Misplaced Wildlife

"I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque."

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.
Belkar: I once fought 1d3 dire camels in a swamp. No joke.

— The Order of the Stick, strip #564

This trope is the bane of naturalists everywhere, just as Anachronism Stew is the bane of historians. It can manifest several different ways.

Generally, filmmakers use whichever animals they can get for a scene involving wild animals, especially in films set in Darkest Africa or The Amazon Rainforest. Whether the animals are in the right environment, on the right continent or displaying appropriate behaviour is something they just hope we won't ask about. Other times, cultural assumptions can lead to animals being placed in the wrong environments even when technical limitations aren't a strict factor.

This can qualify as a full-fledged 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. Likewise, for any depiction of saltwater-dependent organisms such as octopuses or great white sharks living and menacing victims in fresh water.

Particularly common examples include:

Asian elephants in scenes set in Darkest Africa, since African elephants are notoriously difficult to train, and the only trained elephants available thus tend to be Asian.
Monkeys. 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 macaques, baboons, and the colobus) or vestigial (some macaques, the drill, and the mandrill) tails, so any film in Africa or Asia featuring a cute little monkey hanging by its tail will annoy a naturalist like a Shakespearean costume at King Arthur's court annoys an English historian.
Lions are grassland-, desert- and woodland-dwelling animals, but older literature often places them in the depths of the African rainforest. Tigers may sometimes be found in Africa as well, despite being native to Asia. These cases have become rather rare in modern works, however, and are rarely used in a non-parodic manner anymore.
Supposedly scary things like snakes, lizards, scorpions, 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—in which case it overlaps with Terrifying Pet Store Rat.
Probably the most common soundtrack example of misplaced wildlife is the use of the famous "ribbit" call of the Pacific tree frog. Native to the west coast of the US, this frog's call is completely out of place in films set just about anywhere else in the US and indeed the world (no other frog makes the "ribbit" call).
Another frequent example with a frog is hearing the famous call of the coqui (native to Puerto Rico) in jungle scenes set in Vietnam. Many Vietnam War films were filmed in Puerto Rican jungles where the coqui calls are ubiquitous. No southeast Asian frog sounds anything like that.

Misidentified wildlife is another feature of this trope. This tends to happen to birds a lot. Some movies show a bird making 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. (In extreme cases, such as using a red-tailed hawk's scream to represent an "eagle," this has crossed over into The Coconut Effect.)

One reason for misidentified wildlife is laws against the use of wild-caught native species for profit/sale in the United States. Thus, filmmakers often substitute similar-looking or closely related species from the exotic animal trade. For instance African augur buzzards are often stand-ins for native red-tailed hawks in the US, while Eurasian eagle owls are used in place of our native great horned owls.

Occasionally, a movie or TV show will attempt to justify Misplaced Wildlife by identifying an animal onscreen, such as that White-throated Sparrow, as something ''completely'' different — even if it's a species that looks nothing like the creature onscreen.

Also, sometimes background sound effects contain sounds of animals not native to the setting of the film/TV show. Perhaps the most notorious example is Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras, the use of the distinctive "laugh" of the Australian kookaburra in jungle scenes set in Africa, or anywhere else other than Australia, usually used for the sound of any monkey. 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.

This trope is a little more ambiguous in constructed worlds, especially in fantasy, where strictly speaking no single area is within or outside of the species' real-life range. A form of this trope can still occur, however, when animals are placed in biomes where they do not actually live; thus, for example, it's not really any more inaccurate to place bald eagles in a generic fantasyland than golden ones, since it's not actually either North America or Europe, but it is still this trope if either is shown as living in the jungle.

Naturally, this trope occurs much less often when the filming actually takes place in the area where the story is set. Though it can still happen even then, if non-native species are now commonplace to the area, but the story is set in a time period before those species were introduced. Also, this trope generally applies only to normal animals. Funny Animals can be easily called as immigrants of some sort if found out of their element (especially if they're able to build vehicles). A few cases might be explained by Creator Provincialism, as the creators incorporate the animals they're most familiar with.

Note that this trope can also occur with plant life. In fact, it occurs often enough that Misplaced Vegetation is its own Sister Trope.

Examples

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Advertising

Averted in the Coke commercials with the polar bear family for almost a decade, until a 2006 commercial. Possibly justified in that the penguins are on vacation, as they float in on patches of ice.
Lay's once sold a line of potato clips called Crunch Tators featuring an alligator mascot who lives in a ''desert'' and dresses like a cowboy. Apparently gator rhyming with tator was the main reasoning and the presence of barbecue flavors played a role but it's curious that a swamp wasn't selected as the backdrop.
In 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.
There's a Hyundai commercial with a car driving past a lot of wild animals that are impressed by its look. Most of them are common North American forest species, but there's also prairie dogs (which don't belong in the woods), plus lemurs and an emu (which don't even belong on the same continent as the rest, or each other).
GEICO:
- One commercial shows African penguins living in the South Pole. As their name suggests, African penguins are only found along the southern African coast and wouldn't be able to survive the extreme environment of the Antarctic. African penguins are a common captive species, so they were most likely the easiest to book for a commercial shoot.
- Another ad shows some children playing the game "Marco Polo" in a backyard pool with the historical Marco Polo. A llama stands by the pool watching the game for some reason... presumably (since it's wearing a pack) because the commercial's writers didn't know that they're from the wrong continent for Polo to have ever used one on his travels.
- Another ad shows a pair of cartoon turtles get menaced by a white-backed vulture, which is an African species. Due to laws regarding native birds of prey, it's likely that it was simply easier to get than a turkey vulture.
Justified for the joke in an ad video of the Austrian tourism ministry as a Take That! against the stupid tourists who can't distinguish them from Australia. (Cue unexpected kangaroo.)

Anime & Manga

In Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors, the little island where the Japanese build their base contains elephants, rhinos, kangaroos, and crocodiles, none of which are found in the islands of the southwest Pacific. In fact, animals that large aren't found on small islands, period.
More of a translation problem, but nearly every animal in an anime referred to as a raccoon is in reality a raccoon dog (or tanuki), a completely unrelated animal. Raccoons are native to the Americas. Some, depending on the date, 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.
Robin Hood (1990) is set in 13th Century England and portrays raccoons as part of the forest wildlife. Raccoons are in fact native to North America and have no presence in Britain.
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: 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 Haré+Guu contains oddly drawn bears. The manga even says in a small box "Note: there are no bears in the jungle." Said jungle also seems to have pokute as its primary form of wildlife, so...
Doraemon Film Series
- Minor example in the manga of Doraemon: Nobita and the Haunts of Evil, but one panel shows a Hoatzin in Darkest Africa.
- Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan have the gang encountering a woolly rhinoceros and a sarcosuchus crocodile in Cretaceous-era Japan, neither animals being a native Japanese species (The 2016 fixes the issue by replacing them with a steppe bison and a giant salamander). In all versions the Big Bad Gigazombie also has a hungry Smilodon (native to America instead of Japan) in his lair for his captives to be Fed to the Beast, though it's justified that Gigazombie probably captured it from elsewhere.
Part of Goku and Krillen's training in Dragon Ball involves swimming ten laps between the shore of a lake that for some reason has a shark in it.
A dub induced example in Key the Metal Idol. The English version of Key's Lullaby mentions nighthawks and wolves. Nighthawks are only found in the Americas and wolves have been extinct in Japan since 1905.
The "Best Wishes" arc of Pokémon the Series 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 had 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. Corrected in the Gen V sequel games as being the result of computer malfunctions releasing non-native mons into the region. Krabby, Onix and Magnemite are seen during one of the Dawn visit episodes, which makes this an in-universe example.
Kimba the White Lion has the title character living in a jungle while real lions live in savannas. Justified when Kimba's odd home is made into a plot point involving the 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.
One Stormy Night features bison, cougars, grizzly bears, prairie dogs, skunks, raccoons, wild boars, raccoon dogs, and baboons living in a forest with several goats and wolves.
Squid Girl had a king cobra on a mountain in Japan.
Doraemon: Nobita and the Haunts of Evil have a hoatzin native to the Amazon showing up in the African jungles.
Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan has a woolly rhinoceros and a crocodile in Quaternary Japan. This gets fixed in the 2016 remake, where they are appropriately replaced by a steppe bison and a giant salamander respectively.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind has black-tailed gulls living on the coast of Italy. This particular species of gull is only found off the coast of east Asia.
Kemono Friends: Japari Park makes no attempt to separate its animals and Friends by their original location, only by biome. Even then there's a lot of Friends in weird places, though that could be the result of them moving around unsupervised.
Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia does this deliberately. One scene in a travelling montage shows a colony of leaf-cutter ants, despite the story taking place in Mesopotamia while leaf-cutters are native to South America. But it's justified: Queztalcoatl has taken over part of Mesopotamia and her influence has reshaped part of the landscape into a South American jungle, so the leaf-cutters' presence is in fact Foreshadowing.
Dr. STONE has American Alligators on the west coast of the USA—specifically in the Sacramento River—when their natural range is solely the south-east and Gulf coasts.

Asian Animation

ViR: The Robot Boy: Deliberately invoked in the episode "Himalayan Penguins", where Gintu tries to convince the others that there are penguins in the Himalayas despite their repeated assurances otherwise. Gintu transforms himself into a penguin as part of his attempt to convince them.

Comic Books

Asterix and the Griffin: Styracosaurus was a North-American dinosaur and wouldn't have lived in what is now Ukraine.
All over the place in Aquaman's history. If it lives underwater, it can be found in close proximity to Aquaman regardless of whether it's saltwater or freshwater. A recurring example is electric eels appearing in ocean settings when the most-recognized of the species lives in freshwater.
The origin of the first Black Condor (in an issue of Crack Comics) has his parents being killed while they were in Mongolia and himself being raised by condors... which live nowhere near Mongolia.
Inverted in Alpha Flight. Snowbird can turn into an all-white version of any animal, but was originally limited to those native to Canada. When she fights a villain who creates a blinding snowstorm, she thinks about how she needs the echolocation abilities of a bat, but can't turn into one because she claims there are none in Canada. In real life, Canada is home to at least 18 native bat species, with 3 in the northern territories. Sidenote, a bat's echolocation would be utterly useless in a snowstorm.
During Kurt Busiek's run on 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.
Lampshaded in The Incredible Hulk #250 when Silver Surfer visited the North Pole and encountered large groups of penguins. To avert a storm of No-Prizes, the editor wrote in the bottom of the panel that he knew penguins lived on the opposite side of the world but the artist drew them so cute that he left them in.
Mary Marvel (1945): In issue #23, Mary and her mother go on a safari in Africa, and run into alligators...which only live in North America and China.
Monica's Gang has the Lionel's Kingdom subseries, which features a fox, a lion, an elephant, a porcupine, a large family of rabbits, a turtle, some monkeys and an ant living together in a forest... which seems to be located near the Brazilian state of São Paulo (and the suburban area of it to boot). This has been Lampshaded multiple times through the comic's run.
In Prez, the Native American Noble Savage Eagle Free is seen communing with a group of forest creatures that includes a monkey, an elephant and a gorilla.
Like many Jungle Opera comics of the period, the writer of Rulah, Jungle Goddess suffered under the misapprehension that tigers live in the jungles of Africa.
In Supergirl storyline "The Super-Steed of Steel", Kara runs into an alligator in the middle of a tropical island. Alligators are freshwater animals native to only USA and China, and they are cannot survive in saltwater, so how it got there is anyone's guess.
In the 2019 Xena Warrior Princess mini-series, Xena, Gabrielle and Discord end up in a Central American jungle with Pre-Colombian societies and gods and a capybara accompanies the trio, even when they are teleported to a Russian taiga, the Romanian forests and Greece. Turns out, the capybara is a Nature Spirit, which explains how it managed to survive different weather conditions.

Comic Strips

The May 24, 1986 Calvin and Hobbes strip has Calvin imagining himself as a crocodile in the Amazon. Okay, but he then imagines his dad as a hippopotamus... which are native to Africa. This is coming from Calvin, who once seriously believed that bats were bugs.
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!"
Readers of The Comics Curmudgeon study the Mark Trail strip to pin down the location of his 'Lost Forest' homebase by the species of wildlife present — it's a geographical uncertainty like Springfield in The Simpsons.
Justified Trope in 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.

Fan Works

In Aquaman: Monster, this is invoked in one instance with the white-spotted pufferfish, who don't live in the region where the story takes place in real life, but were added for thematic and symbolic reasons with their elaborate nest-building.
Calvin and Hobbes Get XTREME! has yaks on a North American mountain.
The Final Sword: Rebora gets a cool pet accessory in the form of a fallen tree bitten down by beavers for the squirrel^note to climb around on. There are no beavers in Japan.
Marooned in Madagascar:
- As mentioned in the Anachronistic Animal, the Malagasy crowned eagles had gone extinct in the 16th century, implying the ones here are the mainland species. Then again, given how it’s suggested humans never settled on Madagascar in-universe, it would make sense that the Malagasy crowned eagle simply never went extinct in this universe.
- The keeper of Orphanage of Fear in The Odd Family is a pangolin, which are only native to mainland Africa and Asia. Golden moles, also found in mainland Africa, appear in the fic as well, plus a Nile monitor that Mort sics on Kowalski and Private. ^note
- The Odd Family actually addresses and explains the toucan in the Old World. When Xixi tries to interview Keke and the penguins, Keke (who hails from Central America) laughs at the notion that Xixi is a toucan, while Kowalski instantly identifies her as a hornbill. Apparently Xixi has been lying about her species this whole time for an unknown reason and King Julien and the rest of the Madagascar locals were simply too ignorant to realize it.
The Discworld fic Nature Studies deals with some seriously misplaced wildlife. CMOT Dibbler's brainwave — to establish a safari park near Ankh-Morpork — goes seriously wrong when the imported animals escape and colonise Hide Park. An Urban Safari ensues to round them up, led by an Action Girl who, unlike Dibbler, knows all about Howondalandian fauna.
Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has an In-Universe example: it's a bit of a Running Gag that Professor Oak expresses his astonishment whenever Ash, who has yet to leave his home region, somehow manages to catch Pokémon that shouldn't be anywhere near Kanto (such as Goomy and a bunch of Vivillon, who are native to Kalos). There's always a good explanation for said examples, though Oak feels the need to avoid asking questions.
Welcome to Prehistoric Kingdom: While the story tries to maintain a focus on accuracy over spectacle, the first chapter indulges in this trope by necessity - as the majority of the dinosaurs in the focus area of that chapter (the La Colonia Formation in Argentina) were unnamed except for Carnotaurs, so all of the dinosaurs featured are pulled from various other South American formations of similar age, with one, Stegouros, also doubling as an Anachronistic Animal because it isn't known from the very end of the Cretaceous. Chapter 5, "The Care and Feeding of Giants", slightly downplays this trope by revealing that some of the dinosaurs rescued don't match any described at the time, with Word of God confirming that they're Koleken and Titanomachya, both animals that were from the La Colonia Formation but weren't described until after the first chapter was published.

Films — Animation

The 3 Little Pigs: The Movie: Some of the unidentifiable predators at the inn aside, some of the animals there are out of place for what seems to be a forest in the French countryside. Two vultures perch outside the inn hoping for scraps, and one of the guests appears to be a blue tiger. Possibly an Invoked Trope, as at least one of the flyers advertising the Dinner Theatre at the inn were delivered via Flying Postman, and it’s not made clear just how far the marketing campaign went.
Back to the Outback has a downplayed example; Pretty Boy notes that they are not in Tasmania when they encounter Tasmanian devils (a species that in the past could be found throughout Australia, but now are only found on the island state), prompting their leader, Dave, to explain that they were passing through the area on holiday.
Walking with Dinosaurs 3D: Alex's modern day incarnation is a rook, a corvid that isn't found in Alaska.
The Jungle Book (Disney):
- In Walt Disney's version (set in India), the Bandar-log (probably meant to be macaques or langurs) have prehensile tails and flexible limbs like New World monkeys, but otherwise look mostly correct, with the glaring exception of Louie the orangutan (native to Indonesia). In the case of the latter, one reviewer hypothesizes that Louie probably was originally a maharajah's pet who escaped into the wild, which might also explain his familiarity with humans and his desire to be like them.
- 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 acknowledged that Louie was out of place. But since Fables are influenced by people's beliefs about them, it's not impossible that Louie exists simply because more people have seen the Disney movie than read Kipling's books, and Word of God is that he simply didn't do the research.
- The Jungle Book 2 has ocelots make a small appearance during a song. Ocelots live in South America. Same goes to the hippos and a Thompson’s gazelle considering how they live in Africa as well as what appear to be black sifaka lemurs which live naturally only on Madagascar.
- In the animated spin-off Jungle Cubs, aside from Louie there's baboons (there's some evil ones during season 1), babirusa and many other critters.
Disney's Aladdin:
- The setting is Arabia, but Aladdin's monkey sidekick, Abu, has a prehensile tail, which makes him a New World monkey. 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.
- Iago the parrot seems to be a red lory, native to Indonesia. This could be explained by him being an imported pet, but the TV series takes this further when during a jaunt to the Amazon, Iago mentions he left the area a while back (implying he is a very small version of a Scarlet Macaw).
- Surprisingly, Rajah the tiger is not an example, since there actually were tigers ^note in the Middle East during the time the movie takes place. Neither are the elephants who appear in various background shots— the range of Asian elephants also extended into the Middle East once.
- "Prince Ali" has "llamas galore" among Aladdin's entourage, but this is justified because A Genie Did It.
Despite including a parody of this trope (listed below), Disney's Tarzan and its spin-offs sometimes suffer from this trope:
- The original movie briefly features lemurs (native only to Madagascar) and a green tree python (native only to Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia) 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.
- The Licensed Game on the other hand, exaggerates this. Most of the enemies Tarzan has to avoid are misplaced, from South American toucans, macaws and squirrel monkeys to piranhas (yes, the game plays this example straight after the movie it's based on parodies it). The ring-tailed lemurs return from the movie, as do the vicious baboons; they're some of the only African enemies encountered.
- Tarzan II features savanna-dwelling species such as giraffes, wildebeests, and gazelles in the jungle.
- The Legend of Tarzan had blue-and-yellow macaws and bald eagles (or perhaps the very similar-looking African fish eagle, which still doesn't live in jungles) in Africa, as well as the ring-tailed lemurs from the movie. There's also savannah animals like the aforementioned giraffes, zebras, spotted hyenas, and briefly what looked like a lioness (even after the original movie averted this) living in the jungle.
While The Lion King (1994) and most of its sequels and spin-offs mostly avoid this trope, they're not immune to the odd slip-up:
- The "Circle of Life" musical number briefly features a line of leaf-cutting ants, native to South America.
- "I Just Can't Wait to be King" features what appear to be spider monkeys and anteaters (which are both South American fauna as well), though since it's the film's Disney Acid Sequence, it's debatable how much it counts. Still, they could have easily used either aardvarks or pangolins in place of the anteaters.
- The Lion King II: Simba's Pride briefly features an okapi. While okapi are an African species, they live in the rainforest rather than the savanna, which is where the movie proper takes place.
- The Lion King 1 ½ also has Timon mentioning snapping turtles, a North American species.
- If you really want to split hairs, meerkats (Timon's species) live only in Southern Africa in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, while mandrills (Rafiki's species) are restricted to an area of western Central Africa comprising Equatorial Guinea and parts of Cameroon, Gabon and Congo. The movie clearly takes place in Tanzania, as evidenced by the Kilimanjaro's appearance.
- The trope ends up being Played for Laughs in the Look-And-Find book, which features a kangaroo, a red fox ^note, a penguin ^note, a horned owl, a striped skunk, and a giant panda bear in the wilds of Africa as some of the findable objects.
Bambi, set in Northeastern America, came very close too — until the California Quails show up. Bambi himself was originally a Roe Deer and the story took place in a German forest. But the setting was changed and he was made a White-tailed Deer to be more familiar to the American audience.
The Quails also appear (to cluck with disapproval at the Dwarves' dirty floor) in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which also featured raccoons, both native to North America) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), both of which are implied to take place in Europe.
Pocahontas has the quails (once again) and a moose. It is true that some animals ranged farther into the eastern parts of North America in pre-colonial times, but still. It leads one to think that the filmmakers have never even been to Virginia, given the spectacular Artistic License – Geography of the landscape. ^note Elk would have been more accurate if they were looking for something larger than a white-tail in Colonial times.
For another bird in the wrong region, Rio 2 has the Spix macaw, native of the Caatinga (Brazilian Northeast) in The Amazon Rainforest (Brazilian North) — and a huge flock, even if the bird is extinct in the wild.
Orville from The Rescuers is an albatross who gives Bernard and Bianca a ride from New York to Devil's Bayou. However, albatrosses are strictly southern-hemisphere and Pacific birds; what one is doing in New York is anyone's guess.
Dinosaur:
- The film had 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 Misplaced Wildlife and Anachronism Stew simultaneously. The opening scene also featured a Koolasuchus, which was a giant amphibian that only thrived in polar regions (the South Pole, to be precise, on the exact opposite part of the planet). Even taking tectonic shift into account, those didn't belong there.
- The film at least tries to justify the Baylene and the carnotaurs by saying that the former is the last of her kind and that the latter are never found as far north as the apparent setting of the film, saying that they must have been driven out by the meteor.
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 carp, newts and trout living in saltwater habitats and a coral reef that would be more appropriate off the coast of Australia than in the chilly Atlantic Ocean. ^note The sequel also features a walrus living in what appears to be Antarctica. The Screen-to-Stage Adaptation makes Flotsam and Jetsam electric eels, which are a freshwater species native to the Amazon and Orinoco basins, and are not true eels but knifefish. Electric eels are also featured in the prequel.
Beauty and the Beast is set in France, but there are North American wildlife as trophies in Gaston's house. Gaston is exactly the sort of person who would travel to another country for a hunting trip.
Tangled featured a chameleon character living in what appears to be a medieval Northern European kingdom. There are chameleons in southern Europe, but it's unlikely they'd get up that far.
Robin Hood takes place in Medieval England, but features North American raccoons, as well as African and Asian species such as lions, elephants, hippos, and rhinos, and an unidentifiable constrictor snake that seems out of place. (The animals were cast based on the characters' personalities—King Richard the Lionheart is a lion; cunning Robin Hood is a fox, etc.) It is set in a world of sapient animals, so it's not unreasonable to assume all these creatures immigrated from their ancestral homelands over time, but raccoons migrating from North America is implausible, especially considering that the movie is set at a time when European explorers had not yet reached the New World.
Mulan stuck to Chinese wildlife, but forgot that China is a gigantic country whose wildlife varies a great deal by region. Thus we see a giant panda (native to Sichuan province in the southwest) even though the plot revolves around fighting the Huns, who lived in northern China. That is like including jaguars (which are found in the United States, but in southwestern ones like Arizona) in, say, Maine.
- Mulan II featured skunks (native to North America) pestering the main characters during one of the songs from the film.
The Emperor's New Groove has Bucky, an Eurasian red squirrel living in a South American jungle. It might have been an Andean squirrel, which is a reddish-colored squirrel that lives in the South American mountains, but that only lives in the Colombian Andes, which is just outside the range of the Inca empire.
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. The dinosaurs are at least living in a Lost World, but the genera there are as misplaced in location and time as the other animals in the series.
Golden Films' 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 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 variety — fitting as the film is set in the English countryside. Some believe that because the animals are all portrayed as American, and the humans as English, the film could represent the American Revolution... in which case, is it acceptable for a few of the animals to be American species, if a theme of the film is all about said animals/culture fighting for their own identity?
Kung Fu Panda
- Kung Fu Panda has an elderly Galapagos tortoise living in ancient China as one of the film's main characters, It's justified, as his backstory has him being born in the Galapagos Islands and eventually traveling to China.
- The sequel features evil gorillas (native to Africa).
- Kung Fu Panda 4 has features the Chameleon as the Big Bad in China; while there are a handful of chameleon species found in Southern Asia, none occur east of the Indian Subcontinent.
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.
The 1978 film The Water Babies has a (freshwater) electric eel working for a shark Big Bad under the ocean, and lets its lobster, seahorse, and swordfish characters move freely into rivers, which makes it also biologically impossible and can't be justified like most examples by the animals being sapient alone.
The accents and mammals (Tasmanian devil, echidna) in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole make it pretty clear we're in Australia, but it includes every owl species in the world. And the bats working for the pure ones appear to be vampire bats, which are native to Central and South America.
Leo: A few lizards who are the same species of Leo appear in the Everglades. Assuming they are tuataras, which live exclusively in New Zealand, this trope applies here.
In the animated Christmas Movie Spike there's a village (more like a city) of penguins within driving distance of Santa's workshop.
Pangur Ban, Brother Aiden's pet cat in The Secret of Kells, is recognizably a Turkish Angora — telltale signs are the pure white coat, bushy tail, and mismatched eyes — a breed that was not introduced to Europe until the Crusades, at least four hundred years after the completion of the Book of Kells.
Disney's version of Peter Pan skirts this trope. There are North American animals such as grizzly bears and African animals such as hippopotamuses, monkeys and rhinoceroses, living on the same continent, and also presumably within a few miles of each other — and in their native habitats, too. They (partly) justify it by implying (during Peter and the kids' flight from London) that Neverland exists in a separate solar system and thus is a different planet (which makes the pirates and the Indians examples of Fantasy Counterpart Culture). At least the crocodile doesn't stick out too badly, since crocodiles are found in the Caribbean, which is the kind of place you'd expect to encounter folks like Captain Hook and his crew. The sequel Return To Never Land also has lions and elephants on Neverland as well.
In Happy Feet Two, Sven the "flying penguin" turns out to be an Atlantic puffin (who can fly, unlike penguins). It's not made clear how a bird that lives in the North Atlantic has ended up that far south.
Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire had bobcats in Australia.
Song of the South: The popular Disney ride, Splash Mountain, which is based on Song of the South and also takes place in the south, features a porcupine at one point of the ride, even though real porcupines live in the west and the northeast.
Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild: The Beast, which audiences assume to be a bear, is revealed to actually be a cougar. But the Stuart Little trilogy takes place in Eastern North America (specifically New York state), where cougars have long been wiped out.
Jungle Boy: African elephants, gorillas, giraffes and aardvark in Indonesia.
Nearly all of Dingo Pictures' animal characters make an appearance in Animal Soccer World, regardless of their natural habitat. Lions, dogs, seals, squirrels and panthers are just a few examples.
Wish takes place in a vaguely Mediterranean/Spanish setting, but the kingdom's woods are abundant with North American animals like grizzly bears and raccoons.

Films — Live-Action

In 300 the Persian war rhino is an African two-horned rhino instead of one of the one-horned Asian species (granted, there is a two-horned rhino in Asia, the Sumatran rhino, but it is a hairy, much smaller creature with two very short, almost flat horns). Also, rhinos never were domesticated nor used in warfare.
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 warthogs, 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. Warthogs 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 had a "prehistoric" appearance.
In 10,000 BC, woolly mammoths were used to build pyramids that resemble the Egyptian ones. Even a layman should be able to figure out giant woolly animals wouldn't live anywhere near a desert, though in all fairness it's quite clear that they were deliberately captured and brought there for use as laborers just like the human slaves, not that they're actually native to the desert. But even accounting for that, they're a remarkably poor choice for the job given that plenty of other, non-woolly mammoths and other elephant relatives existed that would be better able to handle the heat. Then there's the Terror Birds in the jungle, which were probably meant to be (South American) Phorusrhacids. More likely, they were there so that the producers could say they technically had dinosaurs chasing cavemen in their movie.
Airplane! somehow had an actual turkey vulture. On the other hand, the elephant in Stryker's Africa flashback was actually an Asian elephant (since African elephants cannot legally be used for film and television projects).
At the end of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, the Cooper family discovers an array of Australian Wildlife in their backyard, including kangaroos, wallabies, an emu, a cockatoo… and an American alligator. It's possible the alligator was meant to portray a crocodile, which Australia does have, since alligators are easier to obtain for filming purposes.
The trailer for Alpha (2018) shows long-horned bison, native only to North America, and woolly rhinoceroses, native to Europe. Regardless of where the film is supposed to be set, one of them is out of place.
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked features a meerkat (referred by Alvin as a "honey badger") living on a tropical island.
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid took place in Asia (specifically Borneo) — even though most of the animals in the film are native to South America, particularly the title serpent itself (to say nothing of the tiger that appears briefly, since it's native to neither South America nor Borneo). This may be a case of failing geography rather than biology, as they might've belatedly decided to change the film's location. There's also the deadly golden silk orb-weaver seen several times during the film. Impressively, it's not too out of place (Nephila is a very widespread genus, and there are several Asian species). On the other hand, it's not exactly deadly, as the many, many people who live with these things could easily tell you.
The spiders in Arachnophobia are Delena cancerides from New Zealand, 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 venomous). The film is set in the USA, though the spiders supposedly come from South America.
Alien vs. Predator: The film, most of which takes place in Antarctica, features a Cat Scare where a penguin steps out from behind some crates in an abandoned research station. Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact said penguin is an African Penguin. As the name implies, African Penguins are native to the coasts of Southern Africa not Antarctica. The only penguin species native to Antarctica are Emperor Penguins and Adelie Penguins, neither of which appear in this film.
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.
Blood Diamond: While traveling the Sierra Leonan countryside on foot, the main characters see a cheetah, which is not native to Sierra Leone.
The film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia substituted a common brushtail possum for a Virginia opossum in the greenhouse scene. Necessitated because, although it's set in the eastern U.S., the film was produced in New Zealand, which has very strict laws against importing foreign wildlife. Brushtail possums aren't native to New Zealand either, but they have been established there as feral animals for a long time, so they could be filmed without breaking the law.
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. The original short story identified Baby as a "panther" (which could mean either a leopard or a jaguar), but a leopard happened to be available for filming, so the species was changed but they forgot to change her origin in the script (or more likely, didn't realize they had to).
The Pygmy Nuthatch in Charlie's Angels (2000) is a South American Troupial, a relation to the oriole — a much bigger and different coloured bird. Pygmy Nuthatches are not found in one small spot like Cameron Diaz declares either. And the call heard in the movie matches neither bird.
In the original Clash of the Titans, the snake that shows up is a boa constrictor — which lives in the Americas, and thus would not have appeared in Ancient Greece.
In the remake Clash of the Titans, Zeus' totem is a bald eagle, which is native to North America and would certainly not have shown up in ancient Greece.
Jess Franco's Count Dracula (1970) lets us hear a Transylvanian kookaburra (No bird is onscreen; Franco apparently just wanted some dramatic sound and took whatever he could get). Lovingly parodied in The Monster Squad, where the same animals appear in the Transylvania prologue.
None of the eagles in Cry Wilderness are native to North America. The sick one that gets taken to Helen is a harpy eagle, while the one that attacks Morgan appears to be an African fish eagle. The tiger, at least, is explicitly stated to have escaped from a circus.
The Transylvanian armadillos in Dracula (1931). There's also an opossum; Browning probably meant for them to stand in as giant rats, but still
- 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 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 audiences — at least, the ones outside of Texas — would be less likely to know how very inoffensive these animals are, so might (stress might) actually have found them a bit creepy.
- Then there's the bats. 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. Vampire bats are native to Central and South America; they are not, and have never been, found in eastern Europe.
George of the Jungle is supposed to take place in the heart of Africa but Shep is an Asian elephant (much easier to train), George's friend "Little Monkey" is a South American capuchin, and orangutans (from Indonesia) are occasionally spotted hanging around. And then there's the toucan, which is native to South America as well. Then again, the film is essentially a live action cartoon that doesn't take itself seriously at all, so this might well have been deliberate.
The Ghost and the Darkness—which, for context, was set in Kenya and filmed in South Africa—uses the calls of common nighthawks and Swainson's hawks to establish nighttime scenes. Both species are strictly found in the Americas.^note
One of the gags in Girl Shy has Harold Lloyd sitting on a giant tortoise. Giant tortoises are currently found on islands in the south Pacific and Indian Oceans, not southern California.
Godzilla (1998): Godzilla's origin in this continuity is changed so that he's an iguana that was mutated by nuclear testing in French Polynesia. There aren't any iguana species found in French Polynesia; in fact, none of the lizard species (bearded dragons, Komodo dragons, marine iguanas, Chinese water dragons, and green iguanas) shown in the prologue are anywhere near the location.
The Hawaii scene in Godzilla (2014) has loon calls.
In the adaptation of Harry Crews' novel The Hawk is Dying, George (Paul Giamatti) wrangles an African augur buzzard in place of a red-tailed hawk.
Hawk the Slayer: To show the sinister nature of the forest, a reticulated python is shown freezing its scales off in an English forest.
One scene In the Heat of the Night (set in Mississippi) features the call of a California quail (whose name accurately indicates where it is more commonly found).
Indiana Jones:
- Raiders of the Lost Ark:
  - The monkey looks like another Capuchin. At least the monkey was a pet, and not necessarily native.
  - The big, hairy spiders that climb all over Jones and his guide are Mexican red-kneed tarantulas, native to deserts and scrublands, not rainforests.
  - The boa constrictor that falls on Marian, even though constrictors aren't found in the arid regions of Egypt.
  - In the scene with the tomb full of snakes, one reptile that's visible is not only not Egyptian, but not a snake. It's a European glass lizard.
  - Indy is treated to the threat display of a beautiful...monocled cobra. ^note
- 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, and it also qualifies as Rule of Scary (a way of creating an unsettling mood by alluding to the bloodsucking monsters of folklore). In reality, if you see a bat you can in any way describe as large it's probably a "megabat", which are also known as "fruit bats", because that's what they eat.
  - Also, the crocodiles that devour several Mooks, as well as Mola Ram in the climax, are American alligators, not any of the four Indian species, the saltwater crocodiles, mugger crocodiles, gharial or false gharial. Although this could be because alligators are much easier to obtain for filming than Indian crocodiles. (For the record, salties and muggers will happily eat human meat if they can get it.)
  - None of the bugs in the "bug tunnel" scene are actually from India.
- 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; army ants, however, are nomadic and do not build anthills like the ones in the film.
  - The snake that hilariously has to save Indiana from a quicksand pit in one scene, is not actually a rat snake as Mutt names it, because, as Indiana points out, no rat snakes grow that big, but a Papuan python, living only on Papua New Guinea. Not in South America.
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, black rhinos, zebras, and African bush elephants all don't live in the jungle. This carries over to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. You see, kiddies, jaguars, like piranhas, are native to the Americas, not sub-Saharan Africa.
The Jungle Book (1994): King Louie is an orangutan, which are not native to India. Kaa is the worst offender here as he's played by an anaconda (a snake from South America) instead of an Indian or reticulated python. There are also Ring-Tailed Lemurs.
The Jungle Book (2016):
- India covers a wide range of climates, ecosystems, and biogeographic regions. Consequently, you can throw in a whole bunch of animals that are all found in India, yet don't actually meet each other in the wild. The Jungle Book is set in Seeonee (more typically spelt Seoni) in the state of Madhya Pradesh, central India. A number of Indian wildlife depicted in the movie aren't native to this area itself, such as Indian rhinoceros and pygmy hog (both more typical of the grasslands of the northern and northeastern states), as well as a great deal of the various primate species that make up the Bandar-log.
- Among the Bandar-log, the gibbons are presumed to be western hoolock gibbons, the only gibbon species native to India (the eastern hoolock gibbon might also be present in eastern Arunachal Pradesh). However, it is only found in the northeastern part of India, and does not share a range with the lion-tailed macaque, which is native to the southwestern part of India. Same goes for most of the other monkeys — the other macaque species represented appears to be a pig-tailed macaque, likely the northern pig-tailed macaque. There are also golden langurs and Nilgiri langurs. However, the northern pig-tailed macaque and golden langur are also found only in the northeastern states of India, and wouldn't have hung out with the lion-tailed macaques. The Nilgiri langur, like the lion-tailed macaque, is endemic to southwestern India. None of these species are found in the Seoni area. Only the gray langurs fit biogeographically — they're probably meant to be southern plains gray langur, which is the species native to central India. It's really odd that they chose a number of more exotic-looking monkey species that while Indian, don't occur in this area at all, while omitting the rhesus macaque, which is found in central India.
- The wolves themselves look quite out of place — they have the fur coats of wolves from more temperate climates. Indian wolves are much leaner and look quite different from the European and North American wolves moviegoers are more familiar with.
- The flying squirrel species shown is a red and white giant flying squirrel, which is found in China, not India. There are various flying squirrel species in India, but they aren't as distinctively marked as this species.
- The jerboas, which show up at several points in the movie, must be quite lost; not only are they not found in India, they aren't even jungle inhabitants: they're found only in desert environments, and while some species are found in the arid parts of western Pakistan, that's the closest they ever get to Seoni.
- The frog seen hopping on the ground after the rains return does not look like any known species of frog from India. Instead, it appears to be an European tree frog.
- Among the sounds made by the Bandar-log include the calls of siamang, a gibbon species found in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, not in India, as well as chimpanzees (a species restricted to Africa).
- A red-tailed hawk (a predominantly North American species) is heard calling while Baloo and Bagheera are climbing the cliff in pursuit of the Bandar-log.
- The film is listed under aversions for turning King Louie, originally an orangutan, into a Gigantopithecus, for the explicit reason that orangutans don't live in India... which is just this trope on a temporal level instead of a geographical one. Gigantopithecus lived in India, but has been extinct for 100,000 years or more. Our human protagonist would be far more likely to encounter an orangutan. That being said, a 12-foot-tall King Louie makes for an awesomely-staged scene, so Rule of Cool applies. It would have made more sense if Louie was still an orangutan, but was in India because he was an escapee from captivity.
- Even more egregiously, Baloo is, by all appearances, a grizzly bear. In India. Sloth bears, the literary character's species, simply don't have the good looks or badassery ^note to lead a gritty reboot, although Bagheera and Word of God still identify Baloo as a sloth bear, regardless of how un-sloth bear-like he is in the movie. The Himalayan subspecies of brown bear is found in India, but only in the northwestern Kashmir region, still a long, long way from Madhya Pradesh.
- During the credits, silhouettes of monkeys with prehensile tails and hummingbirds (both of which are restricted to the Americas) are shown.
Jungle Cruise: Invoked in Frank's cheesy tourist-trap Amazon cruise. Among all the other dangers like waterfalls and hostile natives (actually Frank's friends helping the show), there's a (wooden model of a) hippopotamus. One girl tries to point out that hippos aren't found in South America, but Frank shushes her.
Jurassic Park:
- Jurassic Park (1993): A willow ptarmigan can be heard at the Dominican Amber Mine. The ptarmigan is native to cold tundra regions and not tropical islands.
- Jurassic World Dominion: The prologue scene (cut in the theatrical version, but included in the extended edition), set at the end of the Late Cretaceous, shows many animals together which did not coexist in real life due to vast distances of both location and time.
  - The centrepiece of the scene is a Tyrannosaurus fighting a Giganotosaurus that is meant to set up an ancient rivalry between the two apex predators. However, Tyrannosaurus is only known from North America while Giganotosaurus is only known from South America, and the two landmasses were separated by the ocean during the Cretaceous (and Gigantosaurus had been extinct for nearly thirty million years by the time T. rex appeared).
  - Other animals which appear include Oviraptor (only known from Mongolia), Iguanodon (only known from Europe), and Dreadnoughtus (only known from South America). Moros, Pteranodon, Quetzalcoatlus, Ankylosaurus, Nasutoceratops were all at least from North America, but only Quetzalcoatlus, Tyrannosaurus, and Ankylosaurus actually lived together at the very end of the Late Cretaceous.
King Kong (2005) has large theropod dinosaurs that supposedly descended directly from Tyrannosaurus rex. The problem is that T. rex was a native of North America and would have never been anywhere near the Pacific island this film takes place on, even taking continental drift into account. The same applies to every other single dinosaur, and most of the wildlife in general, on the island, which are clearly supposed to be descendants of North American species.
King Kong Lives: macaws on Borneo in the ending scene.
Handwaved in Komodo. The film takes place on an island off the coast of South Carolina, while Komodo dragons live in Indonesia. A bunch of Komodo eggs were left on the island by someone back in the 70s, causing the Komodos to show up there. It still doesn't explain how they could survive that long in a radically different climate.^note
Lake Placid:
- Discussed; the characters openly debate what a giant saltwater crocodile is doing in a lake in Maine. The crocodile expert posits that, miraculously, it swam across two separate oceans. Mrs. Bickerman states that it just showed up one day and hasn't left since.
- Unless it was the biggest black bear on record, the bear didn't belong in the region either.
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.
Liane, Jungle Goddess: When Thoren is photographing African wild life, he is seen making a video of a toco toucan. They only exist in South America.
The vultures seen briefly in The Lone Ranger are African Griffin Vultures, not Turkey Vultures as would be more appropriate for the setting.
Possibly occurs in Long Weekend. The movie is implied to be taking place on the Victorian coast (Marcia's desire to visit Eildon makes it unlikely to be anywhere else), but one of the animals seen in is a Tasmanian devil, which are not found on the Australian mainland. However, this may not be an error as Lunda Beach is implied to be not a normal location.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action had both the classic kookaburra calls and an Asian elephant in the African jungle.
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^note. Ironic, given that the American version was named after the British robin redbreast in the first place. Bonus points for showing two MALE Robins building a nest outside the window.
Mean Girls: During Cady's party, Aaron sees a picture of Cady back in Africa riding an Asian elephant.
The Mighty Peking Man features a Malayan tiger as one of the many animals living in the Himalayas.
In Mistress of the Apes, the 'crocodile' in the river in Africa is fairly obviously an alligator.
The "venomous snakes" in the temple in 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 Misplaced Wildlife. Probably intentional, given writer/director Stephen Sommers' love for 1930s films in all their absurdity. In the same movie, there's Meela's "Egyptian asp." It's a Mexican black kingsnake...which bears a fair resemblence to the lethally venomous Middle Eastern desert cobra or desert black snake.
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 this — the little guy and two other monkeys are labeled in the movie as a Capuchin.) Another one of its denizens is only half right. The ostrich isn't a mammal, but it is at least native to Africa. The ostrich may actually be Fridge Brilliance, since many museum displays show not only the animal but its prey, and the ostrich is prey to several African mammals. A python is also briefly seen (a reptile rather than a mammal), and although pythons are native to Africa, the one in the film seems to resemble an albino Burmese python (native to Asia).
In Outbreak, we see a herd of South American black-capped capuchins running away from a burning rainforest in Africa.
The 1943 The Phantom film serial is set in such a stock Hollywood jungle that they never bother to specify which continent it's on. It doesn't matter: the variety of jungle animals the Phantom encounters is such that wherever it is there's at least one animal that doesn't belong.
In Predator, white-cheeked gibbons can be heard in the Guataemalan jungle. Gibbons are not native to the Americas and are only found in Asia.
In The Revenant, wild boar are seen scavenging at an abandoned campsite. Wild boar are native to Europe and Asia, and while they have since been introduced to parts of North America (and feral pigs are now widely distributed in the southern US), they would not have been present in Montana or the Dakotas in the 1800s.
Rare case of Old World monkeys in the New World: In The Rundown the characters are twice sexually pestered by baboons in South America.
Splash. Madison is supposed to be swimming around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The problem is that she swims past coral reefs, and there are no coral reefs near Cape Cod since the water is too cold. Those scenes were actually filmed in The Bahamas.
No actual wildlife is seen in The Suckers (which, in itself, is odd for a movie about hunting), but George tells a story about Vandemeer lassoing a orangutan in Rhodesia, and Jeff claims to have hunted snow leopards in the Andes. Unless these animals escaped from zoos, they have no business being on those continents.
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) had Asian elephants disguised as African by attaching cardboard tusks and ears to them. However, they got rid of the disguise in the sequels, giving off the impression of this trope. This was probably done because African elephants are notoriously difficult to train.
In Swiss Family Robinson, the characters are shipwrecked on a tropical island that's home an amazing variety of animals. The Disney film was a little better about the animal mix-and-match than the book, but still had an Asian elephant calf (no parents ever seen), a Bengal tiger, African hyenas and zebras and cheetahs, South American spider monkeys, and the older brothers wrestle an anaconda (also a South American native). They discuss that maybe a land bridge was involved; due to 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 (and water channels) were often invoked to explain similar fossils found oceans or continents apart.
Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen features tigers in what looks to be Africa.
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 generally don't hunt large prey.
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. Perhaps they intended it to be a related camel, which would have been plausible (if unlikely) for the time period and place, since presumably one could have wound up there via Arab traders. The same crowd scene has a cage filled with budgerigars (commonly called parakeets in the US). These are small Australian parrots that weren't exported elsewhere until the 19th Century.
In The Witches (1990), there's a scene where a witch tries to lure Luke down from his treehouse with a snake she specifically says she found outside on the path. She's obviously lying, even more obviously if you know that it's a corn snake, a North American species that wouldn't be randomly slithering around in the UK.
Wonder Woman (2017): In the opening scene, child-Diana runs past an armadillo (native to the Americas) on Themiscyra, which is a Mediterranean island.
In Adam Sandler's 2008 comedy, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Zohan and his arch-nemesis Phantom are seen on the Palestine beach competing about which one is the tougher, letting themselves get bitten by a piranha to prove their point. It's presence is a two-fold mistake, because a) piranhas are found in South America, and b) they are fresh water fish. (This is for pure humour, but the writers could have picked a crab or anything more appropriate for the setting.

Literature

Classic Singapore Horror Stories have one of the stories set in the Indonesian jungles, which is infested with baboons - animals native to Africa in real life.
Constance Verity Saves the World:
- Tia lampshades how weird it is that they had a tiger (an animal native to Asia) encounter in Africa during their temple adventure.
- Connie had almost lost her virginity to Larry Peril in the wild jungles of Australia if a bunch of wild gorillas hadn't interrupted them, the reason why there were gorillas in Australia being a mystery she's yet to solve.
Averted in Masques: The shapeshifter Aralorn works as spy, and as misplaced wildlife would be highly suspicious in a world where people know that shapeshifters exist, she knows a lot of mouse subspecies, and where they live, so that she can use just the right one.
The Hound (1924): As the narrator is digging for the Dutchman a second time, he is joined by a vulture that starts pecking the gravesite soil. Vultures do exist in Europe, but typically in the Mediterranean countries and only a few species accept habitats as far north as Swiss. The vulture population closest to the Netherlands are the bearded vultures in the Bavarian Alps, but that population was extinct during the 20th Century. Perhaps the vulture is there solely for supernatural reasons, but even if that's the case, the English narrator is not at all surprised about seeing one, which he should be.
Tarzan: The titular hero fought 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 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.
An Alex Rider book has monkeys in Australia. Umm...
Jules Verne sometimes fell into this, even though he usually tried to explain it. Especially in The Mysterious Island, where the island in question was the last remnant of a sunken continent which connected Australia, Asia and the Americas, which is why kangaroos and agoutis live on the same island.
The posthumous Alexandre Dumas novel Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine features alligators, vampire bats (only mentioned by the main character) and the Kraken (mentioned by the narrator) as creatures that can be encountered in the jungles and lakes of India.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen: In the first story, Munchausen visits Sri Lanka and encounters a lion. To be fair, a lion subspecies (Panthera leo sinhaleyus) lived on Sri Lanka thirty-seven millennia ago, but the writer could not know this (not that it matters anyway because Munchausen is a renowned liar and sayer of tall tales).
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 father mentions that maybe a land bridge was involved. 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.
- In one of his short stories a “South American boomslang” is responsible for making the paramedics think the viewpoint character is dead. The only snake called a boomslang is from sub-Saharan Africa (its common name is Dutch/Afrikaans for “tree snake”). King admits he got the idea from Agatha Christie who had a properly placed boomslang kill someone and he just liked the name.
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 of any sort need not apply.
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.
Paddington Bear came from "Darkest Peru". Spectacled (also known as Andean) bears are native to Peru and other regions of South America, but unfortunately Paddington Bear looks absolutely nothing like a Spectacled bear. The stories also invoke this deliberately, being about a bear living, among people, in London.
The Autobiography of a Monkey has monkeys with clearly prehensile tails and tigers, both in Africa.
Can this trope apply to mythical creatures (and overlap with Sadly Mythtaken)? If so, the bengladeshi adventure novel Chander Pahar features the hero meeting the Bunyip while adeventuring in... Darkest Africa, even though the Bunyip is an Aboriginal Australian monster.
"Leiningen Versus the Ants" demonstrates the power of a massive army ant swarm by having them devour a non-Amazon native elk.
Used as a plot point in the Longmire novel The Dark Horse, allowing the reader to solve the mystery before Sheriff Walt does. About midway into the story, Walt is on the phone with the brother of the deceased, who is a dentist in Ohio. In the background, he hears the song of a western meadowlark, which is common in Wyoming but hardly ever comes east of the Mississippi River. Fortunately, he's able to make the connection Just in Time to save the day.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features a sequence where the Bennett sisters come across a tide of animals fleeing the "unmentionables". Said tide includes North American animals in the form of chipmunks, raccoons and skunks, which were nowhere to be found in Regency England.
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.
Shades of Grey: The wildernesses of the main setting, which takes place where England is today, is home to creatures such as elephants, zebras and kudu antelopes. In this case, it's assumed that whatever the Previous and the Something That Happened did to fill the world with hybrid and altered animals, man-eating plants and mechanical organisms was also responsible for these creatures' presence.
The Sherlock Holmes short story "The Speckled Band" not only featured a nonexistent snake called the "swamp adder" as the titular speckled band, it also mentioned cheetahs and baboons living in India. In real life, cheetahs aren't entirely implausible as 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).
While Fragment averts this trope in its fictional portion, the epistolary prelude describes several Real Life examples of invasive species which have managed to invoke it with great success.
The short story The Scarlet Ibis by Jamrs Hurst featured a strange red bird (the titular scarlet ibis) appearing in Florida, deathly ill or injured shortly after a storm, before it dies, right before the narrator accidentally kills his younger brother, who buried it. Justfied, as the Ibis' range is close enough to Florida for vagrants to occur.
Clayton Emery's Beasts Of Sherwood Forest has chipmunks and other North American species in 12th century England.
In Jeanne Faivre d'Arcier's Le Dernier Vampire (The Last Vampire), one character mentions a remedy her grandmother, a healer from Reunion island, made out of snake venom. There are no poisonous snakes in Reunion island.
Quest for Fire has hissing cockroaches (native to Madagascar) and agoutis (native to South America) showing up in Pleistocene Asia. It's an odd mistake from a novel that goes out of its way to list the various properly placed animals that really did exist in the setting. Then there is a troop of gorilla-like apes which were misplaced (if deliberately speculative) at the time of publication but became an example of Accidentally Correct Writing decades later with the discovery of Gigantopithecus.
Warrior Cats was first set in an English forest, with appropriate flora and fauna. However, as the series went on, it began introducing more and more New World animals, culminating in the cats encountering a cougar in the mountains. The authors have since stated that the series takes place on a fictional island on which both British and American wildlife are present.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is set off the west coast of South America, which doesn't have hyenas and leopards. Justified by Moreau having imported animals from all over the world to transform into beast-men, some of which then degenerated into animals once again.
In a rare realistic example, Mau of Terry Pratchett's Nation notices a number of bird species which are new to his island in the aftermath of the tsunami. It's implied that these birds' native islands were completely inundated by the giant wave, forcing them to seek out any land they could reach.
The Northern Army in the Atlan series rides carnivorous flightless birds as mounts, which is fine if one plays along with the deliberate anachronism...except that the author specifies that the birds are the North American and European Diatryma (now Gastornis). The series takes place in prehistoric South America, which was home to the similar phorusrhacids.
One installment in a series of children's nonfiction books based on The Cat in the Hat had ostriches in Australia.
Commented upon in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym and company are very surprised to discover that Mysterious Antarctica has a thriving population of Galapagos tortoises, and list several reasons why this shouldn't be possible. Ducks are also mentioned. There's also a previously unknown species of bear that's apparently a close evolutionary relative of the polar bears living at the North Pole... somehow.
The tie-in prequel novel for King Kong (2005) has one of Carl Denham's cameramen attacked by aggressive bull North Atlantic seals when he's trying to film a breeding rookery's pups. Which is perfectly sound seal behavior ... except the characters and narrative insist upon calling them leopard seals, which are exclusively Antarctic animals and don't breed in groups (possibly justified in that "leopard seal" is sometimes used as a nickname for the common Harbour seal due to its spotted coat).
Animorphs: Only applicable retroactively, since we don't learn until the final book that the town the Animorphs live in is in California, where there are no wild wolves (or green anoles, which Jake morphed in the first book). In the third book, they encounter a pack of real wolves while in wolf morph. The authors have stated that they wanted kids living anywhere in the USA to be able to imagine the plot happening in their town (though it was confirmed to be a coastal city in the first book).
- The second "Megamorphs" book, "In the Time of Dinosaurs", is very guilty of this. While the Anachronism Stew of the various dinosaurs featured is lampshaded by Tobias at the end, the fact they come from different places as well (European Iguanodon, African Spinosaurus, and South American Saltasaurus are shown alongside various North American dinosaurs) oddly goes unmentioned.
In the children's book Rechenka's Eggs, the titular goose is depicted as a Canada goose, which does not appear in Russia or Ukraine.
Tortall, the country with the most Tortall Universe focus, seems to be vaguely in an analogue to Europe, and there are hedgehogs (European), but also raccoons (North American).

Live-Action TV

The pilot of 1923 involves a locust swarm in Montana, taking place in the titular year. Assuming the locusts in question aren't Rocky Mountain locusts (which were extinct by then), they must be High Plains locusts, a species that does not, and never has, lived in Montana.
Lost has polar bears on a tropical island, alongside horses, chickens, and cows. This is immediately lampshaded by the cast as being very wrong ("Polar bears don't live this far south!" "This one apparently does."), and is just one more mystery about the Island. Eventually explained as being brought to the Island by The DHARMA Initiative, who were doing research on gene manipulation for adaption to different climates.
Radar O'Reilly in the TV series M*A*S*H keeps, among his animals, a pet skunk. Cute and cuddly, and possibly still armed... but not exactly a native of Korea, though they never actually say where he got the skunk.
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.
One of the "Fishin' Musician" sketches on SCTV had Wendy O. Williams and her band on as the musical guest, where they and Gil go out camping in Melonville Forest, where they come across a gorilla in an abandoned mine shaft.
On Salem, a show that takes place during the Salem Witch trials in 1692, the character of Petrus the Blind Seer has a stuffed Pogona lizard (a bearded dragon) as one of his familiars. The Pogona is from the deserts of Australia, a place that wouldn't be discovered by Europeans for at least another 80 years.
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.
CSI:
- The CSI: Miami episode "A grizzly murder" features a brown bear, presumably a grizzly, in Dade County, which is about as far as you can get from the Grizzly Bear's current, historical and post glacial range in the USA. There are some Black Bears in Southern Florida, but most are west of Dade. The bear is treated the whole time as if it was native to the region, it's never clear why was the CSI brought in (though they find evidence of foul play immediately) and the clues eventually lead to yet another murder of an attractive woman in an expensive hotel suite.
- The complete opposite happens in the original CSI episode "Unbearable". Like in the above case, the episode opens with a hunter that has been killed by a bear (a Kodiak in this case). The fact the species is foreign is precisely what brings the CSI in since that makes the person who released the bear accountable for manslaughter, and the clues eventually lead to a zoo that has been selling animals for illegal hunts. Comparing these two episodes is probably the best way to illustrate what makes both series so different.
- Another justified example in the original series happens in "Evaluation Day", where an odd-proportioned skinned and mutilated body found in the desert turns out to be the remains of a poached gorilla. However, because of the lack of leads, we never learn why the poachers smuggled the whole gorilla into Nevada instead of just the parts that were valuable to them. After "Unbearable", we can speculate that it came from the same corrupt zoo as the bear, but this is not stated.
One episode of Gossip Girl has Serena and Trip crashing their car because there are wolves on the road. In New York. (They might have been coyotes, Eastern Red Wolves, or feral dogs with a wolf-like appearance, rather than true wolves.)
On 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, only three 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 Australia — accompanied by the calls of birds only native on the eastern seaboard of the country.
In a Disney adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson (a series spin 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 booby 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. Except to let Booth make the inevitable "boobies" wisecrack.
On The History Channel's Battles BC, CGI elephants are shown fighting for India against the invading army of Alexander the Great. African elephants, not Asian: the ears are distinctively larger in the former.
The telemovie Hart to Hart Down Under had a tiger in the Australian Outback.
The old pirate serial The Buccaneers repeatedly uses kookaburra sound effects. It's set mostly in the Bahamas.
A.N.T. Farm had walruses in California.
In Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane receives visions of a Harris Hawk which is native to the southwest... far from the Hudson Valley.
The 2001 miniseries of The Lost World invokes this as a minor Running Gag, with Edward, the protagonist, repeatedly correcting people on this ("But there are no elephants in Brazil!"), and then being told not to be so pedantic. Another scene has Prof. Summerlee lampshading the Misplaced Vegetation: "They shouldn't even be growing in the same hemisphere!"
Doctor Who:
- Near the end of season 31 we see, among other things, that museums display penguins in the Egyptian desert. This demonstrates quite succinctly how reality is falling apart at the seams; at this point, there's little left of the universe but Earth, humanity, and some poorly-remembered stories about things that never existed. And the Last Centurion.
- In "The Girl Who Died", a Viking village keeps electric eels. Why they do so is almost as unanswerable a question as where they got them, but it does enable the Doctor to use them as a stun gun.
- A lot of the background wolf-howls in "The Time Meddler" sound an awful lot like North American coyotes singing their heads off.
The Borgias:
- Caterina Sforza is shown handling a Harris hawk. Although wildlife is far from the only thing misplaced in this show.
- In the two-parter series premiere, set in 1493, Cesare brings a young pet Capuchin monkey to dinner. This species is native to the continental Americas, which had not been visited by Columbus yet.
- Bizarrely Zig-Zagged when Juan returns from Spain with gifts from the New World, which include a jaguar for Lucrezia. This is indeed an American animal, but his audience is shocked to see it as if they had never witnessed something like it before, despite jaguars being nearly identical-looking to leopards, which were very familiar to upper class Europeans and commonly kept in menageries at the time. Then the awed Lucrezia asks if "beasts like this" live in Spain, and Juan cryptically answers "Not anymore." We never learn if he means American jaguars (which if anything would now be more common in Spain then than ever before), wild big cats in general (which went extinct in Spain at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, but he would not have a way to know about it, obviously) or captive big cats (which were actually common in Spanish menageries during the 15th century).
The 100, set in what was once the United States, has an episode where characters are attacked by a (possibly mutated) Killer Gorilla. Since the gorilla's home seems to be the ruined remains of a zoo, it's probably meant to be descended from zoo gorillas who survived the nuclear war. However, the moose carcass it's saving as a snack is several hundred miles south of where moose live; the show is set in DC/northern VA and moose live in the northern US and Canada. It's possible the moose was another inhabitant of the zoo, but that isn't made clear.
Human Target: In "Salvage & Reclamation", set somewhere in the Andes, the Girl of the Week threatens the team to cut their throats and leave their bodies "to the wolves". The only wolf in South America is the maned wolf, which lives in the plains south of the Amazon, not in the Andes. However, the culpeo, another large South American canid, is sometimes called the "Andean wolf"—this may be what they were referring to.
Justified often uses well-placed wildlife noises for its Kentucky setting, but this makes the episode "Kin" in Season 4 all the more jarring. As Raylan ventures up into the hills, looking for information from his Country Cousins^note, atmosphere is provided by the calls of a western screech owl (mostly found on the west side of the Continental Divide).
Tigers would occasionally appear in the African jungle in the Ron Ely Tarzan series. And kookaburra calls were a constant feature of the soundtrack.
The Office (US):
- In the episode "Business School", the bat that Dwight finds in the office is an Egyptian fruit bat, which is definitely not native to the United States, much less Pennsylvania.
- Downplayed in the episode "Fun Run", which shows a brief scene showing Darryl feeding a fox squirrel. Fox squirrels ARE known from Pennsylvania, but they are not found as far north as Scranton, which is where the show is set. To some extent, this may be because the show was filmed in California, where fox squirrels are present as an introduced species.
Parks and Recreation: The "quail" that Leslie shoots in "Hunting Trip" is a chukar, native to west-central Asia and introduced to most of interior western North America. Both are a long ways from Indiana, where the show takes place. This is particularly glaring given that the bird could have been easily replaced with a northern bobwhite, which is a quail and is appropriate for the area.
Walking with… has quite a few examples:
- "New Blood", set in Late Triassic, has the European Plateosaurus and Peteinosaurus show up in Arizona (granted, this was the time of Pangaea). Less reasonable is the Thrinaxodon-like cynodont, as Thrinaxodon is only known from South Africa and Antarctica (as well as being long gone by 220 MYA).
- "Time of Titans" has the Germanic pterosaur Anurognathus inexplicably living in Late Jurassic Colorado.
- "Giant of the Skies" has Utahraptor living in Europe while being absent during the part set in North America (self-explanatory). The tie-in book suggests the creators thought it was because similar dinosaurs were already found on both sides of the Atlantic as seen with the Iguanodon and Polacanthus, but because Science Marches On (the species on the other side of the Atlantic are now considered more distantly related than originally believed), this is now even more egregious.
- "New Dawn" has a rogue Ambulocetus, known only from the Indian Subcontinent, show up in Germany, some 7,000 km away from its home. While it was already amphibious, it's highly unlikely that such a primitive cetacean could undertake such a journey (especially because India was located in the middle of the ocean at the time).
- The Dimetrodon in Walking with Monsters is obviously based on the large and famous species from the Texan Red Beds, but for whatever reason, its segment is set in Bromacker, Germany, even though the Dimetrodon species found there is the cat-sized D. teutonis. Edaphosaurus also isn't known from the Bromacker locale, although fragmentary fossils tentatively assigned to the genus are known from Germany.
- Chased by Dinosaurs's "Land of Giants" has Pteranodon and Sarcosuchus living in Patagonia. While a species of Sarcosuchus is known from Brazil, this version is based on the gigantic Sarcosuchus imperator, which is only known from North Africa, and both species would've been extinct for at least ten million years by this point (the Brazilian species would've been extinct for close to thirty million years by the episode's time period).
North American viewers of Warrior Nun are left to wonder what a mourning dove is doing in Spain.
Dinosaur Revolution: The second episode features Ornitholestes in Portugal, when the species is known only from the North American Morrison Formation. Granted, it's possible the species was present due to several other Morrison Formation dinosaurs being present in Portugal.

Music

Bluebirds are not native to England, so there's very little chance of them flying over the White Cliffs of Dover — something the cliffs' current guardians admit freely: "Obviously bluebirds sounded more romantic than sea gulls!" The songwriter was American and unaware of this at the time.
"In the Jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight." Lions actually don't live in the jungle, and they don't do much sleeping tonight or any other night, either. They're chiefly nocturnal, so they do most of their sleeping during the day.
The B-52s' "Rock Lobster" references exclusively-freshwater species interacting with saltwater ones in the ocean.
In one version of the children's song "Kookaburra", the kookaburra "counts all the monkeys he can see". The species of kookaburra known for its laugh-like cry is native only to Australia, which has no native monkeys.
The video for the Katy Perry song "Roar" features several animals that don't even live on the same continent. This may be intentional, since the video appears to be trying to invoke a Jungle Queen-style tone and look.
Contrary to the lyrics of "Pineapple Princess" by Annette Funicello, crocodiles are not native to Hawaii. Neither are alligators, for that matter.
Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" contains the verse, "Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny back toad". If this is referring to horned lizards, also called horned toads, these reptiles live in deserts, not the woods.

Puppet Shows

Bear in the Big Blue House has Treelo, a ring-tailed lemur, living in what appears to be a North American house setting with bears, otters and a mouse.
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 18th Century, long before any zoos were built in North America, let alone the Caribbean islands (the first elephant to arrive in the Americas was in 1795). Given that it's The Muppets, this might very well have been an intentional Lampshade Hanging.
The Sesame Street segment "African Animal Alphabet" featured tigers and yaks (both of which are strictly Asian).

Radio

Our Miss Brooks: In "Indian Burial Ground", Miss Brooks reads a newspaper article about the lost burial ground of a Arapaho war party that used gold spears decorated with peacock feathers. This raises the question where an Indian tribe would have obtained a supply of peacock feathers in the 19th century United States - peacocks are native to Asia.

Tabletop Games

Although it went to some lengths to be culturally-informed about Africa, Gary Gygax's "Fantasy Masters" system-neutral RPG product Aesheba: Greek Africa made some serious gaffes with its roster of wildlife. Not only does it include tigers (Asian) and anacondas (South American) among its roster of ostensibly purely-African wildlife, but it even claims that the appearance of an owl at the Greek immigrants' new shrine to Athena must be a divine omen, as owls aren't found there. There are about fifty species of owl in Africa, and Athene noctua, the specific type associated with Athena in classical times, is present there in far greater numbers than in Greece.
Pathfinder: Parodied in Cult of Cinders, the second installment of the Age of Ashes adventure path. When staying in the Ekujae elves' Treetop Town in the depths of the Mwangi jungles, the players find a lioness resting high in the trees at the city's edge. If they ask the elves' lorekeeper what a savannah animal is doing in the middle of the jungle, and why a ground-dwelling creature is in the trees besides, she answers that the lion was brought to them as a cub by an explorer that rescued her from poachers and misguidedly thought that she needed to return her "to the jungle where she belonged". The elves had a good laugh and brought the lion to a pride on the plains, but she returned to their village and took to hanging out in the trees. The elves like to joke that she thinks she's a leopard, and figure that with how fat she's gotten she must be doing pretty well for herself in any case.

Theatre

Much of the action of Shakespeare's As You Like It takes place in the Forest of Arden. There is some debate about whether that refers to the Arden near Stratford, in England, or the Ardennes of the Franco-Belgian border region. However, what is certain is that, in both places, there is little chance of being attacked by a lion. This gets even sillier in some productions, like the Kenneth Branagh film adaptation set in Meiji-era Japan.

Video Games

Age of Empires features, among others, a whale in the Nile and crocodiles in Italy.
The old interactive fiction game Amazon has a scene with a hippo... in Peru. It might have something to do with the fact that the game is a Serial Numbers Filed Off adaptation of the Africa-set novel Congo.
Not counting the various sentient animal residents of Animal Crossing, all of the fish and bugs in the game have just been pulled from various continents. You can catch a koi, then find a black bass downstream from it, and then catch a barracuda right afterwards. Or you can find a Japanese rhino beetle, and a South American Birdwing Butterfly afterward. This is lampshaded at one point in one of the sequels, and in the first game: "I caught a piranha! Which river is this, anyway? I'm glad I didn't take a dip!"
- One of the lampshades is hung in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, in the last part of the description for the sea butterfly. "The only place you'll find both cold-water and tropical sea butterflies swimming together is in this game."
- And then there's the fossils you can dig up. Most of the animals are the very least North American, but you can also uncover Archaeopteryx (Southern Germany), Velociraptor (Mongolia) and Spinosaurus (North Africa).
The Polish game Arktyczne Polowanie, which translates to "Arctic Hunt", has a penguin as a protagonist. He also lives in an igloo, which is associated with peoples living in the Arctic. The problem is that penguins don't live in the Arctic.
Assassin's Creed is usually pretty good about including wildlife appropriate to the region when they include them, and it's usually justified otherwise: mountain lions in Assassin's Creed III, set in New England, are presumably the now-extinct eastern cougar and what appear to be penguins in the Canadian Maritimes in Rogue are actually great auks, also extinct today. Black Flag, however, slipped up in a few places: while crocodiles actually are justified in several parts of the game via the Morelet's and Cuban crocodile, there's no excuse for them in Charlestown, South Carolina, where alligators would make more sense (the only part of the United States where crocodiles live is in southernmost Florida); Principe, off of Africa, is the biggest offender, being home to jaguars, deer, and Central American monkeys, probably as stand-ins for leopards, antelope, and African monkeys. Even then, it could be justified because of the series' Framing Device where everything is all a computer simulation rather than the real-world with the Animus filling in animals that Edward was more familiar with for the similar African species.
- The pattern is repeated in Odyssey, where you can find lions and leopards among more traditional European wildlife. It's stretching, but both species lived in Greece during the Pleistocene and lions, at least, survived there until the 1st century AD, though they became extinct in the Peloponnese c. 1000 BC. Like some of the other games, though, the exact placement of certain species still makes them misplaced—in the eastern parts of the in-game seas, you can find an island that has lions on it for some reason, along with a giant statue of Poseidon that presumably never existed in actual history.
  - In the same game, though, there's an acknowledged and in-universe example: an extensive hunting side quest will eventually take you to the island of Kythira to kill the Krokottas Hyena. Once you begin the fight, the Eagle-Bearer will directly remark that such animals aren't native to Greece (or at least to Kythira) and wonders how it even got there.
It tends to be discreet, but if you notice the raccoons showing up (often) in Battle for Middle Earth II, it will ruin the idea that Middle-Earth is supposed to be the Old World, considering raccoons are native to North America in reality.
Bug has chameleons in Reptilia, the western desert-themed stage. Not desert chameleons, but the green ones that should be seen in the jungle.
Becomes an important plotpoint in Carte Blanche, when protagonist Edgar finds some ants on a cat's skeleton in granny McCullough's basement. Professor Eleonore tells him they're from Central America. Edgar manages to figure out the mystery of the stolen Mayan statue from the antiques shop with this information.
Crash Bandicoot. Being on fictional Australian islands, one could be forgiven for having mainland and island species together in one place. One could also be forgiven for having Tasmanian Tigers and Dingoes (the former is classed as extinct although people claim that they've seen it since, and the latter is not technically a native species but could have been brought over from the mainland), but there's actually an island inhabited by polar bears. That just misses the wrong hemisphere, never mind continent. A more subtle mistake is the Komodo Dragon (a species native to islands in Indonesia). The anthropomorphic characters can be somewhat justified by the fact that they're all N.Cortex's experiments (and thus, may have been imported). The Polar Bear... Not so much.
In Dead Island, one of Roger Howard's recordings is about a near-lethal encounter with a zombified orangutan. However, Dead Island takes place in Banoi, a fictional island in Papua New Guinea — orangutans live only in Borneo and Sumatra, thousands of miles away. Making this even more bizarre, the orangutan lets out a stereotypical "mad gorilla" style roar, and the idea that one could contract the disease is rather suspect, given that an orangutan is hardly likely to consume human flesh.
The PC version of Disney's Aladdin in Nasira's Revenge features a talking gorilla in the first Oasis level, who will damage your if he catches you stealing his coconuts. The fact that it can talk in a fantasy setting like Aladdin might actually be more acceptable than it being in an oasis in an Arabian desert thousands of miles away from any place it should be.
Played with in Dwarf Fortress. Different kinds of wildlife will only exist in certain biomes, but the biomes are defined by weather and terrain patterns, not by continents. It's not unusual to find parrots, jaguars, and pandas in the same jungle.
Empire Earth: One of the tutorials has you guide Phoenicean settlers to build a thriving Mediterranean colony, including fending off tiger attacks. Made even weirder by the fact that wolves are available in the editor.
Both Endless Ocean games have this, but it's way more prevalent in the original, which took place in a single location (the Manoa Lai sea within the South Pacific) rather than spanning the globe, and the characters usually call out any instances of it occurring in the sequel.
Fallout has Radscorpions, which are enormous mutated versions of emperor scorpions. The problem is that emperors are endemic to the Sahara region of North Africa, not North America. This is justified, however, by the fact that they were popular pets in the United States before the Great War. When the bombs dropped and their homes and pet stores were destroyed, the scorpions survived, mutated, and have thrived in the wasteland.
The Rook Islands' location in Far Cry 3 are left vague (it's said to be somewhere in borders of the Indian and Pacific oceans), but the animals on the islands are obviously not supposed to live together (e.g. tigers live in Asia, cassowaries live in Australia and New Guinea). Justified by the pirates, who use the islands as staging areas for their trade in exotic animals. The animals aren't all native to the islands; they were brought there and escaped.
Kyrat from Far Cry 4 is a lesser offender, with its location a bit more explicit (based on Nepal and set somewhere in the Himalayas) and almost all of its wildlife is indeed native to that area. There are a few mistakes, however: the "demon fish", for instance, is based on goliath tigerfish that are native to Africa (and thus would have fit right in to Far Cry 2 if that game had any predatory wildlife). Mayalan tapirs, likewise, exist closer to Southeast Asia, which probably would have been more fitting for the vaguely-Pacific Ocean setting of the previous game. Then there's the mugger crocodiles, which actually are native around that area, but are almost exclusive to lower altitudes than you'll usually find them in the game.
A downplayed case in Far Cry 5. The Deputy can come across caribou in Hope County, Montana. Caribou did range into Montana, but they've been extinct in that state since the early to mid 20th century. An even more egregious case with a crocodile you get to kill in a DLC mission. There are crocodiles in North America, but the southern tip of Florida is as far north as they get.
Quite a few of these in Far Cry Primal:
- The saber-toothed cats of the Oros valley (set in Central Europe) are based on American Smilodons.
- The same goes for the American dire wolves.
- Tapirs, snow leopards, and yaks, none of them European.
- Megacerops, treated in-game as a rare variant of woolly rhinoceros, was native to North America, and long extinct by the time this game is set.
- The eagles that live in Oros are American bald eagles.
- The "bitefish" are actually African tigerfish, as in Far Cry 4.
- The European dholes look more like African wild dogs.
- The crocodiles are prehistoric Pakistani crocodiles, not prehistoric European crocodiles.
Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy VI has monsters and wild animals appear in the appropriate places (wolves in the northern mountains, giant insects in the grasslands, etc), but the Veldt is a continent where all the world's monsters come to migrate for some reason that is never explained, even if certain monsters shouldn't be able to survive in the plains. From a gameplay perspective, the Veldt serves as a training ground for Gau to learn new Rage skills by having random battles with anything you encountered previously, even certain bosses like the Holy Dragon.
- Final Fantasy XII. Japanese players of this game likely didn't notice, but American blue jays are not the best choice for generic sea bird calls in the ambient noise soundtrack for the Phon Coast.
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. Justified specifically for said mourning dove in the Bad Boys Love route: He was a war orphan, which is what left him in Japan, and he was attending St. Pigeonation's so Dr. Shuu could experiment on the virus he was a carrier for.
Impossible Creatures is set on an island chain in the Pacific. Despite that, it contains animals-which are stated to be native to the island-from every continent except Antarctica and possibly Australia (The crocodile could be an African or Asian variety while the kangaroo is DLC that does not appear in the story and therefore cannot be determined to be native or not). It mostly avoids mixing animals from different continents on the same island, but occasionally slips up and does things like having komodo dragons (Asia) living in the same place as bald eagles (North America) and hippopotami (Africa).
Island Saver: You can dismount from a polar bear bankimal in the desert part of Icecap Island. As Apex Bankimals stay in the area they were dismounted in, it can fall into this trope.
Jables's Adventure features Pokey, a talking cactus in the middle of The Lost Woods. 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.
Jaws Unleashed is filled with this, from emperor penguins to saltwater crocodiles living in the same region. Granted, the island (Amity Island) is supposed to be fictional, but the fauna there shouldn't normally coexist.
Knights of Valour, a video game series based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms have polar bears as enemies in the wilderness. In ancient China, nowhere near the Arctic. The first game somewhat justifies it since the bear you encounter is a one-of-a-kind enemy probably purchased by Cao Cao from overseas, but in the sequels you face polar bears in several areas for reasons unexplained.
Krut: The Mythic Wings have misplaced mythological wildlife. The game is set in ancient Siam, and yet one of the bosses is a Kelpie, a cryptid of Scottish origins. You can also face a Gryphon in a later level, although that one doesn't seem too far-fetched since there are gryphons from Middle Eastern myths as well (not too far from Siam) and it's fought in a King's palace, where it could be purchased from a distant land.
Let's Build a Zoo: Dinosaur Island: Minmi is only known from Australia (which is even mentioned in its description), yet its fossil is dug up from Germany.
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.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is set in a densely wooded Russian jungle, 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 Waves this by claiming the Soviets brought them in as "test subjects."
Minecraft:
- Pigs, sheep, cows and chicken can be found in almost any biome, from plains and forests to jungles, tundra and deserts. This is somewhat necessary since all of them (except pigs) provide essential resources (sheep wool is required to make beds to set your spawnpoint and prevent nightly monster spawns, chickens drop feathers that you can craft into arrows, cows drop leather which has many crafting and trading uses) and they all drop edible meat items that help you avoid starving to death.
- Huge human-sized squid can sometimes be found in small lakes and rivers. Prior to the "Update Aquatic", they were the only sea creature, besides pufferfish-like "guardians" that appear only in rare underwater structures.
- Bats and (giant) spiders can be found in any dark area.
- As of 1.7, the player can pull limitless quantities of pufferfish, clownfish, etc. out of small ponds, or even a single block of water that you poured out of a bucket moments ago.
Nier: the most common enemies encountered in the desert outside Facade are a pack of wolves. This is eventually lampshaded by one of the main group:
Weiss: Do you not find it odd to be encountering wolves in a desert?
Nier: Should we?
Weiss: They usually live in forests, after all. I cannot imagine there is much in the way of sustenance for them out here.
Ōkami has a variety of wildlife roaming the overworld which can be fed to gain "Praise" for Amaterasu. For the most part, the fauna is quite accurately Japanese (despite the raccoon dogs/tanuki erroneously being translated as "raccoons" in the English release) — however, later on, tigers (which have not lived in Japan since prehistoric times) join the selection of wildlife. Perhaps justified in that tigers featured frequently in historical Japanese art and folktales, which often borrowed a lot from Chinese culture and art.
Pokémon:
- Generally speaking, the Pokémon world is very loosely based on the real world, yet many Pokémon are based on animals that wouldn't be found in the wild of the places that Pokémon regions are based on. However, such cases rarely qualify for the trope In-Universe; e.g. Phanpy and Donphan are Pokémon native to Johto, irregardless of real elephants' population in Japan. That's not to say that there aren't In-Universe examples, however, with certain games featuring Pokémon that aren't native to the region in which they are found.
- Pokémon Black and White were notable for having no returning Pokémon available in the west half of Unova; you were only going to find Generation V Pokémon until you got access to the east. Pokémon Black and White 2 featured a sudden influx of Pokémon from Generations I-IV all throughout the region, to Professor Juniper's concern. There are implications that this is the result of Team Plasma hacking into the Pokémon Storage System in Version 1.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon give us the Yungoos line and the Alolan Rattata line, which are clearly based on mongoose and rats in Hawaii. Yungoos and Gumshoos are alien species to Alola that were introduced to the region in a misguided attempt to control the population of Rattata and Raticate, another line of Com Mons accidentally brought to Alola. This instead resulted in the Rattata and Raticate becoming nocturnal and adapting to night time to avoid the diurnal Yungoos and Gumshoos, resulting in two invasive species.
- Sun and Moon also feature a sidequest that entails collecting the Cells and Cores of Zygarde, a legendary Pokémon responsible for maintaining the ecosystem... of Kalos. Sina and Dexio, aides to Kalosian Pokémon Professor, appear as tourists in Alola specifically to investigate what it's doing there on Sycamore's behalf. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon replace the collection hunt with Zygarde appearing in its full-bodied 50% Forme in a cave oddly reminiscent of its home cave in Kalos.
- In Pokémon Sword and Shield, it is mentioned in one of Basculin's Pokédex entries that they are often illegally introduced to lakes in Galar.
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus has not just regionally but temporally misplaced wildlife; every so often, space-time distortions will occur that summon wild Pokémon that aren't native to Hisui yet, such as Shieldon and Cranidos (already extinct by events of the game), the Porygon line (computers are still a fantasy in this era), and Johtonian Sneasel (Sneasel have a regional form in this era), plus your starter Pokémon (which were brought to Hisui by Professor Laventon from Johto, Unova, and Alola). There's also a few Alolan Vulpix, but these ones are justified as specifically belonging to a settler from Alola - caught Pokémon, not wild.
- A proper example appears in HeartGold & SoulSilver, due to the way the games are programmed. Route 30, in the original games, had a lake that was completely inaccessible due to trees blocking all access to it, but which had a clearing made in the remakes to let the player fish from and Surf over it. While you are still in the Route 30 portion of the map, freshwater Pokémon like Poliwag appear as they should in a small lake such as this - but water tiles have their possible encounters based on what area of the world they are in rather than being individually determined, so if you surf far South enough to pass into Cherrygrove City's portion of the map, you will suddenly start encountering ocean-bound Pokémon like Tentacool from this tiny freshwater lake, because the city's shore leading out into the ocean means its water was programmed to have oceanic Pokémon.
- Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon lampshade Seel being available in the games despite previous Pokédex entries stating it lives in cold areas: "It has always been supposed that Seel live only in cold seas. Their having shown up in Alola is a mystery."
- Pokédex entries for water types can state that specific water type Pokémon live in specific bodies of water, like rivers, ponds, or deep in the ocean. This does not stop the anime or Pokémon card artwork from depicting these water types in different watery habitats.
In the original Samurai Shodown, monkeys could be seen in the background of Nakoruru's stage in Hokkaido, despite not being native to the island in real life. When this was pointed out to background designer Tomoki Fukui, he jokingly responded by saying that the monkeys must have swum across the Tsugaru Strait to support Nakoruru.
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World: The Abominable Snow Burns is based on the Abominable Snow Man, which is not from the North Pole but rather the Himalayas.
Sonic the Hedgehog. Marine the Raccoon uses 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.
Spec Ops: The Line features oryxes really close to a war-ravaged city, and one appears in the middle of downtown after an explosion and inrush of thirsty people that'd scare off any skittish prey like an antelope. And with how no one else so much as mentions them in passing, they might even not be real and only in Cpt. Walker's head..
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy features numerous species of armadillo running around the deserts of Ancient Egypt. The fact that they're magical armadillos doesn't excuse the fact that they're still armadillos.
Spiritual Assassin Taromaru has a massive Surinam Toad monster as a boss. Said species is native to South America, and the game is set entirely in Meiji-Era Japan.
Stardew Valley takes place in a fictional area, but it sometimes falls into this trope with the Fishing Minigame, as you catch tilapia in the ocean (they should be in lake environments and also shouldn't even be found in the game as Stardew Valley has cold, snowy winters which would kill the tropical tilapia) and lingcod in rivers (they should be in the ocean).
Star Wars games:
- Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II has a fantasy-based version of this — albeit one that's All There in the Manual. The monsters you have to avoid being killed and eaten by are found on two different planets/moons: Sulon (a habitable moon of Sullust) and Ruusan, which are located in different regions of the galaxy. It's possible that Jerec and his minions transported them from one location to another; but given that mailocs (gigantic wasps) and drugons (huge, man-eating fish) are both extremely dangerous and/or unwieldy, relocating them must not have been easy. Furthermore, the game also has Kumumgah (more famously known as Tusken Raiders or Sand People) turning up on Sulon, when any casual Star Wars fan could tell you that they are native to and only found on Tatooine. They are a (somewhat) intelligent species, but they're also nomadic herdsmen and warriors who wouldn't be likely to immigrate to another planet. Later games in the Dark Forces Saga would get better about this; particularly, Tusken Raiders only showed up one more time, on one of two Tatooine-set levels in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.
- Shadows of the Empire starts on Hoth, where you have the option of fighting wampas, and then on to the mountainous arid world of Gall... you get to fight wampas again. Wampas which were there long enough to evolve to have brown fur. The devs later explained that the Imperials were impressed by the wampas' ferocity, capturing several and bioengineering them to adapt to various new environs.
Stranded: One of many threats player will face in the island is lions.
Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 apparently featured what appeared to be emperor penguins (native only to Antarctica) living on various planets that otherwise have a tropical setting. And the inhabitants of the ice planets are bunnies. They could have been king penguins however, since they look similar to emperor penguins, but live in somewhat more temperate climates. Seems to be an in universe example as well, as those penguins appear to be based on the ones from Super Mario 64, which were exclusive to the ice world.2
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has a rare fictional mon example. The Pokémon 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.
The Tomb Raider series sometimes places species in locations where they either never existed or are now extinct (for example, lions in Egypt and China, where they are long gone, brown bears in Peru, gorillas in Greece, and piranhas in India and the South Pacific). To say nothing of the dinosaurs.
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos: Fantasy exemple: arachnatids are big, furry scorpions native to the frigid wastelands of Northrend, but they can also be found in Dustwallow Marsh, a hot swamp half the world away during Rexxar's campaign.
The Wind Road have you fighting Arctic wolves in Ming Dynasty China, despite being an animal of American origin. They're abundant and all over the (non-snowy) woods as well, for some reason. However this was averted when you fight a bear in the desert - said animal is the Gobi Bear, a real-life animal.
Will Rock features, along with other monsters, tigers, lions, and Nile Crocodiles in Greece.
The mission briefing for Mission 4 in Worms Armageddon, "Cool as Ice", says that an enemy worm has infiltrated the South Pole and is threatening to blow it up, yet a polar bear can be clearly seen in the scenery.
Xenoblade Chronicles X is generally consistent about where on Mira particular species are found. Tyrants, however, can be found on different continents from where their species would normally be found, like a tyrant Simius wandering around the plains of Primordia instead of the jungles of Noctilum.
Zoo Vet and its sequel Zoo Vet: Endangered Species have oribi antelope in a temperate forest, Komodo dragons and Chilean flamingos in a rainforest and bald eagles and tokay geckos in a desert.

Web Animation

♪ Where can you see tigers? 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 "Good luck actually finding tigers in Kenya."
Drunk Science explains the origin of polar bears, along with the reason there aren't any penguins in the Arctic.
Happy Tree Friends: Much of the cast consists of North American woodland critters. Then there are ones like Sniffles (a South American anteater), Russell (a sea otter) and Lammy (a sheep).

Webcomics

The Blackblood Alliance: Due to having a long single horn, the Broadhorns are obviously meant to be a Elasmotherium, despite the fact that the comic takes place in North America while the Elasmotherium only inhabited Eurasia.
Sandra and Woo: Sid is a Eurasian red squirrel living in a North American forest. His mother, while pregnant with him, fell into a tourist's suitcase in France.
Pokey the Penguin is set in the Arctic Circle. As it also contains a hippopotamus-like Skeptopotamus, Italian invasion forces and Satan himself, it is possible that geographical realism wasn't the artist's highest priority.
The Order of the Stick made fun of random encounter tables in role-playing games placing animals in the wrong type of habitat.
Belkar: I once fought 1d3 dire camels in a swamp. No joke.

Web Original

Possibly a joke but CinemaSins refers to a tiger in the live action Jungle Book movie as an "African tiger". Not only is there no such thing, but the film makes it clear it takes place in India.
Minecraft SOS: In Owen's 5th episode, he stumbles across a sun bear in a cold tundra and questions how it got there, before bringing it home to the jungle with him, back to its natural habitat. Out-of-universe, it's a retextured polar bear (which naturally spawn in the tundra) that he was assigned to keep as a pet for a server event.
Some effort was made to make sure the adder in the MSF High Forum Roleplay worked with the setting, but whether common European adder or horned viper is found near Salisbury... (shrugs) It was originally meant to be the former, but thanks to being described as "incredibly deadly", had to be switched to the latter.
SCP Foundation: SCP-2761, a genetically modified pipefish that was released in the Everglades and adds genetic material from other animals to its genotype, apparently has whooping crane DNA despite that species not being found in that part of Florida.
A rabbit appears on the Version 3 island of Survival of the Fittest. The Version 3 three island is a jungle. Pokey the Penguin is set in the Arctic Circle. As it also contains a hippopotamus-like Skeptopotamus, Italian invasion forces and Satan himself, it is possible that geographical realism wasn't the artist's highest priority.
The loon is a North American water bird with a spooky call. You can probably guess which part of that description matters to film makers. This video from the YouTube channel Vox compares the bird's natural range to its Hollywood range, with a selection of clips.

Western Animation

Mickey Mouse: Mickey Down Under features an ostrich deep in 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 Pepé 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 just put the accent on in an attempt to impress the ladies when he was away from his wife and kids.
- The Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon "Stop! Look! And Hasten!" features a Burmese tiger in the American Southwest. What did Wile E. expect when he dug a Burmese Tiger Trap?
  - "Surprisibus! Surprisibus!"
  - Then there was the episode which culminated in Wile E. Digging to China—only to meet another roadrunner there, too.
- Rabbit Fire has an elephant pop up in a North American forest. Since he walks on his hind legs and talks, this is clearly an example of Rule of Funny.
- The Bugs Bunny short Frigid Hare has a penguin at the South Pole. Penguins are only found along coasts, not far inland, which is inhospitable to most life. In a rare human example, there is an Eskimo hunting him. Not only do humans not live in Antarctica, he's on entirely the wrong end of the planet.
- Porky's Duck Hunt has an electric eel in a North American river. Electric eels are native to South America.
Tiny Toon Adventures: The music video for the They Might Be Giants song "Istanbul, not Constantinople" messes up by having a Bactrian (two-humped) camel, when only dromedary (one-humped) camels live in the middle east.
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle: While the monkey Nkima is an original character from the Tarzan novels, in Filmation's cartoons, Nkima is drawn to look like a capuchin monkey, which is a New World species.
Tangled: The Series takes place in a European kingdom several centuries ago. Raccoons are from North America, and would not have been found in Europe around that time. This didn’t stop Varian from befriending one that kept coming into his lab and naming it Ruddiger, though.
George of the Jungle and the remake are set in a fictional jungle that looks primarily African, but includes animals and vegetation you wouldn't see in the wilds of Africa. An especially odd use of this trope is in the newer animated series, where one of the characters seems to be a Thylacine, an extinct marsupial from Australasia.^note
Phineas and Ferb:
- The title sequence shows them discovering a dodo bird on a mountaintop. Dodos lived exclusively in the undergrowth of tropical deciduous forests, and would be ill-suited to an alpine environment.
- This show also claims that vipers and badgers are the natural predators of platypi. Platypi are exclusive to Australia, which had neither badgers nor vipers until the latter were accidentally introduced in recent times.
- One of Doofenshmirtz's traumatic backstories involves him being raised by ocelots, which are explicitly referred to in the movie as "South American wildcats". Yet Druelselstein is presumably in continental Europe... since this show has involved both a time machine and a device which brought Danville and Drusselstein into trebuchet range, that could just be an as yet untold tale.
- "The Lizard Whisperer" has a North American chameleon (explicitly identified as such by Isabella). Chameleons are strictly Old World reptiles.
Milo Murphy's Law: The episode "Perchance to Sleepwalk" features red-billed choughs (referred to as "red-beaked crows") in the United States. Red-billed choughs are native to Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The Venture Brothers had an episode where the boys were in South America, and there was an orangutan. The natives also practiced circumcision, so they probably were really in Indonesia.
Ben 10: In a first-season episode, the Tennysons cross a Mexican jungle in which a chameleon (complete with 3 horns and goggle-eyes) is visible in the treetops. True chameleons aren't native to the New World, although feral populations (of different species than the one shown) do exist in California and Florida
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: An in-universe example of this can be seen in "Trespass". On Orto Plutonia, the creatures the native Talz are riding throughout the episode are Narglatches, fan-tailed cat-like creatures that are native to Naboo. Not only the wrong climate zone (Naboo is mostly tropical), but the wrong planet. The Talz are also not advanced enough to have space travel, so the appearance of the Narglatches could not be explained by the Talz having brought them to the planet. Furthermore, the Talz themselves are from another planet. Concept art for Season 5's Ondercon arc featured a variant of the Narglatch that was adapted to Onderon's jungles, which was ultimately unused in the finished product. This was, notably, retroactively made into a non-example by the shift from Legends to current canon; since The Clone Wars was the only work to feature either Talz or Narglatches to be carried over into the modern version of the setting, Orto Plutonia is simply treated as the homeworld of both the Talz and Narglatches.
American Dad! is pretty bad at this: the characters live in "Langley Falls" Virginia, but one episode had Stan take his family out camping into nearby mountains where they get chased by a Grizzly Bear... an animal native to the Western United States (a Black Bear would have been more appropriate) and since American Dad tends to use Lampshade Hanging for things out of place (including the alien member of the cast), the fact that they didn't point this out means it was probably an error. Another episode had Stan narrowly escape a Mountain Lion in the woods... Lions were extirpated from the Eastern U.S. by the beginning of the 20th century (aside from a small and critically endangered population in Florida). Producer Seth MacFarlane is from Rhode Island, about a day-trip away from Virginia, so either he really doesn't know any better or he's been living in California too long.
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 the series takes place in North America, where the Autobots' 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 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 OddParents!: The TV movie "Fairy Idol" shows penguins... living in the North Pole.
Thomas & Friends:
- A picture book based on the show apparently showed American Robins living on the Island of Sodor, which is supposed to be located between the real-life islands of Man and Britain. American robins sometimes show up in Britain, but rarely.
- 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). This didn't happen in the TV show, where dinosaur skeleton the Narrow Gauge locomotives found looks like that of a Dacentrurus (a large stegosaurid native to England).
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Despite taking place in a deliberate Fantasy Kitchen Sink, the show gets special mention for having a giant squid in a lake in "The Show Stoppers". Further, given that the show takes place in a temperate, pastoral fields-and-woodlands type of setting, it's also more than a bit strange to see toucans and sea lions show up as regular components of Fluttershy's coterie of woodland critters.
- "Campfire Tales": An in-universe example. Applejack mentions that the flyders that attacked their campsite are native to the Luna Bay area^note, and don't usually travel so far from their home.
Danger Mouse: "The Bad Luck Eye of the Little Yellow God", ostensibly set in Brazil, is jampacked with African wildlife.
DuckTales (1987): One episode 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.
Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: "Kiwi's Big Adventure" features a crocodile in the tropical jungles of New Zealand.
Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: "Slap Happy Lion" has a once-ferocious lion that terrified all the other animals in the jungle with his roars, including a zebra, flamingo, a trio of crocodiles, an ostrich, snakes, a gorilla, and a kangaroo. Though one could argue a kangaroo might be more at home in a jungle than the lion is. Lions do not actually live in jungles.
Popeye: "Wild Elephinks" has Popeye encountering a moose in the African jungle. He's also seen fighting bears and squirrels in the climax.
Mike, Lu & Og has the Philosophical Society (a goat, a pig and a porcupine) on a deserted island. Other misplaced animals include the wombat (usually outwitting Alfred) and a chicken (chased by Margery in one episode). It may always be that those animals were also the cause of a shipwreck following an animal shipping. The rest of which animals died in the ocean.
Futurama:
- "The Deep South" has an electric eel in the ocean. The same scene also shows a coelacanth (which is found in the Indian ocean), a leafy seadragon (from the Pacific), and a clownfish (Pacific again) despite the episode being set under the Atlantic.
- "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" has penguins and orcas on Pluto^note. And just to be clear, neither were an extraterrestrial species, they're ordinary Earth penguins and orcas. Absolutely no explanation is given to it.
- "Fun on a Bun" has Megatherium (giant ground sloth), Macrauchenia (long-necked and trunked ungulate), and Doedicurus (giant club-tailed armadillo) in a Lost World in Europe. All three were native to South America. At least the token saber-toothed cat appears to be a Machairodus (it had a long tail) which did live in Europe, but that genus went extinct before the Pleistocene.
The Smurfs (1981): Skunks, which are North American creatures, can be found in the medieval European Smurf Forest. The comic books feature local polecats instead.
Gravity Falls had grizzly bears and alligators in Oregon, though that's hardly the strangest thing to happen in the show.
What's New, Scooby-Doo? had savannah animals like lions and giraffes in a jungle.
Inspector Gadget: In "The Amazon", Gadget encounters a huge white gorilla in, well, The Amazon Rainforest. Gorillas are only found in Africa.
Brandy & Mr. Whiskers features black-and-white tapirs, which live in Asia, in The Amazon Rainforest. Real South American tapirs are brown or gray. A proboscis monkey (also from Asia) has also appeared a few times.
Geronimo Stilton: Inverted. In one episode when a shark attacks a surfing competition. Looking it up, Benjamin sees that it's a copper shark, and, since those are usually found around Australia and New Zealand, deduces that it must have been introduced on purpose. While it is true that they're found there, copper sharks are found in many other coastal areas◊, as widely dispersed as the West Coast of the United States and the Mediterranean.
All Hail King Julien has Xixi the toucan, a species native to South America and not Madagascar. Odd, considering that previous incarnations of the franchise have averted this trope.
The New Adventures of Superman: In "Night of the Octopod", the inactive Octopod is shocked back to life by an electric eel. At the base of Niagara Falls.
The Jungle Bunch: Maurice is a penguin who lives in a jungle. In the first movie's intro, it's revealed his egg was thrown into the sea by a walrus, and drifted to the jungle where he was then raised by a tiger. There are also koalas and beavers living in the jungle.
Simba: è nato un re has lions, tigers, bears, gray wolves, leopards, and pythons all living in the same jungle in Africa.
Betty Boop: "A Hunting We Will Go" has Bimbo and Koko encounter lions and leopards in a North American forest.
Taz-Mania: Dingoes and koalas are only found on the Australian mainland, and kiwis are from New Zealand. Alligators don't live in Australia. Most of the rest of the animals are fine. Perhaps surprisingly, this includes the Bush Mice (the long-tailed mouse is a species of mouse found only in Tasmania that looks quite similar to house mice, and house mice and rats are found anywhere there are humans) and Buddy Boar (feral pigs have been an issue on the island).
Sea Princesses: Elektra is the Princess of the Electric Eels: a creature that doesn't dwell in the sea.
Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town: Topper the Penguin is in search of the South Pole, but somehow found his way to the Arctic Circle. Lampshaded by Kris Kringle, who says to him, "That's on the opposite end of the Earth! You're about as lost as you could get!"
Animaniacs: A parody of The Lion King features tigers living in what appears to be Africa, though this may just have been Rule of Funny at work. As in The Lion King, there are also leafcutter ants.
PAW Patrol: A literal example; in "Pups Save the Jungle Penguins", some Antarctic penguins mistaken end up in the jungle, and the mission is to bring them home.
Total Drama World Tour:
- Pandas are featured very prominently in "Super Happy Crazy Fun Time Japan" as part of the episode's first challenge, despite it being well-known that they are a distinctively Chinese animal. This especially stands out given earlier in the episode, Chris was called out for using a Shaolin Monk outfit when announcing to the contestants they would be in Japan.
- The first challenge in "Awwwwww, Drumheller" has the contestants digging up dinosaur bones, with Alejandro finding a complete Allosaurus skeleton. While Drumheller, Alberta, is famous for its plethora of dinosaur fossils, Allosaurus specimens are only known from the United States and Portugal. Furthermore, Allosaurus is a Jurassic dinosaur, with all of Drumheller's dinosaurs being from the Cretaceous.
Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race: The contestants come to Argentina in "Last Tango in Buenos Aires", where emus play a major part in the second half. This is despite the fact emus are native to Australia. However, there are similar birds known as rheas in Argentina, so its possible the writers got them mixed up.
SpongeBob SquarePants:
- The Kamp Koral spinoff introduces two narwhals, Narlene and Nobby, despite the franchise taking place in tropical waters. Narwhals live in the Arctic Ocean and are ill-suited for warmer waters.
- A narwhal also shows up in the episode "Whale Watching" as Pearl's boyfriend.
Family Guy: The B-plot for "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows" revolves around Peter taking care of some white-rumped swallows after their mother lays its eggs in his new beard. White-rumped swallows aren't found in Rhode Island; they're native to South America.
Dragons: Riders of Berk:
- Although we don't know where Berk is, it's probably nowhere close to the Himalayas, where yaks are from. Unless they are Scotland Hairy Cows; however, they are referred to as yaks.
- Fishlegs speculates that the baby dragon that scared him might've been a flaming chipmunk. Chipmunks are native to North America and (one species) Central Asia.

Real Life

Real Life Misplaced Wildlife is a serious problem as it can potentially create an invasive species. Someone brings over an exotic pet and either releases it when it's too much trouble or it escapes on its own, eventually finding a mate of similar background and reproducing. Depending on what animal it is, the climate, lack of predators, and abundance of prey that doesn't know how to avoid/escape them means they flourish well above what they do in their native territory, becoming a nuisance at best and a threat to humans at worst. Though this isn't always bad, as moving animals to new climates without natural predators has saved some species from extinction.
In the Californian city of Martinez, there's a local legend about a group of monkeys living in the creek. They even have a restaurant named after them.
There's a stable population of ring necked parakeets in South Eastern England, London, and other European cities such as Madrid—it's not uncommon to see trees covered in the little green birds as well as with their spherical nests in such places as Ramsgate or the Casa de Campo in the latter.
Thanks to notorious Drug Lord Pablo Escobar, there is now a small population of hippos in Colombia.
Beavers were introduced to the southern tip of South America in an attempt to start a fur industry. The industry never took off, but the beavers made themselves at home.
The reverse happened with the South American coypu, also known as nutria (looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver), which has invaded many parts of the USA and Europe after being introduced there by fur ranchers.
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 draw eager birdwatchers from all over the country.
- Eurasian Eagle Owls, which are thought to have been native to the United Kingdom at some point in the past, have recently been making a sudden comeback thanks to occasional vagrants and deliberate releases or escapes of pet owls.
- 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.
- 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.
- Monk parakeets are a particularly notable example — between being popular pets and fairly hardy in temperate or warmer weather, monk parakeets thrive in Florida, in isolated colonies in several other major American cities — including Chicago — and most of Mediterranean Europe. Technically these are "introduced" rather than misplaced — they were released as pets or escaped on their own and have become feral versus winding up in the wrong place due to some natural phenomenon. This is unfortunately pretty common, as evidenced by the European Starling being ubiquitous across North America and the also European House Sparrow now being one of the most numerous birds on the continent, despite the latter's declining numbers in countries it is native to according to its article on That Other Wiki. Amazingly, both of these species were only introduced to North America in the last 150 years or so. A story mentioning flocks of House Sparrows in New York City would have qualified for this trope as being wrong not that long ago.
- The 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.
- On at least two occasions, bald eagles have found their way to Ireland.
- The common parakeet, or budgie, has been marching, proverbially, into the Netherlands driving out the native Sparrow (which as mention above is doing just fine in its non-native North American habitats).
- The Rock Pigeon^note 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 birds that 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^note. The fact that Rock Pigeons outside their native habitat are descended from domesticated specimens also results in varying colors among individuals.
- The Indian peafowl (commonly referred to as the peacock, even though this technically only refers to males of the species) has become established in Florida, believed to have originated from a pet shop in Miami. While not nearly as threatening to the local wildlife as some of the other creatures on this list that have cropped up in Florida, Floridians are mixed on them, with some hating them for their noise, droppings, and property damage (especially to patio screens and AC units) and others loving them for their beauty and embracing them as a natural tourist attraction.
- Peafowl also roam free in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, which is notorious for having one of the mildest climates in the country. They were first introduced in 1891 and the park is now home to roughly 40 of them. They're known to wander into the gardens of homes across the street from the park, and during the 2020 mating season animal control officers captured a peacock in heat that had injured a 90-year-old woman outside her apartment building.
The story of how Singapore got its name — once upon a time, there was a fishing village called Temasek. Then a prince called Sang Nila Utama arrived, and upon reaching the shores of the island saw a creature that looked like a giant cat, with a red body, a black head and a white chest. He asked his assistant what the animal was and was told it was a lion. Hence the place was called the "Lion City" (i.e. Singapura) from that point on.
Actual misplaced wildlife: there is a herd of South American 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 and in France.
- 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-hunting—and squirrel-eating—to the UK, specifically targeting the Greys, so that the Reds have a chance to thrive again. There are also efforts going on to help the native Pine Marten recover by using it as a natural population controller against the Greys - Pine Martens and Red Squirrels developed as species at around the same time as each other, with Red Squirrels preferring to live in the trees to avoid their natural predator, the Pine Marten, who mostly lives on the ground. Grey Squirrels prefer to live on the ground as well, meaning that they'd be ample prey for the Marten.
Rhesus macaques were released into the Everglades by a tour boat operator to enhance his "Jungle Cruise", not, as is often claimed, by the creators of the one Tarzan movie filmed there.
- 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 now we do have potentially man-eating snakes.
- The same is true for several species of parrots/parakeets in various areas.
The rise of various "Beast of X" sightings and rumours circulating in rural northern England roughly coincides with a tightening of regulations on keeping large predators as pets. This is probably not a coincidence.
There are many sightings of "black panthers" and maned lions in North America and Australia. Some fall under "Phantom cats", a cryptozoological phenomenon revolving around large wild cats being sighted outside their indigenous environments. In Australia, at least, invasive wild cats are a legitimate problem. Since lions and other large carnivores can be legally kept as pets in many US states, at least some reported sightings in the US are also genuine.
It is widely believed that the countryside surrounding Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire supports a thriving wallaby population.
- And aside of the wallabies there are Japanese sika deer all over the place, American gray squirrels driving native red squirrels into extinction and more Père David's deer, Chinese water deer and Reeves's muntjacs there than in their native China. British mammal fauna is completely FUBAR. Even rabbits weren't native to Britain until the Normans introduced them as game animals. Native British hares have mostly been displaced into isolated mountains and marshes by the fast-breeding continental coneys.
Some introduced species have become so widespread, their presence can be felt all over the world. One of the most ubiquitous, the rat, has spread so relentlessly that biologists haven't got a clue what sort of habitat their wild ancestors originally came from.
- The most widespread and familiar rat is the Norway rat (also called the brown rat). While, like any inhabitable place, there are rats in Norway today, it's definitely not their original, indigenous location. They were called Norway rats by an English biologist in the 18th century, when the brown rat didn't even exist in Norway.
You wouldn't expect to see gray whales on the coast of Israel, would you?
Dromedary camels are native to the North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where they are now completely domesticated; it's generally accepted that they've been extinct in the wild for at least 2000 years. The only feral population is in Australia, where they were introduced in the mid-1800s as pack animals.
- For a time, there was a small population of feral camels in the western United States, thanks to the short-lived efforts of the United States Camel Corps, which used camels to help survey the uncharted (and very arid) American Southwest in the 1850s. The last reported sighting of a wild camel in the US was in Texas in 1941. The camels did quite well when first released (the original camels that all modern species descend from evolved in the American Southwest and some of the brush is perfectly suited for them to eat), but their numbers were too small to establish a lasting feral population like horses did.
Many domestic species are like this: wild (actually feral) 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, pigs, and pigeons 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, Texas, 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. Horses have no such history in Australia, though, and brumbies (feral horses) have become a pest.
Non-native dolphins, sharks and seals sometimes turn up off the Atlantic coast of Britain.
A Bull Shark was once caught in Alton, Illinois.
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 top of that, some historians believe that pigs that escaped from the Spaniards spread many of the diseases that devastated indigenous populations throughout the Americas.
In June 2011, a young emperor penguin ended up on the coast of New Zealand (where there are penguins, just different species).
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's natural habitat, the Arctic Circle.
Beluga Whales rarely visit the Thames Estuary in England; one affectionately named Benny showed up on his own in 2018, and appears to have made the Estuary his home.
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 200 million strong and a major pest.
Fish also get misplaced—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not—in various rivers and streams around the world. In North America, numerous species of Asian carp have infested lakes and rivers across the United States, and on occasion so have northern snakeheads. Alligator gar, native to the Southeast United States, have been found in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkmenistan and Singapore. The South American arapaima has been introduced to lakes and rivers in Thailand and Malaysia. There are varying reasons for this, from fish owned by private collectors escaping or being released into the wild, introduced to remove pest species or as part of conservation efforts.
- Still other species have sneaked into rivers because their eggs or hatchlings got mixed in with the rocks and mud used as ballast in some types of boat. This is why lampreys are now a serious pest in many major U.S. rivers and parts of the Great Lakes.
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 in most places (though not in Australia), 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 all right. The fallow deer used to live in most of Europe until an ice age drove it all the way back to Turkey and beyond. Then the Romans came along and they apparently liked the deer so much they introduced the animals in, well, most of Europe.
The old "Parisian Sewer Rat" carnival sideshow gig. If it's not a silly-looking rubber/plastic monster rat, it's typically a nutria, which are native to marshlands in South America.
Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, has played host to a herd of bison for nearly a century. The bison were initially introduced to the island by a film crew in the 1920s and were simply left behind when filming wrapped up. Thanks to a lack of major predators the herd ballooned to a population of nearly 600 at its highest. Current numbers sit at around 150-200 while any excess bison are used to help repopulate the Great Plains in the American Midwest.
The famous problem of rabbits in Australia; they were initially brought over by colonists for food and hunting, and became so pervasive they damn near destroyed the Australian ecosystem. Same story with foxes, which have the additional problem of being predators and eating the native species.
- Rabbits were also originally introduced to Great Britain, probably by the Normans who considered such "coneys" tasty. They weren't nearly as destructive in this case, as the British Isles already had their own native hare and rabbit species as well as predators that fed on them; native species of lagomorph did, however, suffer a great loss of home range to the imported newcomers, such that several are now confined to shrunken niches of swampland or mountain terrain.
A number of non-native game animals were introduced in various places of the USSR to diversify the hunting (or for other purposes), with varying degrees of success.
- "Raccoon dog" or tanuki west of Urals. Success, since they did live there and went extinct only several thousand years ago.
- Nutria or coypu or "South American swamp beaver". They thrive on farms, but don't store food and can't survive long winters in the wild. By now they live only in Azerbaijan.
- Ostriches on the Black Sea coast. Partial success by 1941, but the project was abandoned because of the war and never revisited.
- Skunks. Failure.
- Common North American raccoon. Success in Belarus, Azerbaijan and a small area in southern Russia.
- For the same reason — to diversify huntable game — raccoons were introduced in Germany in 1930s. Later several dozen escaped from a fur farm. Today they thrive all over Germany.
16th century chronicles from Novgorod, Russia, state that in 1581 "...ferocious beasts crocodiles came out of the river and blocked the road, bit many people, people were terrified and prayed to God all over the land..." Some historians write it off as an allegoric description of the grave events at the czar's court. Others believe the crocodiles were being delivered from Egypt via Syria for somebody's private zoo or zoos and escaped. They didn't survive the winter.
A crocodile, nicknamed "Sifis" by the locals, lived in Crete, Greece from summer 2014 until spring 2015 (he died after a particularly long winter).
The common pheasant, originally native to southwestern Asia, began being introduced to other parts of the Northern Hemisphere in Roman times. Less destructive than many of the above examples, it's blended into ecosystems of Europe and North America so seamlessly that it's now the state bird of South Dakota, despite being unheard of on the continent before 1881. Ironically, captive-bred lines of pheasants released for hunting have mostly replaced wild pheasants in their native country of Georgia, making this a case of an introduced species supplanting itself.
There's now a concentrated effort to introduce rhinoceros to Australia in an attempt to save them from rampant poaching.
In 1810 in Cumberland, England, there was a mysterious beast described as a large sandy brown striped animal, resembling both a dog and a cat, slaughtering sheep and drinking their blood, leading to it being dubbed the Vampire Dog of Ennerdale. It's now believed it was a thylacine, escaped from one of the many unlicensed travelling menageries of the time.
The exact origins of the domestic chicken aren't clear, but it's likely they're all descended from the red junglefowl, probably hybrid with the grey junglefowl, native to India and south-east Asia. Despite being technically misplaced almost everywhere, they have become the most numerous bird in the world.
Tanaxpillo, usually known as "La isla de los monos" ("the island of monkeys" in Spanish) on Lake Catemaco, Mexico, is home to a colony of stump-tailed macaques from South Asia which were introduced on the place as part of a study regarding the species and its habitat.
In Brazil, an activist painted her body in protest to Amazon Rainforest fires, portraying the rainforest on fire along with its flora, but with a giraffe included for some reason. Naturally, it lead to a Memetic Mutation.
It is common for geographically-themed areas in zoos to display a few animals that do not actually live in whatever the highlighted region is. (Random example: pygmy marmosets in the Bronx Zoo's Congo Gorilla Forest.) Though signage will usually provide information on a species' correct biogeography, thus subverting this trope.

Aversions and Parodies