You will believe a shark can roar: Zoological malpractice in Hollywood.

In the Disney film I’ll Be Home for Christmas, the main character comes across a white-backed vulture in the desert of California. There’s the obvious issue of it being an African species, and I think it’s a bit puzzling that they would use this exotic vulture when the native and ever-abundant turkey vultures would presumably be easy to obtain.

 

It's illegal for a native bird to work under the MBTA, that's why so many movies use exotic birds in place of native ones - it's technically illegal to use native ones (although I highly doubt anyone would actually get in trouble for using a legally obtained native bird).

 

Oh, that’s interesting.

 

This donkey breed list which includes a kulan (an onager subspecies and genetically distinct from domestic asses) as well as the two horse hybrids. It doesn't list zebra hybrids (zonkeys/zedonks/donkra).

https://st3.depositphotos.com/10334...llustration-donkey-breeds-icon-set-animal.jpg

With the 2nd part I mentioned is analogous to making a tiger subspecies list and including ligers and tigons.

 

This doesn’t explain why movies don’t just use computer-generated birds, or why bird vocalizations are often incorrect. In these cases, ignorance on the part of the film studio or the fact that most audiences would not notice is a sufficient explanation. Furthermore, the reason why the calls of Red-tailed Hawks are often used with imagery of other birds of prey (particularly Bald Eagles) is because its scream is considered to be more impressive than the vocalizations of, for example, falcons, which often make high-pitched chittering or chirping noises, and Bald Eagles, which produce a feeble, gull-like clucking.

 

Most modern movies do use CGI birds - but remember that cheap CGI is still fairly new technology, which is why you might struggle to think of movies that do this.

I know why Red-tailed Hawk sounds are used, and I've always found it a bit silly, as I think Bald Eagles actually sound more majestic than Red-tailed Hawks do. I've noticed that in the past few years actual Bald Eagle sounds are being used more often.

 

An image displaying different types of antelope, but the "Tibetan antelope" is an extremely obvious oryx.

 

An oryx that also seems to be a 3d model.

 

And that "lechwe" is a wildly obvious blackbuck!

 

Good grief!!! Where did you find this?

 

As do the Chousingha and Sable Antelope..
..and the gerenuk

 

This is a graphic from a pest control site, which uses a picture of a ground squirrel for a gopher, when real gophers look more like moles. Also, you are more likely to confuse a vole for a deer mouse than a gopher or prairie dog; the only real similarity between moles and voles in this context is in their names.

 

Some ground squirrels are also called gophers but do not belong to the same family as pocket gophers.

 

I meant pocket gophers (Geomyidae), which are the true gophers. It’s inaccurate to call ground squirrels gophers. You are right though, that they are commonly (though ignorantly) nicknamed gophers (for example, the “gopher” in Minnesota’s nickname refers not to pocket gophers but to Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrels).

 

The Burgess Animal Book for Children has quite a few inaccuracies (many of them related to its early publication date of 1920), but the worst one is how the “squirrel family” (Sciuridae) is classified. The book went to the effort that it did (despite deliberately avoiding technical terms), and yet, it classified squirrels in a rather nonsensical way, even for its time.
According to the book, the squirrel family is divided into three groups (perhaps representing the level of subfamily or tribe): flying squirrels, marmots (including prairie dogs), and true squirrels. True squirrels are further divided into tree squirrels, rock squirrels, and ground squirrels (which I assume are representing the rank of “genus”). The weirdest thing about this system is the distinction between “rock squirrels” and “ground squirrels”. According to the book, chipmunks are rock squirrels, and “spermophiles” (species traditionally classified in the genus Spermophilus) are ground squirrels. The book mentions the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel and the “gray ground squirrels” as true ground squirrels. Of the “gray ground squirrels”, only the California Ground Squirrel is mentioned, so perhaps this term refers to species that would now be classified in the genus Otospermophilus, which ironically includes the actual Rock Squirrel. So under this classification, the Rock Squirrel is presumably not a “rock squirrel”, the marmots, chipmunks, and prairie dogs, are not ground squirrels as they really are, and the tree squirrels are not grouped with the flying squirrels even though any reasonable person (including modern taxonomists) would group them together.

 

Gopher is a term that doesn't really specifically refer to any animal but more most burrowing rodents. I don't think it's inaccurate to call a woodchuck a gopher, as is being done here.

 

What about when a cowboy says, "Gopher yer gun"?

 

Well oddly enough in the past fruit bats were once thought to be the vampires until Desmodus rotundus was found

Even then people didn't believe it was a real vampire bat

Heck there's even Vampyrodes caraccioli which is a fruit bat

 

Smiling non-human primates is such a pet peeve of mine in media. I think Night At The Museum had a few scenes with a monkey smiling as a ”the monkey is happy/being silly” thing, even though with non-human primates, smiling is a sign of discomfort. It’s unfortunately become pretty common misinformation to the point where videos of primates in inproper care doing fear grimaces is a cute thing, but relaxed, comfortable primates are accused of being abused since “they look sad”. I feel like not enough people understand that animals don’t usually emote like humans do.