Out-of-place wildlife in media

Barney's Barrier Reef uses Banggai Cardinalfish to represent cardinalfish. Banggai Cardinalfish are are native to Indonesia and are not found on the Great Barrier Reef.

Endless Ocean 2 is full of this kind of stuff. Too much to list here, but it includes Californian Sea Lions, West Indian Manatee and Little Blue Penguins in a South Pacific coral reef, Japanese Jack Mackerel, Whitetip Reef Sharks, Olive Flounder and Kidako Moray in the Mediterranean and Japanese Spider Crab, Beluga Sturgeon, Atlantic Tarpon and Nomura's Jellyfish in the Red Sea.

At least it's better than the original Endless Ocean game, which had every animal in the game in the same South Pacific reef. Including Polar Bears. And Emperor Penguins. And Belugas. Yikes.

 

The most cliche sound effect and often used for bald eagles. Polar Express actually had correct bald eagle sounds.

 

I remember a dream where Dora from Dora the Explorer was mentioning African animals, and among them were tigers and I was sorta disturbed.

I really love tigers nowadays though.

 

Reminds me, the film adaptation Dora and the Lost City of Gold shows pygmy elephants in a South American rainforest. I was very surprised at this error because I’d assume even most non-animal people realize that elephants don’t live in South America, or at least don’t think of them as neotropical wildlife.

For what it’s worth, Boots, though clearly not meant to be any specific species of real primate, also has features generally more reminiscent of an Old World monkey.

 

The Disney film I’ll be Home for Christmas has a white-backed vulture in the desert of California, because it would apparently be illegal to use a native bird such as a Turkey vulture, as I recently learned.

 

Even as a kid, the ones that drove me nuts were when an Asian Elephant was clearly meant to be portraying an African Elephant. The most jarring example is in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, which takes place in Africa, yet the one elephant that appears is clearly an Asian Elephant. I heard many years ago, when Hollywood was still using real elephants (I don't even know if they do anymore) that Asian Elephants were easier to train than African Elephants, which is why you mostly saw the Asian species in movies, even when it made no sense.

 

There are certainly still real elephants appearing movies.

 

I wasn't sure if it had been banned or not, since I know actor chimps, at least in the states, have been banned.

 

African Wildlife Photographic Poster 24x36 - Walmart.com

This African wildlife poster with a water buffalo for a Cape buffalo and an American alligator for a crocodile.

 

The hornbill species is wrong too as the only species that is native(and still occuring here) in Singapore is the Oriental Pied Hornbill

Afaik there was a Great Hornbill spotted at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve but it was most likely an escapee or a visitor from Malaysia

 

"Surely in an elephant----"

He winced as if in pain.

"Don't! Don't talk of elephants in South America. Even in these days of Board schools----"

From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" - evidence that, even over a century ago, there were people exasperated that folks thought that elephants lived in South America.

 

Had the extinct gomphotheres of South America been discovered at that point? Given that the Lost World has living dinosaurs, living elephants would actually be a lot less of a stretch...