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{{trope}}
[[File:misplacedwildlife.jpg|
{{quote|'''Celia:''' Doesn't anyone think it's odd that tropical birds were flying around in this climate?
'''Haley:''' Have you ever read an encounter table? Nothing surprises me anymore.
▲{{quote|'''Celia:''' Doesn't anyone think it's odd that tropical birds were flying around in this climate?<br />
'''
The bane of Naturalists, just as [[Anachronism Stew]] is the bane of Historians. This is a Trope that can manifest several different ways.
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Notorious in the case of elephants for scenes in [[Darkest Africa]], since the only trained elephants available tend to be Indian, not African.
Glaringly obvious in the case of monkeys, as the cutest monkeys, the ones with the round faces and prehensile tails, are exclusive to the New World. Old World monkeys have long, wrinkly, often brightly colored faces and bare, often colourful, butts with non-prehensile (most of the macaque family and the colobus family) or vestigial tails (the drill and mandrill), so any film in Africa, India, Asia, or the Middle East featuring a cute little monkey hanging by its tail will annoy a naturalist like a [[Shakespeare
Also, scary things like snakes and spiders will consist of whatever the pet store had in stock. Never mind where these animals live. Never mind if they're even really dangerous either.
Can qualify as a full-fledged [[Artistic License: Biology|biology fail]] in cases where the animal wouldn't even be able to ''survive'' in the environment where it's depicted, never mind being in the wrong place. Fishes are perhaps the most common victims of this, as when freshwater species such as piranha or electric eels are shown living in the ocean, where salinity ought to kill them in minutes.
Misidentified wildlife is another feature of this Trope. This tends to happen to birds a lot. Some movies show a bird making [[Noisy Nature|generic ambient noise type calls]], usually via stock footage. This ruins any sense of immersion for birdwatchers, who will immediately ask, "Hey, what's a White-throated Sparrow doing in feudal Japan?" Indeed one will eventually come away with the impression that there are no birdwatchers in Hollywood.
Occasionally, a movie or TV show will attempt to justify
Also, sometimes [[Noisy Nature|background sound effects]] contain sounds of animals not native to the setting of the film/TV show. Perhaps the most notorious example is the use of the distinctive "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_-icFHwQo laugh]" of the [[Australian Wildlife|Australian kookaburra]] in jungle scenes set in Africa, or anywhere else other than Australia. This began with MGM's early-30s jungle movies like ''Tarzan, the Ape Man'', and ever since, '''everybody''' has used this sound as jungle background.
Naturally, this Trope occurs much less often when the filming actually takes place within the area where the story is set. Also, this Trope generally applies only to normal animals. [[Funny Animal
Note that this trope can also occur with plant life. In fact, it occurs often enough that [[Misplaced Vegetation]] is its own [[Sister Trope]].
See also [[Noisy Nature]], [[Diurnal Nocturnal Animal]], [[Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying]], [[Somewhere an Ornithologist Is Crying]], and [[Polar Bears and Penguins]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== General ==▼
== Played Straight ==
▲=== General ===
* Any film, TV series or cartoon (and there are quite a few) which show penguins in the Arctic, or polar bears or walrus in the Antarctic. People have generally wised up about this, though, so it rarely appears any more without some [[Lampshade Hanging]].
* Americans often use [[wikipedia:Old World vulture|Old World vultures]] for scenes that don't take place in the Old World. These vultures also seem to exclusively be shown in deserts. While the [[wikipedia:Turkey Vulture|Turkey Vulture]], which actually does live in the United States (and is one of the most common vulture in the United States), does live in deserts, it also lives in most of the rest of the continental United States. They aren't an uncommon sight ''driving down any highway in America'', though moviegoers [[Reality Is Unrealistic|don't expect them to appear soaring over a forest instead of a desert]]. They also don't get concerned when the misplaced vultures previously mentioned [[Stock Sound Effects|let out the cry of a Red-tailed Hawk]] (actual American vultures can't make any noises other than hissing).
* Any instance of a creepy scene in a graveyard or spooky forest at night where [[Ravens and Crows|a flock of crows]] takes flight in raucous caws and startles our protagonist. Sure, they might be found in those locations by daytime, but most birds have pretty poor nighttime vision, corvids among them, and would not take flight at night unless they had a very pressing reason to do
* In some Hollywood movies shot on location or outdoor sets in California, one can hear the calls of the Wrentit, a bird only found in coastal California.
* Many films, regardless of setting, will feature the sound of frogs "ribbiting" in order to add ambiance. In real life, this sound won't be heard except on the West coast of North America (Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia), as it is a call unique to the Pacific Chorus Frog. The stock sound was recorded in and around the Hollywood area many moons ago, and has since been inserted into footage as far flung as the forests of England, the jungles of Vietnam, and the Australian outback.
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* Likewise, many low-budget films or crime shows will toss a few mealworms onto a prop corpse, trusting viewers will be too squicked out by the wriggling to realize they aren't maggots, and in fact are beetle larvae that not only don't eat decomposing flesh, but are vegetarians who only eat plants.
* Many works taking place in a desert will feature enormous, glossy black rainforest scorpions, such as the [[wikipedia:Pandinus imperator|Emperor]]. This is most likely due to the ease of procurement and harmless nature of the species; it actually requires high humidity and would die in a desert. Some works will avoid this, and instead will use Arizonan species in "Egypt".
* If you're watching something set in prehistoric times, more often than not it's just [[Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying|a lot easier to just give up]] on seeing any animals in the parts of the
* Patriotic artists seem to like painting Bald Eagles in environments ''other'' than the large bodies of water they tend to prefer, being opportunistic fish-eaters. Often, its simply because it [[Rule of Cool|looks majestic]]. Never mind what the Eagle is going to eat in the middle of a '''desert''', or a wide open prairie like in ''[[Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron]]''. Anytime they're seen in film, they're [[Noisy Nature|generally dubbed over with the majestic scream of the Red-Tailed Hawk]], as opposed to their less-impressive squeaking and grunting.
* Inverted by [[wikipedia:Passenger Pigeon|Passenger Pigeons]]. They never turn up in period pieces, and considering [https://web.archive.org/web/20090905152840/http://www.bookofratings.com/extinctanimals.html how ludicrously common they were said to be], this might count as a (unique) instance of this trope. This is because no living Passenger Pigeons still exist since they've gone extinct, and other than through the use of CGI or using Mourning Doves in place of them, which falls into this trope, you'll never see one.
** Many period pieces set in England run into the opposite
** Little egrets may give the same problem in the
* Traditionally, in period pieces set along the Eastern seaboard to the Gulf
** ''The New World'' averted this; computer-generated Carolina Parakeets, based on still-living relatives (Mitred Conures), were used in a brief scene. This is what happens when your writer/director is also a birdwatcher.
* Documentaries about the Black Death invariably show domesticated rats running loose on piles of corpses. At the very least, they're the wrong species (''Rattus norvegicus'', not ''Rattus rattus''); in the worst examples, the rats' fur shows patterns, such as hooded or albino, that wouldn't survive to adulthood in nature.
** A related trope is any horror movie using rats for a grossout or [[Cat Scare]]. The rat will often be patterned, frequently be obviously a juvenile fresh from the pet store, and will ''always'' nonchalantly stare at the actor/camera instead of the instant fight or flight response that makes wild rats so unnerving.
* The calls of the Kookaburra and the Indian Blue Peacock most often embellish the soundtracks of Hollywood jungle movies.
* The haunting call of the Common Loon, which is native to North America, can be heard anywhere where a strange haunting sound is needed. Anywhere from tropical rain forests to Asian bamboo forests.
* As can be seen below, many live-action works that need monkeys will use Capuchin monkeys, even if it's not set in Central or South America. This may be justified by the relative intelligence of the Capuchin which makes it easy to train, as well as other factors such as audience appeal or obtainability. Doesn't stop primatologists and the like from facepalming at works that place wild Capuchins outside of the New World, though.
* Most films with "dangerous" spiders making an appearance show tarantulas, or other similar scary-looking to a layman, but non-venomous spiders, in part because they look big and scary, and partially because they show up better on the screen. Presumably they're also used to limit the risk of crew-members getting poisoned.
=== Advertising ===
* Averted in the Coke commercials with the polar bear family for almost a decade... until the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIk7Q_DJIgQ latest commercial in the series.] ''Sigh...'' Possibly justified in that the penguins are on vacation, as they float in on patches of ice.
* In [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-bQsbrGs4 the Snickers Feast ads] with a Viking and a pilgrim, the Viking's headdress is made partially from the hide of raccoons, which are specific to the Western Hemisphere. He could have been a Viking who traveled to North America, but it's doubtful that the makers of the commercials thought about that.
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=== Anime
* More of a translation problem, but nearly every animal in an anime or manga that is referred to as a raccoon is in reality a raccoon dog (or ''tanuki''), a completely unrelated animal. Raccoons are native to the Americas. Some, like the one below, may be referring to actual raccoons since they are an invasive species now found in 42 out of 47 prefectures.
* ''[[Rascal the Raccoon]]'' is a 1977 anime series with a main character that is a raccoon. At the time it was very popular, leading to around 1,500 raccoons that were imported as pets each year after the success of the anime series, so it became something of a [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]].
* The main island of Japan hosts a sort of urban-dwelling dove similar to a morning dove with a very distinctive call: ''hoot-hoot / low grumble.'' This call is heard in ''[[Kaleido Star]]'' even though the beginning of the story is set in [[Los Angeles]].
* ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' has, among other things, tigers in Africa. When the author found out that tigers don't ''live'' in Africa, he admitted to not doing the research... and then, since it's a [[Gag Series]], lampshaded it in a flashback in a later chapter by portraying an African savanna with such diverse species as pandas, unicorns, dinosaurs, and a "dragon" that looks rather like a person in a costume.
* This is brought up in ''[[Pet Shop of Horrors|Petshop of Horrors: Tokyo]]'', in a chapter where D points out to Wu Fei that many of the animals that are considered normal in Japan were actually imported from other countries.
* The Jungle in ''[[
* The "Best Wishes" arc of the ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'' anime apparently featured Pikachu in the Unova region, which ironically did not feature such Pokémon (or ''any'' Pokémon from the first four generations) there. This was only because Ash brought the Pikachu with him, there have yet to be any appearances of the 493 Pokémon from prior generations in the wild. There were also instances of certain Pokémon appearing in a region in which they're normally not native to, especially during both the Hoenn and Sinnoh arcs. Some of these can be excused if they have a trainer who might have brought them there, but not so much when they're found in the wild.
* ''[[Kimba the White Lion]]'' has the title character living in a jungle while real lions live in savannas. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] when Kimba's odd home is made into a plot point involving the [[Ancient Egypt|heritage]] of the white lions. Although real ''African'' lions typically live in open grassland and low tree density savannah, it's not unknown for them to live in bush and forest habitats. It's even more normal for Asiatic lions where mixed open forest(or jungle)/grassland (high tree density savannah) habitat is more normal.
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=== Comic Books ===
* The [[So Bad It's Good]] ''Black Condor'' comic book series has the title character's parents being killed while they were in Mongolia and himself being raised by condors... which live nowhere near Mongolia.
* During Kurt Busiek's run on ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|The Avengers]]'', a Snowbird [[Expy]] called Silverclaw shows up; she can only turn into animals native to South America. The cheetah was retconned into a jaguar next issue (though she changed into that for ''speed''), but they never tried to explain the cockatoo.
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===
* [[Justified Trope]] in ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]''. There are wild tigers in the African country of Bengali because an Indian Maharaja once brought a group of them from India some hundred years earlier.▼
* Lampshaded in a ''Polar Express'' parody in a ''[[FoxTrot]]'' comic strip: The conductor welcomes Roger to the North Pole... until Roger points out the presence of penguins. "Stupid Map-Quest!"▼
* The daily comic strip ''Crock'' follows a French Foreign Legion unit in North Africa. It routinely features cacti, which only occur naturally in New World deserts. May be a case of [[Reality Is Unrealistic]], since several species of cactus from the new world have become naturalized through the Mediterranean basin, with most having been imported more than 100 years ago for use either as crops or ornamentals.▼
* The [http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/05/24 May 24, 1986] ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' strip has Calvin imagining him being a crocodile in the amazon. Okay, but he then imagines his dad as a hippopotamus.▼
* ''[[The Jungle Book (Disney film)|The Jungle Book]]''
** In [[Disney Animated Canon|Disney's version]] (set in India), Monkey People look mostly correct, with the glaring exception of Louie the ''orangutan'' (native to Indonesia).
** Strangely, Louie was kept in both the [[Live Action Adaptation]] and "The Kipling group of Fables" in the comic book ''[[Fables]]'', despite being a Disney addition and neither part of [[Rudyard Kipling]]'s work nor a genuine "Fable". In the live-action ''Jungle Book'' it was at least [[Lampshade Hanging|acknowledged]] that Louie was out of place. But since ''Fables'' are influenced by people's beliefs about them, [[Fan Wank|it's not impossible that]] Louie exists simply [[Adaptation Displacement|because more people have seen the Disney movie than read Kipling's books,]] and [[Word of God]] is that he simply [[Did Not Do the Research]].
** The ''Jungle Book 2'' has an Ocelot make a small appearance during a song. Ocelots live in South America. Same goes to the hippos considering how they live in Africa.
** In the animated spin-off ''Jungle Cubs'', aside from Louie there's baboons (there's some evil ones during season 1), babirusa, cheetah (surprisingly, they were cheetahs in India until the early 20th century) and many other critters.
* Abu in [[Disney Animated Canon|Disney's]] ''[[Aladdin (Disney film)|Aladdin]]'', who looks like a New-World monkey in Arabia. There was mention in the animated series that Abu was imported as part of a traveling circus before he was adopted by Aladdin, and his tiny vest and hat was an artifact of this past, though this may have been an [[Author's Saving Throw]]. And Iago the parrot seems to be a very small version of a Scarlet Macaw. We had to wait for the [[Recycled: the Series|Television Series of the Film]] to get an explanation: during a jaunt to the Amazon, Iago mentions he left the area a while back.
* Despite including a parody of this trope (listed below) [[Disney Animated Canon|Disney's]] ''[[Tarzan (Disney film)|Tarzan]]'' messed up by having lemurs (native only to Madagascar) in mainland Africa. At least they put a leopard in the place of the book's lion, which, given the jungle setting, is much more appropriate.
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** And then there's the ''[[Animaniacs]]'' version of ''The Lion King,'' which for some reason, featured tigers living in what appears to be Africa. Though [[Deconstruction|knowing]] ''[[Rule of Funny|Animaniacs]]'', this may have been a [[Lampshade Hanging]] on the above instances.
** The ''Animaniacs'' version also apparantly kept the leafcutter ants.
* ''[[Bambi]]'', set in Northeastern America, came very close
* The Quails also appear (to cluck with disapproval at the Dwarves' dirty floor) in ''[[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs]]'' (which also featured raccoons, both native to North America), which is implied to take place in Europe. Those Quails get around!
* And there they are again in ''[[Sleeping Beauty (Disney film)|Sleeping Beauty]]''!
* And there they are AGAIN again in ''[[Pocahontas]]''! Now, it is true that some animals ranged farther into the eastern parts of North America in pre-colonial times, but come on, and that's not even touching on the moose. It leads one to think that the filmmakers have never even been to Virginia, given the spectacular [[Artistic License Geology]] of the landscape. Elk would have been more accurate if they were looking for something larger than a white-tail in Colonial times. There's also a large grizzly bear with cubs, even though there are only black bears in Virginia.
* ''[[Dinosaur]]'' had prosauropods and a ''Brachiosaurus'' interacting with Cretaceous-period dinosaurs, as well as ''lemurs'', which did not evolve until well after dinosaurs went extinct. Meanwhile the ''Carnotaurus'' that appeared was found only in South America, with relatives in Africa and southern Europe. Thus, this movie had
* ''[[Finding Nemo]]'' was very impressive with its well researched Great Barrier Reef fish. Pity they didn't extend the research to the birds, using American species of Pelican and Gull instead of Australian ones.
* ''[[The Little Mermaid]]'' has newts living in saltwater habitats and a coral reef that would be more appropriate off the coast of Australia than in the chilly Atlantic Ocean. The sequel also features a walrus living in what appears to be Antarctica.
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* ''[[Ice Age]]'' has animals misplaced in time as well as space. At the very least, they used animals that were all around after the dinosaurs died out (with the exception of the second film's hesperornithines, mostly flightless Mesozoic diving birds). Especially confusing the mains haven't aged between the two movies, but they're set at opposite ends of the titular ice age... And then comes ''Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs'', when the first movie had ''humans''. Oy...
* Golden Films' ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125867/ The Jungle King]'' Lions don't live in jungles.
* The stop-motion animation of ''[[Fantastic Mr. Fox]]'' comes very close to entering this trope, depending on your interpretation of the film. Although American animals such as the possum, beaver, and grey fox are present, this could just very well be an artistic choice on the director's part. After all, some of the animals that could have more easily been represented by their American counterparts, such as the badger, were instead obviously portrayed as the Eurasian
* ''[[Kung Fu Panda]]'' has an elderly Galapagos tortoise living in ancient China as one of the film's main characters, while the sequel featured evil [[Maniac Monkeys|gorillas]] (native to Africa) commanding armies of evil [[Big Badass Wolf|wolves]].
* That cute little desert mouse, Priscilla, in ''[[Rango]]'' [[Word of God]] is she's actually an aye-aye. The film is set in the Mohave Desert, and the aye-aye is native only to ''Madagascar''.
=== Films -- Live-Action ===
* The movies ''[[Big Fish]]'' and ''[[Sideways]]'' (deleted scene) replaced turkey vultures with one of the closely related yellow-headed vulture species. Since only turkey vultures that cannot be returned to the wild can be kept in captivity, it is apparently much simpler to just import a foreign lookalike.
* ''[[Airplane!]]'' somehow had an actual turkey vulture, though. On the other hand, the elephant in Stryker's Africa flashback was actually an Asian elephant.
* In ''[[10,000
* ''[[Anaconda
* The Transylvanian armadillos(!) in ''[[Dracula (1931 film)|Dracula]]'' (1931). There's also an opossum; Browning probably meant for them to stand in as giant rats, but...
** The Spanish language version, shot from the same script on the same sets at night after the English-speaking cast and crew had gone home, does use rats. The director made a point of watching the English language footage every night before getting to work, and then making his version better. He didn't know what the armadillos were for, either.
** One theory is that the armadillos and opossums are actually a result of [[Executive Meddling|censorship]]; showing actual live rats would have been against the rules as too "revolting" for an American audience, so rat stand ins were rather bizarrely used. The Spanish version would have been shown in areas where this limitation wouldn't have applied, so they got away with using real rats.
** As the Spanish-language version was intended for Latin American markets, much of its intended audience would know that armadillos (native to that part of the world) are harmless and nothing like rats. English-speaking
** Then there's the bats. [[Our Vampires Are Different|The connection between vampires and bats was never very strong in the classic vampire myths]]. Stoker mostly came up with it after reading about vampire bats somewhere and incorporating them into the story. The problem is that vampire bats are native to Latin America. The only place in Eastern Europe you're likely to find them are zoos.
* ''[[Indiana Jones]]''
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*** The boa constrictor that falls on Marian, even though constrictors aren't found in the arid regions of Egypt.
** ''[[Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]]''
*** Indy misidentifies the large bats as vampire bats, which aren't found in India. Granted, he might've been yanking his companions' chains about those. In reality, if you see a bat you can in any way describe as large it's probably a "megabat", which are also know as "fruit bats", because that's what they eat.
** ''[[Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull]]''
*** The siafu ("big damn ants!")are native to Africa, not Peru, and aren't nearly as big in [[Real Life]]. This could be a case of misidentified wildlife on Indy's part instead, as the Amazon notoriously does have similar army ants.
* In ''[[The Leech Woman]]'', our main characters are trekking through Africa. Although the [[Stock Footage]] is correct about what animals are in Africa (except for a typical alligator/crocodile confusion hodge-podge of shots at one point), scenes on sets have a New World monkey climbing a tree away from the characters, and an Indian elephant with African elephant-style ears glued onto its head.
* ''[[Night at the Museum]]'' has a blatantly New World Capuchin Monkey in The Hall of African Mammals. (And worse, they go to no effort to hide
* Speaking of Dracula, ''[[Nosferatu]]'' features a striped hyena in Transylvania. But in truth, it was probably meant to be a werewolf.
** Lovingly parodied in ''[[The Monster Squad]]'', where the same animals appear in the Transylvania prologue.
** Dracula adaptations seem to have this problem bad; the [[Furry Comic|furry webcomic version]] features Jonathan Harker the coyote (originally meant to be a fox, but the guy doing the strip likes coyotes), and a Eastern European ship's crew contained a kangaroo. This is particularly silly since Quincy Morris was from Texas, so making ''him'' a coyote would've been appropriate.
* Not even live-action Disney is immune to this. In ''[[Mary Poppins]]'' the robin that lands on Mary's hand during the "Spoonful of Sugar" song is an ''American'' robin, in England, well outside its normal range. Ironic, given that the American version was named after the [http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/robin.htm British robin redbreast] in the first place. Bonus points for showing [[Ho Yay|two MALE Robins]] building a nest outside the window.
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* In the opening sequence of ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' the hominids, in a semi-desert African setting, are accompanied by tapirs, when there's no evidence that they ever existed in Africa. In the novel, they were boars, so it was probably just a case of being unable to get a large animal of that sort passive enough to use in filming, especially since one shot involves a hominid angrily shoving a tapir aside. Boars ''are'' nasty, and would probably attack the actors if they shoved it like that. [[Word of God]] is that one reason they used tapirs is because they were more exotic-looking and "prehistoric" appearance.
* ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers]]: Revenge of the Fallen'' features tigers in what looks to be Africa.
* The Pygmy Nuthatch in ''[[Charlie's Angels|Charlies Angels]]'' is a South American Troupial, a relation to the
* Used for comedic effect at the beginning of ''[[UHF (film)|UHF]]''.
* ''[[Tropic Thunder]]'' features a vicious man-eating panda in the jungle along the Vietnam/Laos border. In [[Real Life]], giant pandas are found only in China, and nowhere near the border with Indochina. To say nothing of the fact that real life pandas aren't carnivorous.
* ''[[Troy]]'' contains a moment where a llama is seen in the city of Troy, despite the fact that llamas are new-world animals and would never have been found in ancient Greece/Troy. The same crowd scene has a cage filled with budgerigars (commonly called parakeets in the US). These are small Australian parrots that weren't discovered until the 19th Century.
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* ''[[Bringing Up Baby]]'' has a leopard from South America. Leopards are old world cats, found in Africa and Asia. South America is the domain of jaguars. One wonders why they called the cat a leopard, as Baby was even ''played'' by a jaguar. Someone [[Did Not Do the Research|forgot to do their homework]] in zoology, it seems.
* The spiders in ''[[Arachnophobia]]'' are ''Delena cancerides'' from New Zealand, [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099052/trivia a species known for being slow and harmless]. This is somewhat evident to the arachnology fan watching the film, as they are so slow and inert that they sometimes have to be urged to move by sticks that are visible in-shot. The "big bad" spider toward the end is a bird-eating tarantula, more dangerous owing to being large and aggressive (if not particularly poisonous). The film is set in the USA, though the spiders supposedly come from South America.
* The "venomous snakes" in the temple in ''[[The Mummy Trilogy|The Mummy Returns]]'' are mainly coral snake mimics. Coral snakes and their mimics live in the Americas, not in Egypt. If you're using prop or CG snakes ''anyway'' (and they were, at least when snakes were being kicked or thrown around) there is really no excuse for them to be
* The first ''[[Alien vs. Predator]]'' movie is set in [[Mysterious Antarctica]] and has a [[Cat Scare]] involving a penguin. Problem is, the bird shown is an ''African'' penguin, only found in, well, Africa.
* Oddly enough, the first ''[[Tarzan]]'' movie had Asian elephants disguised as African by [[Special Effects Failure|attaching cardboard tusks and ears to them]]. They got rid of the disguise in the sequels. This was probably done because African elephants are notoriously difficult to train.
* Justified in ''[[Jumanji]]''. The jungle that the Jumanji world is composed of is not a real-world environment, but a fantastical, magical creation of the game, hence all sorts of misplaced wildlife spring from it. For instance, Pelicans, lions, rhinos, zebra and elephants all don't live in the jungle.
* [[Alvin and the Chipmunks|''Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked'']] featured a meerkat (referred by Alvin as a [[Critical Research Failure|''honey badger'']]) living on a tropical island.
* In Adam Sandler's 2008 comedy
=== Literature ===
* [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]] had [[Tarzan]] fight a tiger at least once. Also lions, which live in Africa but on the savanna, not the jungle. To Burroughs' credit, he realized the mistake and removed the tiger when the serialized ''Tarzan of the Apes'' was collected as a novel. The only other tiger to appear in the novels occurs in ''Tarzan and the Foreign Legion'' which is set on Sumatra, which does have tigers.
* Quite a few animals in ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'' don't exactly run rampant in the Pacific Northwest. At least, not enough of them to feed a clan of vampires. Or blame mysterious deaths on.
* The latest ''[[Alex Rider]]'' book has monkeys in ''Australia''. Umm...
* ''[[Jules Verne]]'', of all people, could sometimes fall into this, even though he usually tried to
* In the book ''[[The Swiss Family Robinson]]'', the characters are shipwrecked on a tropical island which is home to Eurasian buffalo and onagers, African lions, South American ocelots and boa constrictors, Australian kangaroos, and Antarctic penguins. The movie makes quite a spectacular attempt to justify this: the characters theorize that the island is all that's left of [[Hollywood Atlas|a land bridge between continents]], and somehow representatives of every single place it reached got stuck there when the rest of the bridge eroded away. In this case it's because [[Science Marches On]]: before the theory of plate tectonics gave a plausible mechanism for continental drift, the idea that continents could ''move'' was considered fringe science, and land bridges were often invoked to explain similar fossils found oceans apart.
* [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[Desperation]]'' takes place in the Nevada desert during the summer and includes a few scenes with hordes of fiddleback spiders. Said spiders do not live this far to the west (we do have grass spiders with stripes vaguely reminiscent of the fiddleback, but the resemblance ends there), and they prefer a temperate climate.
* The [[Dr. Seuss]] book ''[[Horton Hears a Who!]]'' has an elephant and a kangaroo living in the same jungle. Highly unlikely in any case, but then again, this is Dr. Seuss we're talking about, so real world rules or any sort need not apply.
* [[Alan Dean Foster]]'s ''Spellsinger'' series takes place in a fantasy world where all mammals, birds, amphibians and turtles are sentient. Few of the animal species he encounters should be living on the same continent, let alone in the same village.
** At one point, after having met Australian animals, Jon Tom goes to a place where Australian animals exclusively live. Even there, the habitats ''within'' Australia are inextricably mixed together.
* In one of Paul Doherty's mystery novels set in [[Ancient Egypt]], Queen Hapshetsut appears in court wearing an outfit trimmed with ''jaguar'' fur. Presumably the author meant to say "leopard", as jaguars are exclusively a New World big cat.
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* "[[Leiningen Versus the Ants]]" demonstrates the power of a massive army ant swarm by having them devour a non-Amazon native elk.
* ''[[Pride and Prejudice And Zombies]]'' features a sequence where the Bennett sisters come across a tide of animals fleeing the "unmentionables". Said tide includes the North American animals chipmunks, raccoons and skunks, which were nowhere to be found in Regency England.
** As if the author had heard about complaints and decided to give people something to ''really'' gripe about, the spiritual sequel ''[[Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters]]'' features well-to-do English families having rattlesnake and armadillo for dinner, while a servant's grave is despoiled by a scavenging ''hyena''.
* The ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' novel "The Speckled Band" not only featured a nonexistent snake called the "swamp adder" as the titular speckled band, but also mentioned cheetahs and baboons living in India. In real life, cheetahs would have become extinct in India around the time the book was published, and baboons are actually native to Africa.
** The novel was first published in 1892. The last solid evidence for cheetah in India was in 1947 and they are officially regarded as extirpated in India in the 1950s. They would have been rare in the 1890s but not yet extirpated. The baboon reference may also have been ''Macacus rhesus'' (the Rhesus Macaque) which has very occasionally been called the "Indian baboon" in English (even though it's not a baboon at all).
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=== Live-Action TV ===
* ''[[Lost]]'' has [[It Was His Sled|polar]] [[All There Is to Know About "The Crying Game"|bears]] on a tropical island, alongside horses, chickens, and cows. Explained as being brought to the Island by {{spoiler|The DHARMA Initiative, [[All There in the Manual|who were doing research on gene manipulation for adaption to different climates.]]}}
* Radar O'Reilly in the TV series ''[[M*A*S*H (television)|
* In ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' episode "The Jungle", various aspects of the African jungle come to haunt some guy with a curse on him. At several points during the episode, we hear a kookaburra laughing in the background. Kookaburras live in Australia, not Africa.
* Back in the year 2000, CBS caught a lot of crap from birdwatchers who recognized the birdsong on the network's golf broadcasts as belonging to birds not native to the location of the tournament. Yep, they admitted that they were piping in "ambient birdsong" to their telecasts. Oops.
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* On ''[[Little House on the Prairie (TV series)|Little House On the Prairie]]'', one can hear the "chi-ca-go" call of the California Quail. ''Little House'' is set in Minnesota, and the Quail is only found west of the Rockies. It really can't be helped, since it ''was'' filmed in California.
* ''[[Power Rangers Jungle Fury]]'' (emphasis on '''Jungle'''), which sees the usage of a tiger, jaguar, cheetah, lion, chameleon, elephant, bat, shark, gorilla, penguin, antelope, wolf, and rhino. ''Power Rangers'' has done this for a long time, even when Saban ran the series: the original ''[[Mighty Morphin Power Rangers]]'' had 7 Dinozords, [[Stock Dinosaurs|only two of which were actually legitimate dinosaurs]]. At least ''Jungle Fury'' was originally planned to be named ''Beast Fist'', so it made somewhat of a bit of sense. ''[[Power Rangers Wild Force]]'' and ''Gaoranger'' might better be considered an [[Anachronism Stew]], since it's clear that the animals they chose were all over the place, jungle, desert, woodland, etc., and had no real one location, like a Jungle, Forest, etc. The only time Wildlife gets misplaced were with the animal-based weapons of the Jungle Sword (Lion, Tiger, Eagle, Shark, Bison) and Jungle Blaster (Falcon, Deer, Giraffe, Rhino, Armadillo.)
* A segment of David Attenborough's ''Life of Birds'' featuring a bird endemic to the South-West of
* In a Disney adaptation of ''Swiss Family Robinson'' (a [[Recycled: the Series|series spun off from their film adaptation]]), the family meets a falconer and his... bird. A bird that is played by ''3 different species'' over the course of the episode. By the time she is shown flying (via stock footage of a falcon) and then landing on the man's wrist (suddenly, she's a Golden Eagle), you wonder how the producers thought we wouldn't notice.
* A park ranger on ''[[Bones]]'' once tried to kick the show's crime scene investigators out of her park, on the grounds that their activities might disrupt a migratory flight path for a rare species of booby. All 6 species of boobies (the birds) are native to tropical islands and coastlines, mainly in the Pacific, so would have no reason to migrate over a crime scene that's within driving distance of Washington D.C.
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=== Music ===
* Bluebirds are not native to England, so there's very little chance of them flying over the White Cliffs of
* ''On the Savannah, the freaking SAVANNAH, the lion sleeps tonight.'' (Lions do not live in the jungle.)
===
▲* [[Justified Trope]] in ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]''. There are wild tigers in the African country of Bengali because an Indian Maharaja once brought a group of them from India some hundred years earlier.
▲* Lampshaded in a ''Polar Express'' parody in a ''[[FoxTrot]]'' comic strip: The conductor welcomes Roger to the North Pole... until Roger points out the presence of penguins. "Stupid Map-Quest!"
▲* The daily comic strip ''Crock'' follows a French Foreign Legion unit in North Africa. It routinely features cacti, which only occur naturally in New World deserts. May be a case of [[Reality Is Unrealistic]], since several species of cactus from the new world have become naturalized through the Mediterranean basin, with most having been imported more than 100 years ago for use either as crops or ornamentals.
▲* The [http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/05/24 May 24, 1986] ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' strip has Calvin imagining him being a crocodile in the amazon. Okay, but he then imagines his dad as a hippopotamus.
=== Puppet Shows ===
* In ''[[Muppet Treasure Island]]'', the second half takes place on an unidentified North American island. Miss Piggy is brought to the ceremony by an Asian elephant (and not a Muppet one either). What makes it worse is that the story takes place in the 17th Century, long before any zoos were built in North America, let alone the Caribbean islands. Given that it's [[The Muppets]], this might very well have been an intentional [[Lampshade Hanging]].
=== Tabletop Games ===
* Despite most of ''[[Ravenloft]]'' setting's domains being [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture|spooky versions of European nations]], they tend to have a mixture of North American and European wildlife (e.g. hedgehogs and skunks on the same random [[Cat Scare|false-alarm]] encounter table). Justified in the case of the African-flavored Wildlands' tigers, which [[The Powers That Be|the Dark Powers]] put there deliberately to have a blood-feud with the native lions.
* Many role-playing games' encounter tables for aquatic creatures don't bother to distinguish between freshwater and saltwater species, probably because [[Atlantis Is Boring|there aren't many choices to work with]].
=== Video Games ===
* ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'', which is set in a densely wooded Russian jungle (huh?), is positively loaded with species that simply aren't supposed to be there, reaching right into the cryptozoological on occasion. This meta reason is that it was an attempt by Hideo Kojima to keep players from guessing the location of Snake Eater from the demos. In the game one of your [[Mission Control]] later [[Hand Wave
* ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]''. Marine the Raccoon uses [[Land Down Under|Australian slang]], while the actual echidna has an American accent. Also, said echidna is a descendant of the Maya civilization, a Mesoamerican tribe, and has dreadlocks. There's a fancomic somewhere with Knuckles freaking out over trying to figure out his nationality.
* ''[[Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy]]'' features numerous species of ''armadillo'' running around the deserts of Ancient Egypt. The fact that they're ''magical'' armadillos [[A Wizard Did It|doesn't excuse the fact that]] ''they're still armadillos.''
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* ''[[Will Rock]]'' features, along with other monsters, tigers, lions, and Nile Crocodiles in Greece.
* ''[[Jabless Adventure]]'' features Pokey, a talking cactus in the middle of [[The Lost Woods]]. [[Lampshade Hanging|You ask him what he's doing there, and he's not sure.]] Later in the game, you encounter Pokey again, in a volcano. He explains that he dug his way there.
* ''[[Super Smash Bros.]] Brawl'' has a rare [[Mon]] example. The [[Pokémon]] [[Our Dragons Are Different|Rayquaza]] raises out of a lake like it's some sort of sea monster. It's supposed to live in the earth's ozone layer.
* Not seen but heard in ''[[The Lost Vikings]] II'': one of BGM tracks in the Amazon Jungle contains sounds of various wildlife... among them '''elephants'''.
* Justified in ''[[Hatoful Boyfriend]]'', which takes place at a prestigious high school for sapient birds, and so attracts students and faculty from all over the world. The heroine still lampshades the unlikeliness of encountering a mourning dove in Japan.
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=== Web Animation ===
* ♪ Where can <s>you</s> see tigers? [https://web.archive.org/web/20140330055205/http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ Only in Kenya...] ♪ The point of the video was to showcase that you really ''could'' only see Lions in Kenya, and an updated version of the video features the line "[[Lampshade Hanging|Good luck actually finding tigers in Kenya]]."
* ''[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/551691 Drunk Science]'' explains the origin of Polar Bears, along with the reason there aren't any penguins in the arctic.
=== Web Original ===
* A rabbit appears on the version 3 island of ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]''. The version three island is a jungle.
* ''[[Pokey the Penguin]]'' is set in the Arctic Circle. As it also contains a hippopotamus-like Skeptopotamus, [[Acceptable Target|Italian invasion forces]] and [[Satan]] himself, it is possible that [[Rule of Funny|geographical realism wasn't the artist's highest priority]].
=== Western Animation ===
* An old [[Mickey Mouse]] short, ''Mickey Down Under'', features an ostrich deep in [[Misplaced Vegetation|the banana jungles of Australia]]. Obviously it was meant to be an emu, but the animators simply drew an African ostrich.
* ''[[Looney Tunes]]''
** The famous character Pepe Le Pew is a French skunk. There are no skunks in France. Might explain why he can't find a female of his own species and is reduced to pursuing cats with paint on their backs, though in his first appearance, it turned out he wasn't actually French and [[Characterization Marches On|just put the accent on in an attempt to impress the ladies when he was away from his wife and kids]]. Nowadays, some viewers speculate he's actually French-Canadian or Cajun, and it's the accent he's faking rather than the language.
** In the ''[[Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner|Wile E Coyote and The Road Runner]]'' cartoon, there was a Burmese tiger in the American Southwest. [[Rule of Funny|What did Wile E. expect when he dug a Burmese Tiger Trap?]]
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* ''[[Beast Wars]]'' tries to avoid this by not being very particular as to what ''species'' of animal the cast transform into (and having the decency to explain Dinobot and Megatron's dinosaur alt-modes as being scanned from fossils), but it still has some odd placements, such as the gorilla that the computer scans for Optimus Primal being in the middle of what appears to be a desert. In a more literal sense, the fact that most of the animals on the cast are ''in the same shot'', centimetres apart from one another, is unusual. The wildlife placements are made far more odd when it is revealed that {{spoiler|the series takes place in North America, where the Autobot's Ark crashed}}. Even allowing for the prehistoric setting, many of the animals scanned in the first episode, as well as the proto-humans, are very out of place.
** ''Beast Wars II'', the Japan-only anime sequel, has at least one Tasmanian Devil on Gaea, which is Earth in the distant future. Plus, the surface of Gaea is a ''[[Single Biome Planet|jungle]]''. Other examples abound, such as the question of how Big Convoy of ''Beast Wars Neo'' has a mammoth alt-form when he's apparently never even been to Earth/Gaea.
* ''[[The Fairly
** "We Brits love the smell of skunk. [[Running Gag|It reminds us of the hunt!]]" There are no wild skunks in the UK.
* ''[[Thomas the Tank Engine]]''
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** Another picture book based on this show was actually about Thomas and Stepney finding a [[Tyrannosaurus Rex]] skeleton on Sodor, despite that dinosaur being native to North America (they really should've either uncovered a Megalosaurus or a Baryonyx, both of which are actually theropod dinosaurs that are native to England). Well at least the dinosaur skeleton the Narrow Gauge locomotives found in the show is actually that of a Dacentrurus (a small stegosaurid native to England).
* ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'', despite taking place in a deliberate [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink]], gets special mention for having a giant squid ''in a lake'' in "The Showstoppers".
* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' takes place in a world littered with platypus bears, skunk bears, armadillo bears, gopher bears, and polar bear dogs. The Gaang is baffled when they learn that the Earth King owns a pet...
* The ''[[Danger Mouse]]'' episode "The Bad Luck Eye of the Little Yellow God", ostensibly set in Brazil, is jampacked with African wildlife.
* One episode of ''[[DuckTales (1987)]]'' had Scrooge McDuck, the nephews, Webby, and Ms. Beakley go to Antarctica to protect a colony of penguins from a giant carnivorous walrus that was trapped in an ice cube for thousands of years, but was accidentally freed by Webby's tuning fork, causing said ice cube to shatter. In real life, walruses are native to the Arctic, not Antarctica. A leopard seal would be more appropriate however, since they are giant seals that live near Antartica which feed on penguins.
* The ''[[Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (animation)|Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers]]'' episode "Kiwi's Big Adventure" features a crocodile in the [[Misplaced Vegetation|tropical jungles]] of New Zealand.
* The blue foxes in ''[[The Animals of Farthing Wood]]'', which are not found in Europe. In the original books there's no indication that the foxes in White Deer Park look any different to Fox and
=== Real Life ===
* Thanks to notorious Drug Lord Pablo Escobar, there is now a small population of hippos in Colombia.
* Birds occasionally fly to places they aren't normally seen in, such as Siberian birds in Alaska or American birds in Europe, due to being blown off course by strong winds during their migration. That said, this is such a rare occurrence, it tends to make the news.
** And it doesn't just happen to birds either. A West Indian Manatee (more readily associated with Florida) spent his summer in Cape Cod in 2008.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20130224133818/http://www.brooklynparrots.com/ The Wild Parrots of Brooklyn.]
** Pasadena, California has a large, non-indigenous population of naturalized parrots. According to the "Parrot Project of Los Angeles", the parrots are of at least five species. Some residents have come to enjoy the birds as part of their unique city's culture, while others consider them to be loud pests. Many theories surround the mystery of how the parrots landed in Pasadena and claimed the area as their own. A widely accepted story is that they were part of the stock that were set free for their survival from the large pet emporium at Simpson's Garden Town on East Colorado Boulevard, which burned down in 1959.
** The same Monk Parakeets thrive in Florida, and also in isolated colonies in several other major American cities including Chicago. Technically these are "introduced" rather than
** The [[wikipedia:Common Pheasant|Ring-necked Pheasant]], so beloved of American hunters and artists and also the state bird of South Dakota, was brought to North America in 1857. They are originally native to Russia and are also naturalized in much of Western Europe.
** The common parakeet, or
** The Rock Pigeon<ref>or Rock Dove as it was called before ornithologist organizations adopted a name more consistent with the bird more often informally being called a pigeon than a dove</ref> ended up this way due to human intervention. The species's adaptability combined with feral populations ending up on every continent except for Antarctica ended up giving what originally lived on European cliffs a very wide range, to the point where their non-native status outside their original range isn't brought up much due to how common and widespread they are, as well as the fact that these countries often have their own native species of doves and pigeons, in contrast to how the House Sparrow and European Starling stand out in North America since their families are mostly restricted to the Old World; although the Americas have species called sparrows, they're actually in the same family as Old World buntings.<ref>Details on the page for [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit]]</ref>
* The story of how [[Singapore]] got its
* Actual misplaced wildlife: there is a herd of South American [[wikipedia:Rhea (bird)|Rheas]] living in northeastern Germany, of all places. Apparently, winters here aren't that much worse than in Argentina.
** There are also a few colonies of escaped wallabies living wild in the UK.
** The grey squirrel is native to North America but now so common in the UK that most people never see the native red ones, to the point that there is currently a campaign to introduce squirrel-
* Monkeys were released/escaped into the Everglades after the filming of the ''Tarzan'' movies there. While the movies were set in Africa, not Florida, they now depict accurately the fauna of the Everglades. When they were being filmed, they didn't...
** Certain species of large constrictors often kept as pets have escaped or been illegally released when they got too big in such numbers that their populations in Florida may now be self-sustaining. So yes, [[Oh Crap|now we do have potentially man-eating snakes]].
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* Dromedary camels are native to the North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where they are now completely domesticated. The only wild population is in Australia, where they were introduced.
* Many domestic species are like this: wild horses in the United States are descendants of animals brought over from Europe by Spanish explorers or that escaped from captivity. Likewise, feral populations of cats, dogs, goats, sheep, and pigs are now common in many places that they're not native to. Pigs in particular have proved so able to colonize new territory that they've become a serious ecological problem in places like California, Hawaii, Florida, and Australia.
** However, horses evolved in North America, and only got to Eurasia relatively recently. They died out in North America about 10,000 years ago, before being reintroduced. Mustang defenders have argued that wild horses should be allowed in National Parks in the American Southwest because the archeological record shows they lived there before humans did.
* Non-native dolphins, sharks and seals sometimes turn up off the Atlantic coast of Britain.
* Pigs are native to Europe and Asia. Polynesians introduced them across the South Pacific. Spanish explorers introduced them to North America, South America, and everywhere else they went. Today, feral pigs are found from the US to Argentina, in Australia, and in a whole slew of other places they're not supposed to be. Unfortunately, due to their fast growth rate, high reproductive rate, ability to eat almost anything, and the general lack of predators capable of dealing with them, they've become a huge problem in most of the places they've been introduced to.
* On June 2011, a [https://web.archive.org/web/20140122064114/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8589213/Emperor-penguin-washes-up-on-beach-far-from-home-in-New-Zealand.html young emperor penguin ended up on the coast of New Zealand].
* Every now and again, a walrus will be seen in or around Northern Scotland, even though that's still quite a ways away from the walrus' natural habitat, the Arctic Circle.
* The South American nutria (looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver) has invaded many parts of the USA and Europe after being introduced there by fur ranchers.
* The common starling was not native to North America until 1890, when Eugene Schieffelin and the American Acclimatization Society released 60-100 in Central Park as part of a plan to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare to America. They are now over two-hundred million strong and a major pest bird.
* Fish also get
* The cane toad, native to South and Central America, was released into numerous islands in Oceania, the Caribbean, Hawaii and Australia where they were intended to reduce or eliminate cane beetles that were eating cane sugar, a valuable crop. The toads succeeded in their mission, but rather than stop at the beetles, they went on to eat anything else they could fit in their mouths. In addition to that, they have a deadly venom that frequently kills predator species. The lack of predators and an abundance of food sources have caused cane toad populations to explode and become a serious pest species that have destabilized every ecosystem they were introduced to.
* And just sometimes this works out
* The old "Parisian Sewer Rat" carnival sideshow gig. If it's not a silly-looking rubber/plastic monster rat, it's typically a capybara, which are native to marshlands in South America.
▲== Anime & Manga ==
** Done intentionally in the story "An Akane to Remember". The forested valley of Ryûgenzawa is filled with the most unlikely of creatures, including a [[Everythings Better With Platypus|platypus]], porcupines, herds of frill-necked lizards, cranes, koalas and one or two ''dodo birds''. However, it's noted in the story itself that they don't belong there and were in fact imported from other countries: in the original manga, Shinnosuke's grandfather used to be the caretaker at a zoo that was built there, while the anime explains them as exotic pets that the old man collected. Akane, Ranma and Ryôga were more concerned about the fact they were all [[Attack of the 50
▲* ''[[Ranma ½|Ranma One Half]]''
▲** Done intentionally in the story "An Akane to Remember". The forested valley of Ryûgenzawa is filled with the most unlikely of creatures, including a [[Everythings Better With Platypus|platypus]], porcupines, herds of frill-necked lizards, cranes, koalas and one or two ''dodo birds''. However, it's noted in the story itself that they don't belong there and were in fact imported from other countries: in the original manga, Shinnosuke's grandfather used to be the caretaker at a zoo that was built there, while the anime explains them as exotic pets that the old man collected. Akane, Ranma and Ryôga were more concerned about the fact they were all [[Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever|bigger than human beings]] anyway.
** At another time, Ranma, Genma, and Sôun must find a way to get past the girls bathing in a hot spring. Genma and Sôun have the bright idea of painting Genma's panda form so he more closely resembles a vicious grizzly. The problem? The only paint they have on hand is ''white''. The girls immediately see through this. ("Whoever heard of a polar bear in ''Japan''?") Cue the bucket to the face.
** Also, there's an octopus spring at Jusenkyô, which seems to be nowhere near the ocean. Even the [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"|Guide]] has no idea how it can be possible.
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=== Comic Books ===
* In ''[[Tintin|The Black Island]]'', there is a gorilla on the island, which is in Scotland. However, the residents of the nearest village have no word for it other than "the beast", and it's being kept as a guardian by the villains (who probably imported it on the black market).
* In a comic based on ''[[Super Mario Land]] 2'', which ran in an issue of Nintendo Power, Mario finds an octopus in a lake. He asks the octopus about it, and the octpus realizes that's why he's been feeling sick. Mario offers to pour some salt into the water, but after doing so, realizes that he poured in ''sugar'', instead... (Contrast with the actual game, where the octopus is alive [[Womb Level|inside a sleeping whale]].)
===
* In Disney's ''[[Tarzan (Disney film)|Tarzan]]'', a baby Tantor worries about there being piranhas in the
* The comic strip ''[[Sherman's Lagoon|Shermans Lagoon]]'' at times features a polar bear. This particular guy seems more interested in lounging around in the tropics, though -- he's a tourist.▼
▲* In Disney's ''[[Tarzan (Disney film)|Tarzan]]'', a baby Tantor worries about there being piranhas in the river -- mistaking a young Tarzan for a piranha. The adult elephants have a discussion about how there are no piranhas in Africa -- they're native to South America. <ref>They're right, too.</ref> Then Tarzan pops up and they all panic.
* About midway through ''[[Up (animation)|Up]]'', Mr. Fredriksen and [[The Load|Russell]] are in Venezuela. Russell complains that he's tired. Mr. Fredriksen tells Russell to hurry up before a tiger eats him, but Russell whines that there aren't tigers in Venezuela.
* In the Disney feature ''[[Saludos Amigos]]'', during the "Gaucho Goofy" segment, we see Goofy wielding the bolas against an Argentine ostrich. Initially the ostrich appears to be an African ostrich, but the narrator then points out that unlike the African ostrich, the Argentine ostrich doesn't have decorative tail-feathers. The tail-feathers are then pulled off the ostrich's body.
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=== Films -- Live-Action ===
* In ''[[Animal Crackers]]'', Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) is telling of his African adventures, which include shooting a polar bear in the jungle. When Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) objects that polar bears only live in the Arctic, he explains: "This bear was anemic and he couldn't stand the cold climate. Besides, he was a rich bear and could afford to go away in the winter." No such [[Hand Wave]] is offered for the 6 tigers also mentioned in the speech (just a lame pun). By the time Spaulding gets around to saying that "the principal animals inhabiting the African jungle are [[wikipedia:Loyal Order of Moose|Moose]], [[wikipedia:Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks|Elks]], and [[wikipedia:Knights of Pythias|Knights of Pythias]]," it's pretty clear that he never went anywhere near [[Darkest Africa]] and that his speech is justified by the [[Rule of Funny]].
** In a borderline [[Funny Aneurysm Moment]], he also said it was preferable to shoot elephants in Alabama, because [[Incredibly Lame Pun|the Tuscaloosa]]. That same year, a sportswriter with flair for the dramatic, first referred to members of the University of Alabama, located in Tuscaloosa, as a herd of elephants, the birth of the Big Al mascot.
* ''[[Elf]]'' includes a collection of stop-action wildlife at the North Pole. Even though this is a silly fantasy story, the movie twists the penguins-in-the-arctic cliché by having ''puffins'', which look a lot like penguins. (The extinct flightless Great Auk, ''Pinguinus impennis'' was the origin of the name ''penguin''. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Keulemans-GreatAuk.jpg There is a similarity].)
* In ''[[Forbidden Planet]]'', Morbius keeps a surprising menagerie of Earth animals on Altair-IV, which hadn't been brought there aboard the Bellerophon with Morbius and the other colonists. The theory is advanced that these animals could have evolved on Altair-IV and subsequently have been brought to Earth by Krell [[Ancient Astronauts]]
* Cleverly averted in ''[[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]] and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone''. They couldn't get a boa constrictor, only a Burmese Python, so they changed the reference from Brazil to Burma and removed the snake's use of the word "Amigo".
* Averted in the movie ''[[Cast Away]]'' through the simple expedient of having no visible (or audible) wildlife whatsoever aside from the crabs and fish the main character catches for food.
* There's a jungle in the Madonna movie ''Who's That Girl?'' with all the usual suspects; cockatoos, kangaroos, zebras, patagonian felixes, etc., but it's artificial (the biggest artificial jungle on the Lower West Side), so they were stocked into it anyway. And it's on top of an apartment building.
* Lampshaded in ''[[Monty Python's The Meaning of Life]]'', where a "tiger" attacks a British soldier in Africa. Several characters incredulously ask, "A tiger? In Africa?" only to be shushed by others in the scene.
* ''[[Monty Python and
** Then there's the debate over how coconut shells turned up in England. They could have been carried by an African swallow, but not a European swallow. But then, African swallows are non-migratory...
* In ''[[An American Werewolf in London]]'', David and Jack start half-jokingly speculating about what's making the howling sounds in the distance. David first suggests a coyote, and Jack retorts that there aren't any coyotes in England.
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=== Literature ===
* A very tongue-in-cheek one from ''[[Harry Potter]]'': Hogwarts has a giant squid. Living in a lake. In northern Scotland. [[A Wizard Did It]].
=== Live-Action TV ===
* ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'': Lampshaded and subverted in "Scott of the Antarctic", where an egotistical film star throws a tantrum when he is informed that the lion that he is supposed to fight doesn't live in the Antarctic. A compromise is worked out, and the movie gets a different setting and a new title: "Scott of the Sahara." Then they go and leave in the part where another character in the film fights [[Everything's Better with Penguins|a penguin]] (a [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|20-foot tall electric penguin with tentacles]]).
* The UK version of ''[[Being Human (UK)]]'' has a number of short videos that were released to the internet, one of which is a video record of the night George was attacked. When they hear howling in the distance, the American tourist he's walking with suggests wolves, and is contemptuously shot down -- "you don't get ''wolves'' up here."
=== Music ===
* Parodied in the Tragically Hip song "Gus: The Polar Bear from Central Park".
* Parodied in the song "Tarzan and Jane" by the Danish band Toy-Box, which opens with a chorus of "jungle" sounds, including various birds singing, large cats growling, monkeys calling, ''sheep bleating'', and elephants trumpeting.
* Referenced in "That's Right", which has been performed by billy Lee Riley and [[The Goon Show|Ray Ellington]]:
{{quote|
=== Newspaper Comics ===
▲* The comic strip ''[[Sherman's
=== Video Games ===
* ''[[Endless Ocean]]''
** Mostly averted in the first game by having the "ocean" in question be the fictional Manoa Lai sea. Still, one would wonder what polar bears, orcas, belugas, walruses, etc. are doing in a tropical climate...
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** The sequel otherwise averts this trope by having species be in their proper environments in appropriate areas around the world. On the rare occasion of genuine misplaced wildlife, the characters will wonder, "How'd that get there?" aloud, often offering up a (usually fairly plausible) theory. One sub-quest even has you rescuing some marine fish that have managed to wander into a freshwater area and made themselves very sick in the process.
* The 3rd ''Hugo'' [[Adventure Game]] has an ''elephant'' in the ''Amazon''. When you go "Look Elephant", the flavor text sheepishly admits that elephants don't live in South America and [[Handwaved|explains it by it escaping from a circus]] and more or less admits it's just there to be a puzzle. Next question: Why is there a big circus in the middle of the Amazon Jungle? In the same ''Hugo'' game, the natives are eating "roast hyena". Hyenas are native to Africa and Asia, not South America.
* In ''[[The Magic School Bus]] Explores the World of Animals'', you have to identify
* The ''[[Monkey Island]]'' games take everything that would make a realistic setting and gleefully throw it out the window, as can be expected from a series that places [[Anachronism Stew|vending machines]] in [[Welcome to The Caribbean Luv|17th century Caribbean]]. It comes with plenty of [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshading]].
{{quote|
'''Guybrush:''' Chimps? There aren't any chimps in the Caribbean!
'''Stan:''' Oh, shut up. It makes a good story. }}
* In ''Flight of the Amazon Queen'' you encounter a gorilla styled ghost blocking your way; you can [[Puff of Logic|get rid of it]] by pointing out that gorillas only live in Africa, not in South America. The same happens when the "gorilla" has half on and half off a pink and purple polka-dot suit with which the ghost claims to be a vicious dinosaur.
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=== Web Comics ===
* ''[[The Order of the Stick]]''
** A variant in one strip where two displacer beasts (monsters who tend towards dungeons) end up wandering the plains in search of food; one of them points out it's not even their natural habitat, so they're at a disadvantage. When they see the party approach, they realize that [[Genre Savvy|they're just supposed to be another random encounter]] and hide until they've passed.
** Better done [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0564.html there], providing the page quote.
* ''[[Memoria (2010 webcomic)|Memoria]]'': [http://memoria.valice.net/?p=297 Rhinos as farm animals.]
=== Western Animation ===
* Subverted in a ''[[Jana of the Jungle]]'' episode where a captive elephant breaks loose and is rampaging through the South American rain forest. Here, the elephant is explicitly shown ''not'' to be native to the region, forcing Jana to explain to the frightened natives that it is a simply a large animal before she sets out to find it and prevent it from causing irreparable damage or being killed by the natives.
* Parodied in a ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' season 12 deleted scene: Homer collapses during a marathon in Springfield, USA, and is dragged off by hyenas.
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=== Real Life ===
* Time to spoil the ending of every single "brain teaser" set in Australia, ever. There are no bears or wolves or whatever other misplaced animal the story featured heavily in Australia (well, there are dingoes...). The guy telling the story is a blowhard.
* Thanks to the oil-spill disaster, word is now out that oil companies (not just BP) drilling in the Gulf of Mexico merely duplicated their recovery plans for spillages occurring in Alaska. This includes guidelines about how to assist walruses and polar bears endangered by a spill.
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{{reflist}}
{{related|Diurnal Nocturnal Animal}}
{{related|Misplaced Vegetation}}
{{related|Noisy Nature}}
{{related|Polar Bears and Penguins.}}
{{related|Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying}}
{{related|Somewhere an Ornithologist Is Crying}}
[[Category:Did Not Do the Research]]
[[Category:Settings]]
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