Discussion Main / FantasticFaunaCounterpart

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• The numerous times anteaters have evolved is an excellent example of how convergent evolution works: many unrelated mammals have independently evolved narrow snouts, powerful curved claws and long sticky tongues for feeding on ants and termites and breaking into their hives: these include the true anteaters of South America (distant relatives of sloths), the aardvarks of Africa (a distant relative of elephants and manatees), the pangolins of Asia (scaly mammals thought to be related to carnivorans more than anything else), the echidnas of Australia (egg-laying monotremes), and the numbats (marsupials). The sloth bears of India also evolved some anteater-like traits (large curved claws to break anthills, elongated snouts), though they are not as specialized as the others, and still complement their diet with more typical bear-like food like fruit, honey and carrion.
• The most common large, herding plains herbivores in Africa are antelopes. In Australia, however, this niche is instead filled by kangaroos. Antelopes and kangaroos also fill similar niches to deer in wooded environments, and kangaroos were often compared to deer in the journals of the first Europeans to visit Australia.
• The aye-aye lemur is in a way a Madagascan equivalent of a woodpecker, as it bores through bark with its sharp incisors to feed on grubs and insects that tunnel in the wood.
• The mongoose can be seen as this to the weasel: both are long-bodied small predators adapted to chasing small prey down their burrows. However, they belong to completely different branches of the carnivoran family tree: while weasels are more closely related to dogs, mongooses are more closely related to cats.
• Hummingbirds fill the niche of flying nectar-feeders in the American continent, which is filled by large insects, primarily moths, in other parts of the world. In the deserts of North America, certain kinds of bat fill this role instead, and have developed long, sticky tongues very similar to a hummingbird's to feed on nectar.
• Baboons, mandrills and drills fill a similar niche as wolves and other canids, and are essentially the primate equivalent of wolves. This is especially apparent with their skull shape, which is essentially a primate skull stretched out into a caniform shape.
• Cranes, storks, and herons are three distinct groups of birds that all evolved long legs, necks and bills due to their similar habitat and diet (wading birds living in wetlands, mostly eating small vertebrates). Each family is more closely related to certain smaller waterbirds than to one another — cranes to crakes and coots, storks to boobies and cormorants, and herons to ibises and pelicans.
• With jaguars native to the Americas, tigers native to Asia, and lions native to Africa, and all being the feline apex predators of their respective continents, they can be seen as Fantastic Fauna Counterparts/Palette Swaps of each other.
• Certain prehistoric animals filled niches that modern animals now occupy:
  • A notable case are the pterosaurs, who convergently evolved many similarities with birds of today, such as ones that sieved food from water like a flamingo, or ones with throat pouches like pelicans for catching fish. The azdarchids, a group of very large pterosaurs adapted for moving around on land, filled a niche very similar to that now held by cranes, storks and herons, just scaled up to the size of a giraffe.
  • Chalicotheres were prehistoric, knuckle-walking, odd-toed ungulates that were essentially horses trying to be gorillas (or from a certain perspective, a literal Donkey Kong). They also filled the same ecological niche in the Old World as giant ground sloths did in the New World, being large, slow-moving, knuckle-walking herbivores with big claws on their front limbs.
  • The long-necked, long-legged Paraceratherium was essentially a rhino adapted to fill the niche of the sauropod dinosaurs, and giraffes later adopted many of these same traits.
  • Aquatic vertebrates have repeatedly developed a number of similar traits — in particular, sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins are habitually used in science textbooks to show convergent evolution. Similarly, the elongated primitive whale Basilosaurus was essentially a mammalian mosasaur.
  • Prionosuchus, a large Triassic amphibian, greatly resembled a crocodile and likely filled their niche as aquatic ambush hunters ages before the true crocodiles evolved.
  • Many Mesozoic mammals and protomammals are very similar to modern species. Examples include the aquatic Castorocauda that had a paddle-like tail similar to a beaver, the gliding Volaticotherium that glided like a flying squirrel, or the stocky dinosaur-eating Repenomamus that are similar to honey badgers of today.
  • The shape of Tyrannosaurus skulls and close relatives indicate that it was something of a precursor for all modern land predators, with it being one of the earliest predators to have binocular vision, which was so good that it even surpassed that of modern hawks. In a way, that makes all modern carnivores (canids, bears, and felids) FantasticFaunaCounterparts of the tyrannosaurs, who could be considered a prototype of modern land predators.
• African wild dogs can be seen as an African equivalent to gray wolves^note though there actually is a wolf native to Africa, but it is morphologically more similar to a jackal, to the point that it was mistaken as one before being reclassified. They are both intelligent social canines with rivalries with big cats (mountain lions for wolves, lions for African wild dogs.) They have similarities in pack structure, with packs being centered around a monogamous pair, and older offspring either dispersing or staying to help raise younger siblings. African wild dogs hunt antelope, which are superficially similar to the deer wolves hunt. You can also argue that spotted hyenas have some similarities to wolves, especially the extinct dire wolf, although they are not actually canines.
  • Mammalian carnivores resembling dogs have evolved so many times in the fossil record that it probably deserves a term like carcinization (caninization?), with mesonychids (carnivorous ungulates), creodonts (primitive mammal carnivores), Tasmanian tigers (marsupials), amphicyonids (the "bear dogs") and hyenas both modern and extinct being examples of animals that assumed a form uncannily similar to true canines. Even baboons and mandrills have a similar skull shape. Even the gorgonopsids and therocephalians, primitive mammal-relatives (therapsids) from before the time of the dinosaurs, were rather dog-like in size and body proportions.
• Carcinisation is a very specific convergent evolution phenomenon where crustaceans just keep taking on crab-like shapes, whether true crabs or not.
• Due to them being the only big cats that live in social groups, lions are basically the feline equivalent of wolves.
• It's been theorized that it's possible for some alien life to look superficially similar to Earth life because of convergent evolution. We already see this on Earth with some animal species looking similar to other species they are not closely related to. Starfish Aliens are also probably a thing also. It's not a either/or thing.

These are all just real animals that resemble other animals, not a fictional animal invented along the lines of a real animal.

They do this in Penn Zero Part Time hero. There's a four-legged hammerhead shark in one episode, which appears in another episode, and is revealed to talk!

Do mythical creatures that turn out to be garbled descriptions of real animals count?

Might be subject to "Binomium ridiculus"

Can we get a screenshot of the dog-like worms from Spongebob?