Misleading Animal Names

Post Reply New Topic

We call them ladybirds and they're not birds either.

A bluebottle is not actually a bottle.

The red panda isn't a panda, or even related to bears. It is more related to raccoons.

Chihuahuas. They are not a place in Mexico, but instead a dog.

Red pandas and giant pandas are much more distantly related than their names would imply. The giant panda is a bear, the red panda is closer to a raccoon.

Praying mantises have names in some languages suggesting they are crickets. They're actually closer to being cockroaches.

Dragonflies are neither dragons nor flies.

Blindworms are neither snakes nor worms, but actually legless lizards.

Shepherd Spiders ("Daddy Longlegs"), while arachnids, aren't technically spiders.

And its not a mammal. So even the females don't have "tits"!

^ This thing was featured on my son's favorite show, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That. It freaked us all out.

Catfish don't have anything to do with cats. I think they're called that because they look like they have whiskers.

Manatees aren't men or tea.

Blue tits aren't what you'd think initially.

When I was in gradeschool they taught us the "pandas aren't really bears".

But the concensus has changed and now greater pandas are actually classed as bears. Though the lesser (red) panda is not a bear, but a cousin of the raccoon.

"Turkeys" aren't really from Turkey, but from the North, and Central, America.

Like "guinea pigs" when the critters were first introduced to Europe Europeans rightly deduced that they must come from some faraway exotic place, but they got the place wrong. These new big funny looking chickens must come from somewhere in the East- so the French dubbed them "the chicken of India", and the Brits called them "turkeys".

The earwig is not nosy, or look like an ear, or a wig.

A bongo is a type of antelope, but it doesn't play rhythm or dance.

An aye-aye, is not a Scottish person agreeing with you, or the navel term 'aye aye Captain' its a lemur with large ...eyes.

The statement "pandas aren't bears" is both true and false due to the ambiguity as to which creature it refers to. Probably not so much a change in consensus as your grade school teacher having heard a more detailed explanation and only took this half-true distillation away from it. Wouldn't be the first time kids have to make do with sub-par information.

Craneflies are not cranes, absolutely do not have the flying skills of cranes but they are flies.

The Great Dane is a dog that is not originally from Denmark, but from Germany.

No. My point was that in the Sixties the nit picking word was that the greater panda- the "panda bear"- was supposedly "not really a bear". Even in the national zoo they had plaques talking about how they don't know how to classify the animals. But then some zoologist in the eighties thoroughly analyzed the anatomy, and concluded that the greater "panda bear" is indeed a bear after all. Jay Gould devoted a chapter to agreeing with the zoologist. So I can see where the above poster got the now debunked idea that the greater pandas "aren't really bears". Jay Gould talked about how a French explorer of China in the Nineteenth century labeled two kinds of not closely related Chinese animals "panda", and Gould concluded that the simple label was enough to confuse science about both pandas for the next century.

When I was a kid in Washington DC of the Sixties we had a lesser panda pair in the National Zoo (which looked a lot like our own local raccoons). But didn't get the famous pair of greater pandas (which sure as heck looked like bears to me) until the epochal Nixon trip to China when I was a teen.

As a kid I always suspected that the lessers were raccoons, and that the nonscientists who called the big ones "panda bears" were actually correct (the nitpicking experts must be wrong). So I was happy that the scientific community finally came around to agreeing with me!

Huh. Did not know. Thanks for that.

Sea monkeys are not actual monkeys - it is a marketing name given to brine shrimp because of their tails.