Field guide · nine specimens

Real animals that look fake, taken apart piece by piece

In 1799 a dried specimen from New South Wales reached George Shaw at the British Museum. It had a duck's bill, a beaver's tail and an otter's fur. Shaw described it anyway, and put his suspicion in print.

“impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure.”

George Shaw, The Naturalist's Miscellany, vol. 10 (1799)

The platypus was real, and so is the reflex. Real animals that look fake still get called photoshopped, or a hybrid animal generator result on first sight. None of them is a cross. Each is a single species that happens to carry a part we file under a different animal. So this page does what Shaw did with his scissors: it checks the seams. For each specimen, what it looks assembled from, what it actually is, and the job the borrowed-looking part does.

Group one

Borrowed heads: the bill, the trunk and the finger

The face is where the eye checks first, so a head that belongs to another animal is what gets a specimen accused of fraud. In all three cases the part is a feeding tool, and the animal it resembles is a coincidence.

Platypus swimming at the surface of a river in Queensland, one of the real animals that look fakeSPECIMEN 01

Platypus

Ornithorhynchus anatinus

Looks like

  • duck bill
  • beaver tail
  • otter body

Actually

An egg-laying mammal. With the echidna it is one of only two living monotreme lineages, the group that split from every other mammal before marsupials and placentals parted ways.

What the part is for

The bill is not a beak. It is soft, and packed with electroreceptors that pick up the muscle signals of prey while the animal hunts with its eyes shut. The tail stores fat, and the male carries a venomous spur on each ankle.

CC BY 1.0 · Peter Scheunis · source

Malayan tapir with black front half and white saddle, a real animal that looks fakeSPECIMEN 02

Malayan tapir

Tapirus indicus

Looks like

  • short elephant trunk
  • pig body
  • panda paint job

Actually

An odd-toed ungulate whose closest living relatives are horses and rhinoceroses. Four toes in front, three behind.

What the part is for

The trunk is the nose and upper lip fused into one grasping tool. It pulls leaves, sniffs, and works as a snorkel when the tapir walks along a river bottom. The two-tone coat breaks up the body outline in forest shade.

CC BY 4.0 · Jan Ebr · source

Wild aye-aye at night in Madagascar gripping a branch, showing its large ears and thin fingersSPECIMEN 03

Aye-aye

Daubentonia madagascariensis

Looks like

  • bat ears
  • rodent teeth
  • a twig for a middle finger

Actually

A lemur, and the world's largest nocturnal primate. Madagascar only.

What the part is for

It taps wood with the thin finger, listens for a hollow, gnaws in with incisors that never stop growing, and hooks the grub out with the same finger. The ears are the microphone. Local folklore reads the whole kit as an omen, which is part of why it is threatened.

CC BY 2.0 · nomis-simon · source

Group two

Borrowed bodies: stripes, necks and stilts

These three have ordinary faces on frames that seem to come from somewhere else. Each frame is a way of reaching food, or of not becoming it, in one particular landscape.

Two okapis grazing, showing zebra-striped legs on a dark chestnut bodySPECIMEN 04

Okapi

Okapia johnstoni

Looks like

  • zebra legs
  • deer body
  • giraffe tongue

Actually

The giraffe's only living relative. Western science did not describe it until 1901; the people of the Ituri Forest had always known it.

What the part is for

The stripes work as camouflage in dappled rainforest light, and may act as a follow-me marker for a calf behind its mother. The long dark tongue reaches its own eyes and ears, exactly as a giraffe's does.

CC BY-SA 4.0 · NasserHalaweh · source

Gerenuk standing upright on its hind legs in dry grass to browse, a real animal that looks made upSPECIMEN 05

Gerenuk

Litocranius walleri

Looks like

  • gazelle
  • a giraffe's neck bolted on

Actually

An East African antelope. Its Somali name means giraffe-necked.

What the part is for

The neck is a reach extension. A gerenuk stands straight up on its hind legs to browse bushes six to eight feet off the ground, and gets most of its water from the leaves, so it can live where the grazers below it cannot.

CC BY-SA 4.0 · Warren Garst (Colorado State University, via DPLA) · source

Maned wolf stretching, showing its red coat, dark mane and unusually long black legsSPECIMEN 06

Maned wolf

Chrysocyon brachyurus

Looks like

  • fox head
  • deer legs
  • black stockings

Actually

Neither a fox nor a true wolf. It sits alone in its own genus, in the grasslands of central South America.

What the part is for

The legs are a periscope. They lift the head above tall cerrado grass so the animal can see and be heard. Roughly half its diet is fruit, mostly the lobeira, which is not what a wolf-shaped animal is supposed to eat.

CC BY 2.0 · Neil McIntosh · source

Group three

Borrowed armour and ornaments: scales, tusks and a horn

Here the extra part is the whole identity. Take away the scales, the tusks or the tusk and you are left with a plain mammal. In all three the ornament is made of something ordinary, grown to an extraordinary length.

Sunda pangolin climbing along a branch, its overlapping keratin scales clearly visibleSPECIMEN 07

Sunda pangolin

Manis javanica

Looks like

  • pinecone
  • anteater tongue
  • reptile

Actually

A mammal, and the only one with scales. Despite the anteater look it is closer to the carnivores, cats and dogs included. Eight species live across Asia and Africa.

What the part is for

The scales are keratin, the same protein as your fingernails, and the animal rolls into a ball behind them. It has no teeth. The tongue reaches up to half its body length and does all the work an ant nest requires.

CC BY-SA 4.0 · Frendi Apen Irawan · source

Babirusa with upper tusks curving up through its snout and back toward its foreheadSPECIMEN 08

Babirusa

Babyrousa

Looks like

  • wild pig
  • antlers growing out of its face

Actually

A member of the pig family found only on Sulawesi and nearby islands. The name means pig-deer in Malay, for the antler-like tusks.

What the part is for

In males the upper canines start downward, then turn and grow up through the skin of the snout and curve back toward the forehead. They are display, not tools, and an old male's tusks can keep growing until they reach the skull.

CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mhlayson · source

Pod of narwhals at the surface of Arctic water with spiral tusks showing, a real animal that looks like a unicorn whaleSPECIMEN 09

Narwhal

Monodon monoceros

Looks like

  • beluga body
  • unicorn horn

Actually

An Arctic toothed whale in the same family as the beluga. The horn is a tooth: the left upper canine, grown out through the lip in a counter-clockwise spiral, up to about three metres long, mostly in males.

What the part is for

It is a sense organ. Seawater enters channels in the tusk and reaches nerves at its base; when researchers bathed the tusk in salt water and then fresh, the whale's heart rate changed. What a narwhal reads from that is still being worked out.

Public domain · Kristin Laidre, Polar Science Center, UW / NOAA · source

The pattern

Why evolution keeps building the same parts

Nine animals, and the borrowed-looking parts sort into a very short list: a probe for finding food, a reach for getting to it, a coat that hides the body, and a signal that says do not bother. A platypus bill and an aye-aye finger are both probes. A gerenuk neck and a tapir trunk are both reach. Zebra stripes on an okapi and a tapir's white saddle are both camouflage.

When two unrelated animals face the same problem in the same kind of place, they often end up with the same shape for the part that solves it. Biologists call it convergent evolution, and it is the reason a duck and a platypus both arrived at a flat, soft, sensitive bill for feeling around in murky water. The animal is not a copy. The part is an answer, and there are only so many good answers.

That is also why the names mislead. Duck-billed, giraffe-necked, pig-deer, sea unicorn: every one of them files a working organ under the animal we already knew. The organ came first. The comparison is ours, and it is the whole reason these animals look fake.

Probe

Platypus bill, aye-aye finger, pangolin tongue. Something that goes where the eyes cannot.

Reach

Gerenuk neck, tapir trunk, okapi tongue, maned wolf legs. A longer arm for the same meal.

Coat

Okapi stripes, tapir saddle, pangolin scales. Break up the outline or make it inedible.

Signal

Babirusa tusks, narwhal tusk. Grown past any practical size because someone is watching.

Try it

Rebuild three of them in the generator

The generator mixes eleven body parts from real species, which is roughly what Shaw accused nature of doing. These three recipes use only animals already in its library. Load one, keep the locked parts, and reroll the rest to see how far you can push it before it stops reading as the original.

Target · Okapi

Almost an Okapi

  • Red deer body
  • Giraffe head and mouth
  • Plains zebra legs
Load this recipe →

Target · Platypus

Almost a Platypus

  • Sea otter body and fur
  • Duck bill and feet
  • Beaver tail
Load this recipe →

Target · Narwhal

Almost a Narwhal

  • Bottlenose dolphin body and head
  • Asian elephant tusk as the extra
Load this recipe →

If you came here for a different kind of strange

None of these nine is a hybrid, but real crosses exist and are stranger than they sound. The page on real hybrid animals covers ligers, mules and wild crosses with the parents named. If what you wanted was plain odd rather than improbable, the ugly animals page asks the same question of a star-nosed mole and a blobfish. Four of the nine real animals that look fake above are also in the animal library, which has the okapi, the Malayan tapir, the Sunda pangolin and the narwhal among its species; search any of them by name. If you draw one of them, the hybrid drawing guide explains why the seams sit where they do. And for the hybrids people invented on purpose, the guide to mythical hybrid creatures gives the griffin, chimera and sphinx the same part-by-part treatment.

Where this comes from

Sources for these nine specimens

Every claim on a card traces to one of these. Zoo and museum species pages carry the natural history; the two papers carry the genome and the tusk experiment; Shaw carries his own doubt.