#metazooa.com

[lilacface]

Always wanted to learn the taxonomic names for animals because my inner thesaurus needs it.

I found a daily puzzle that gives you 20 attempts to guess it's animal.

Not shown: if you click the family name it'll give you a blurb from wikipedia, which gives good hints.

its real fun.

[kholden83]

Now that #163 is live, I can complain about #162 without spoiling anyone

So, you see here how it shows Cheetahs as not part of Felinae? I thought they were part of Felinae, wikipedia says they're part of Felinae.

So, for context, Metazooa actually has a fairly small database of critters, and you need to put them in by common name. It's straight-up missing a whole bunch of animals that are not that obscure and it makes weird assumptions about what animal you mean sometimes. For example, it thinks you mean the Australian Magpie if you type 'magpie', which are a passerine bird, not closely related to other birds called 'magpie' which are corvids. And it doesn't have the others at all. Or another common Australian bird, the magpie-lark.

Looking at that tree, and then looking at the tree on wikipedia, the only felids that were unaccounted for were genus Neofelis, clouded leopards. I typed leopard, the only result was the regular ones, in Genus Panthera. I gave up and pressed the "reveal rank" button that costs three guesses. Never even been tempted to use it before.

When I fucking googled the revealed "Acinonychinae" on Duck Duck Go, I could then tell it was a cheetah, but even there most resources were saying it was part of Felinae. If I'd known cheetah's genus off the top of my head, I might have recognised it without the googling. But anyway.

From reading some of the pages I found, I discovered we didn't know cheetahs were 'small' cats until we did DNA on them in the 90's, but that was the fucking 90s, at least 25 years ago. Did they assemble their database from a 30 year old hardcopy encyclopaedia? They're clearly not using wikipedia despite linking to it.

I mean it's still fun, but the limited species database can be frustrating and confusing at times, and they straight-up got it wrong this time