History Main / FantasticFaunaCounterpart

** The grox is a 5-meter-long extraterrestrial reptile-like animal whose highly aggressive nature is made up for by its extreme value as livestock (very delicious and nutritious meat, high environmental adaptability, [[ExtremeOmnivore extreme omnivory]]), such that it's very widespread across the myriad worlds of Imperium, taking the role that cattle do in real life.

* ''{{VideoGame/Valheim}}'': Lox are enormous crosses between lizards and musk oxen that can be domesticated for their fur and meat, but also used as AwesomeButImpractical mounts.

** The so called wolves that attack the Harfoots look a lot like entelodonts.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Amphibia}}'' (the page image): The show is set in a world where frogs and toads are the main equivalent to humans and everything else is scaled accordingly. Thus, the frogs keep spiders as dog-like pets, ride giant snails similarly to horses or donkeys, and farm giant caterpillars with cow-like colorations for dairy (i.e. it's implied, though not explicitly stated, that they create cheese from the caterpillars' mucus). Meanwhile, there are flies that act like birds (actual birds also exist, but they are [[GiantFlyer monstrous predators that eat frogs]]), and hedgehogs that hunt in packs and cackle like hyenas. Also, an entire episode revolves around a caterpillar acting and looking like a cat.

* ''FantasticFaunaCounterpart/{{Serina}}''

* ''WebOriginal/HamstersParadise'':

* ''WebOriginal/{{Amphiterra}}'', being an alternate Earth where frogs, instead of reptiles and mammals, became the dominant species of the planet, has frog versions of many different animals of our timeline, such as the gibbon-like tree frixel, the tyrannosaur-like catastrophic fraggon, and the mammoth-like foaming squander.

* ''WebOriginal/{{Snaiad}}'' has shades of these among its creatures: the Kahydrons are akin to canids (though some of the larger species are omnivores similar to bears and one species is a full-on herbivore like a panda), the Fuckers are ambush predators like big cats, and the Allotaurs are akin to rhinos and elephants. However, as the author repeatedly states, all these similarities are only skin-deep, and many vertebrates on Snaiad have no close Earth analog, such as the tiny insect-sized vertebrates called Picotheres. There are also no flying vertebrates: the niche of birds is instead occupied by invertebrate organisms similar to flying slugs.

* The opening narration of ''WesternAnimation/HowToTrainYourDragon'' refers to dragons as the pests of the island Berk, comparing them to mice or mosquitoes. In contrast, the ending narration [[spoiler:refers to them as the pets of Berk, comparing them to ponies or parrots]].

When it comes to WorldBuilding, writers often want to populate their world with a fantastic fauna different from our own. However, at the same time they want this fauna to be somewhat believable and/or familiar to the viewers. One way to achieve this is to make some of the fantasy species the exact counterparts of a real-world animal. Thus, we end up with things like giant insects flocking like pigeons, giant reptiles hunting in packs and howling like wolves, or tentacled creatures swinging from trees like monkeys. In a sense, each species acts like an {{Expy}} or a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute of a different species.

* ''ComicBook/DeffSkwadron'': Squigs, ferocious fungal organisms that follow Orks around everywhere, appear in variants resembling various Earth animals such as squigsharks, messenger squigeons (spherical critters with birdlike wings) and squighawks (PteroSoarer-like avians).

** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkToThePast A Link to the Past]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkBetweenWorlds A Link Between Worlds]]'' have a number of creatures in the Dark World and Lorule that take the place of more familiar and mundane beings in Hyrule, typically moving and attacking in the same way but with more alien and monstrous appearances. For instance, the crow enemies encountered in Hyrule are replaced by Dactos, small {{Ptero Soarer}}s, while large bats common in Hyrulean dungeons are replaced by Chasupas, giant eyeballs with bat wings. This also occurs for Hyrulean monsters; the octopus-like Octoroks, for instance, are replaced by the more alien-looking, antennaed Slaroks, while the fishlike Zora are replaced the cyclopean Ku.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Cars}}'': In a world of living vehicles, farming machines take place of cattle -- tractors act like cows, gently grazing on wheat fields and tipping over when someone honks at them, and Frank the combine harvester acts like an aggressive bull, attacking cars who enter his field. There are also tiny VW Beetles that take the place of insects, and the credits use submarines in place of [[HereThereBeDragons whales and sea monsters shown on old maps]].

Works with their own pages:

* ''WebOriginal/{{Serina}}'':
** Many of the evolved descendants of canaries become analogues of other birds (such as the falcon-like falconary or the moa-like serestriders), of mammals (the viviparous canaribou or the quadrupedal grazing serezelles) and of non-avian dinosaurs (such as the pseudornithopods or the ''T. rex''-sized, flightless tyrant serins). Eventually, some of the more derived birds cease to resemble avians at all: the changeling birds in particular develop larval states similar to insects, and through further specialization their more derived lineages give rise to permanently aquatic, gill-breathing fishlike neotenic forms or the botfly-like squicks with parasitic larval young.
** The other primary groups of vertebrates in the setting are the tribbets, land-dwelling fish descended from guppies. Their most basic groups are analogous to mudskippers and frogs, while more advanced ones become similar to lizards and snakes. One group, the furry warm-blooded tribbetheres, eventually becomes three-legged mammal-analogues resembling rodents, canids and ungulates. One particular type, the antlears, specifically become a deer equivalent, just with heavily keratinized, branched ears instead of true antlers.
** During the last ice age of the Ultimocene, a giant, trunked bird called the neckbeard and its tribbethere predator the sabertooth circuagodog become obvious expies of wooly mammoths and saber-toothed cats. There is also a herbivorous knuckle-walking tribbethere called the treeskinner that closely resembles a chalicothere.
** The jackal carnackle acts similarly to an arctic fox, following around large predators such as bumblebears to share their kills.
** Seastrikers are very similar to orcas due to being large, [[ItCanthink highly intelligent]] aquatic predators that live in matrilineal social groups and [[BreadEggsMilkSquick play with their prey before killing it]]. Their descendants, the daydreamers, take this resemblance further by living in cultural groups distinguished by choice of diet, with the fishers, pastoralists, and whalers roughly corresponding to the resident, transient, and offshore orca populations of western North America respectively, while the warmonger whalers' habit of tipping ice floes to prey on seal-like molodonts resting on them is based on a common hunting tactic used by polar orcas.

** It's a default game assumption that housecats exist in the setting. However, there's also the pseudodragon, which has gone from being merely a [[ShoulderSizedDragon cat-sized dragon]] to essentially a scaly flying cat: it naps a lot, it enjoys stalking mice, it'll be @ familiar for a wizard but is very independent and fussy, and so on.

** ''Literature/ManAfterManAnAnthropologyOfTheFuture'' has the descendants of ''humans'' taking on these niches. There are grazing ape-like humans, sabertoothed carnivorous humans, manatee-like aquatic humans and small parasitic humans to name a few, with tons of UncannyValley to boot. The original set of examples is explicitly invoked in-universe -- after most of Earth's megafauna goes extinct and humans are the only large animals left, the far-future civilization uses the human genome as a template to create species intended to fill the niches of bygone bears, tundra grazers, plains grazers and forest apes. Later cases, however, are simply uncanny examples of parallel evolution.

* ''WebOriginal/MultituberculateEarth'' is an AlternateHistory SpeculativeBiology project about a world where [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multituberculata multituberculates]], rather than therians, became the dominant mammals groups in the Cenozoic. Some animal groups follow a vaguely similar trajectory to some real life groups in the early Cenozoic at least, though never perfectly (especially since they don't resemble their analogues in our timeline physically:
** Ptilodontoideans essentially double both as creodonts and primates, being the first wave of large predatory mammals (later displaced by more omnivorous carnivores) but also predominantly arboreal with several frugivorous species. Both carnivorous and frugivorous forms largely disappear in the Oligocene in the norther continents, with the latter surviving in Africa and then rafting to South America, Madagascar and the Caribbean like monkeys and lemurs did. However, they also include the flying pteroectypodids, which essentially are a mixture between squirrels and corvids as flying omnivores that come to rule the northern canopies; the notoptilodontoideans, which dispersed across the southern continents and become increasingly carnivorous in a blend between marsupial range and sparassodont carnivory; and the caribboptilodontoideans, which are basically multituberculate solenodonts.
** Microcosmodontids and eucosmodontids are basically like carnivorans, being the more generalised carnivores that won over the more hypercarnivorous ones. However, microcosmodontids also include a variety of mole like forms and eucosmodontids branched out both as mouse analogues and as flying pterosaur-like species.
** Meniscoessids pretty much are like our condylarths, a brief moment of success before being constrained to the Balkanatolia island. Probably the straight example.
** Taeniolabidids begin as pantodont and uintathere analogues (dominant large hrbivores across the northern continents) before taking to the seas. However, unlike sea cows they also returned to freshwater successfully acting as the dominant aquatic herbivores in lakes, rivers and seas, and still return to land to raise their young, which allowed some to become fully terrestrial in the Caribbean (making them also analogous to our Cairbbean ground sloths).
** Lambdopsalids diversified as hooved mammals similar to deer and antelopes (albeit with two hooves in the forelimb, on in the backlimbs and no antlers/horns), but also include a variety of small digging species analogous to bunnies or even mole rats.
** Gondwanatheres spread from India into Asia and North America where they became the dominant herbivores, mirroring recent hypothesis about perossodactyl evolution. However, they also include the African galulatheriids, which are more analogous to elephants, hyraxes and other herbivorous afrotheres (with a few marine forms like desmostylians) and ferugliotheriids, which brief spread to North America and Europe from Central America before dying out in the Oligocene, basically analogous to the local early horse and rhino relatives. In South America and Australia they are basically ground sloth and diprotodont analogues respectively, though galulatheriids seem to take after pyrotheres and capybaras in being semi-aquatic animals whose ancestors crossed the South Atlantic from Africa.
** Kogaionids are basically analogous to tenrecs, ptolemaiidans, african creodonts and ''Anatoliadelphys'', being the dominant insectivores and carnivores in Africa, Madagascar and Balkanatolia. However, they also produced marine forms, the whale or seal like dagontheres, and flying insulonycteriids that act as pteranodontian pterosaurs.
** Dagontheres, monotremes and necrolestids technically mirror the evolution of cetaceans, but they still need to come ashore to reproduce, with the former being more like leopard seals in being both carnivorous and filter-feeders.
** Dryolestoids are essentially analogous to both groups of dominant mammals in our world's South America, Antarctica and Australia, marsupials and meridiungulates, though they also produced sengi-like runners, bat-like flyers, marine mammals and long necked herbivores loking like a mixture between a dog and a sauropod.

* ''WesternAnimation/CloudyWithAChanceOfMeatballs2'': The characters discover that the FLDSMDFR has created an entire ecosystem of sentient food items ("foodimals") that often resemble real-world creatures, mostly with PunnyNames. There are flamingo-like mangos ("flamangos"), chimpanzee-like shrimps ("shrimpanzees"), elephant-like watermelons ("watermelophants"), hippopotamus-like potatoes ("hippotatomuses") and so forth.

* ''Film/{{Avatar}}'': Pandora's wildlife has a number of species that have a clear counterpart on Earth. The Na'vi are humans, of course, but the thanator is essentially a giant panther, the titanothere is a rhinoceros, the prolemuris are monkeys, the direhorses are [[HorseOfADifferentColor horses]], etc. The extended cut also features sturmbeest, which for all intents and purposes are buffalo (even being hunted by the Na'vi on horseback to further their resemblance to Native American hunters). The sequel, ''Film/AvatarTheWayOfWater'' continues this trend with Pandora's oceans, with clear analogues for dolphins (the ilu, although their body shape is strongly plesiosaur-like), sharks (the akula, the name of which is even Russian for shark), and whales (the tulkans).