[QUOTE=Ronald C. Semone]
Maybe I’m being dense, but I still don’t get it. If I went to the wilds of Alaska and captured a caribou and put it in my backyard next to a reindeer I had bought from a herd being commercially raised, could you tell the difference?
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You might not be able to, but a mammalogist, or a reindeer herder, probably could. There are a number of subspecies of reindeer/caribou, though I am not sure how distinct they are (and I had not been aware of the possible interbreeding between domestic reindeer and Alaskan caribou that yabob mentions). At any rate, I would expect that someone knowledgeable most likely could tell them apart.
[QUOTE=Colibri]
The early colonists were not naturalists. They very frequently made such mistakes. Many of them may not have been familiar with the European counterparts.
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Come to think of it, were common names even common at that time? I can well believe that e.g. a blue tit or a red-tailed kite would have different names in different parts of England at the time.
[QUOTE=slaphead]
Come to think of it, were common names even common at that time? I can well believe that e.g. a blue tit or a red-tailed kite would have different names in different parts of England at the time.
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They certainly weren’t standardized, or “official.” Even today there are no official global standards for common names.