I always thought, despite them once being called “koala bears”, that the “bear” part had been dropped and that everyone knows they’re marsupials and in no way related to bears. However, I’ve been obsessed with them since I was a child, so I can’t really gauge what the general, non koala obsessed public knows or doesn’t know.
What got me thinking about this - because I know you’re all kicking off the sheets wondering- is that I just saw a rerun of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon mentions his love of “koala bears” (and his “koala bear face”). I’ve seen this ep countless times and it never fails to rankle. Not because I’m a koala fan girl (though I am!) but because no one as smart as Sheldon would call them that. In fact, I can picture him lecturing someone about it if they made that mistake. So, maybe it’s not as common knowledge as I once thought (?). A real life SC would never make that error but obviously actor Jim Parsons is only saying the words that have been written for him. You’d think a show that has actual consultants to help get the complicated science right would know that koalas are not bears.
Wait, what . . .? I know (think?) Red Pandas are actually in the raccoon family but how are panda bears “not pandas”? Is a panda some other type of critter that the black and white bear is named for?
I didn’t know they weren’t bears. Actually, I may have run across that factoid before and just couldn’t retain it, because my eyes keep on telling me they are bears.
I got to hold one once. Oh he was the cutie-wootiest thing!
That’s the old and incorrect science, IIRC. Now scientists have learned through DNA that pandas are another type of bear, not part of a different family.
I’m pretty sure I’ve known for most my life that they weren’t bears. I mean, they don’t really even look like bears, do they? At least they don’t look like what I think of as bears. Sheldon calling them “koala bears” doesn’t bug me though. Something can be called a bear without taxonomically being a true bear. Like peanuts aren’t true nuts, but we still call them that. I guess I could maybe see an argument that it isn’t in Sheldon’s character, perhaps, to refer to them colloquially as “koala bears,” him being more the personality that would interject a statement like “you know they aren’t really bears” but, who knows. Maybe he just grew up with calling them koala bears.
Exactly. There are two separate issues here. Calling them “koala bears” is not the same as believing they’re actually bears. Granted there may be people who think they’re bears, but using the term doesn’t prove anything. Nobody believes sea lions are lions, nobody believes prairie dogs are dogs. Kangaroo mice are not kangaroos, Tasmanian tigers are not tigers, and flying foxes are not foxes. My using those terms doesn’t prove my ignorance about taxonomy.
As I remember it, many of the things called nuts (walnuts, pine nuts, Brazil nuts…) aren’t, just like many of the things called berries (raspberries, strawberries, mulberries, blackberries…) aren’t either, botanically speaking. So it seems natural to me that marsupial bears are just koalas, not real bears.
But, but. . . aren’t those you listed the actual names? I mean, obviously not their scientific name, but, for instance, aren’t sea lions always called “sea lions”? Prairie dogs don’t have any other name (that I know of), peoples’ knowledge that they’re not of the dog family notwithstanding.Koala bear was never their “official” name, was it? I know I certainly first thought that was their actual name, 40+ years ago.
No. Not when they are called an eared seal or an otary.
Not that it matters, they’re just names that weren’t selected to be unambiguous for scientific purposes.
What about something like a “killer whale,” which is not technically a whale, but a dolphin, and is also more and more commonly referred to as an “orca.”? Then there’s American buffalo, which we all know are actually bison, and we use both terms.
