eurasian, but I'm leaning towards North American
View attachment 456581

Which exact book is it? There are several animal encyclopedias by DK. And a 'horsefly' at the page with 'mountain goat' is another species of fly, because of its long proboscis.
 
Back
Top