Call a Smeerp a Rabbit
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"Fur the color of dead grass conceals a hard, scaly exoskeleton protecting this flesh-eater with few known predators. Its head is concealed by a split upper and lower jaw, and it is from between these that it keeps careful watch on prey through well protected sunken eyeholes."
—Feral Croc bestiary entry, Final Fantasy XII
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It doesn't look like a duck, act like a duck, or quack like a duck. But everyone around you insists it's a duck.
Just as Speculative Fiction authors like to give regular animals funny names, they also like to invent wild new creatures, give them the names of familiar animals, and plunk them down into their settings to run amok. The differences between the smeerps and their real-world counterparts can range from mild -- such as "dogs" that have spiked backs and three tails in addition to all their normally canine traits -- to extreme, such as bipedal, poison-spitting, frilled reptiles with saddles being referred to as "horses".
When used in non-visual media, the problem is that unless the author is very explicit right up front about the fact that the animal in question is quite different from what the word normally means, the reader may be hundreds of pages in before he runs across something that just doesn't make sense, which can be jarring. It shatters the Suspension of Disbelief when you have to suddenly change your mental image of the hero's faithful dog to include scales and a forked tongue.
A common trope in RPGs, especially when naming monsters.
There is some Truth in Television here--early biologists and naturalists would name newly discovered animals after the ones they were familiar with due to a resemblance in how it looks, sounds, or acts. This is why, just as an example, you'd need to distinguish between American Bison and Eurasian Bison. Often, it would be a very happy coincidence if the similarly named animals were actually found to be genetically related once Science Marched On.
And for whatever reason, everyone thought that every animal would have an "alien" equivalent. The closest equivalent to outer space back then was the ocean. Have you noticed how many sea creatures have names like "Sea/Mer + Name of Land Animal", IE Sea Lion, Cow, Horse, Slug, and Cucumber? RPGs like to run with this too. Note that quite a few cases are due to translation errors (see Dinosaurs Are Dragons for a specific example of this.)
Then again, maybe the very first naturalists were just lazy. Or apathetic.
The inverse of Call a Rabbit A Smeerp. When already fictional creatures bear little resemblance to their mythological counterparts, it is, depending on the case in question, either Our Monsters Are Different or Call a Pegasus A Hippogriff. Occasionally might be related to Translation Convention. See also Horse of a Different Color and Space X. Not to be confused with In Name Only.
Anime & Manga
- Plue from Rave Master is the source of endless confusion for the protagonist. He's white, has a horn-like nose, eats lollipops, and alters between walking on two legs and four, and has on one occasion been indecisive over his own gender. So far people have accused him of being a dog, an insect, a cat (though the person who guessed this went on to guess a specific breed that was a dog anyway), a water demon, a snowman, or an alien. (Word of God cheerfully insists he's a dog, though.) Additionally, the group occasionally travel around in a cart pulled by a "horse"... which is purple, bipedal and reptilian in appearance, and constantly shakes its head back and forth rapidly. And let's not even get started on Griff...
- Plue gets this treatment again when Lucy summons him in Fairy Tail. At least Natsu and Happy doubt her when she insists that she has summoned a dog spirit. They seem to give up on arguing with her almost immediately though.
- Admittedly, Griff is the only one to insist that the thing pulling his cart is a horse. It is lampshaded several times by the other characters.
- That horse also has a trunk and makes a weird engine-like sound.
- Biomega features bizarre technorganic Big Creepy Crawlies referred to as horses. Then again, the people who ride them seem to have a very loose definition of the word, as this is also what they call the main character's motorcycle.
- The "horseclaws" from Nausicaa of the Valley of The Wind are large flightless birds used for transportation After the End. In the manga, one of the older characters mentions hearing of a time when the word "horse" described a mammal. Nausicaa looks shocked.
- The Red Elk from Princess Mononoke does not resemble an actual elk or wapiti.
- Though the aliens of Sgt Frog do look somewhat amphibious, they are far closer to the standard Little Green Men than frogs.
- Could be a result of stylized art (look at the humans in the series) rather than them not looking like frogs.
- Animals in (on) Nagasarete Airantou may as well be animals in name only. Lampshaded heavily by Ikuto in the beginning but he's since taken it in stride (especially those cotton balls they call "sheep"). Whenever a "real" animal appears it is given such "real" detail that even animals of the same species on Airantou find it horrifying.
- Rental Magica had it Played for Laughs right in the first episode (TV order), on account of [[http://blog.seiha.org/images/rental1/rental1
{{quote| Itsuki: (panicking) You said it was a dog!
Nekoyashiki: (very calmly) [[http://blog.seiha.org/images/rental1/rental1