Random Animal Generator

What the random animal generator does

You want a random animal. Maybe for a quiz, maybe a game, maybe a drawing prompt, maybe just curiosity.

This gives you one. Press the button.

And then read on, because there is an entry in here that quietly admits the whole list has a problem, and the problem turns out to be one of the more interesting things in science.

How to use it

Tap Generate for a n animal, or a batch, and Copy takes them with you.

The animal that needs a parenthesis

Somewhere in this list, near the top of the alphabet, is an entry that reads:

American buffalo (bison)

Look at that bracket. Somebody had to put it there. Every list of animals in English has one and it is always in the same place, and it is there because the name is wrong.

There is no American buffalo. There never was.

Real buffalo are the Cape buffalo in Africa and the water buffalo in Asia. The enormous shaggy thing on the American plains is a bison, it is not closely related to either of them, and the only reason it is called a buffalo is that some Europeans turned up, saw a big cow-shaped animal, reached for the nearest big cow-shaped word they had, and never corrected themselves.

That was four hundred years ago. It is on the coins. It is in the songs. There is a city called Buffalo. The word has won so thoroughly that the animal's actual name has to be smuggled in afterwards, in a bracket, like a correction slipped under a door.

So the bracket is not sloppiness. The bracket is the whole problem in miniature.

Common names lie. Not occasionally. Constantly, and structurally, because a common name is not a decision anybody made. It is a habit that hardened.

Once you start looking you cannot stop. A koala bear is not a bear. A guinea pig is not a pig and is not from Guinea. A horned toad is a lizard. A jellyfish, a starfish, a crayfish and a cuttlefish are all not fish. A firefly is a beetle. A prairie dog is a rodent. A red panda is not a panda and is not closely related to the black and white one. An electric eel is not an eel. A mountain goat is not a goat.

Every one of those is a person, at some point, guessing, and the guess outliving them by centuries.

One cat, forty names, and a world record

Now the champion. This is a genuine Guinness World Record and it is my favourite one.

The record is for the mammal with the most names. It belongs to a single species of cat.

You know it. You know it several times over. It is the puma. It is also the cougar. It is also the mountain lion. It is also the panther, if you are in Florida. It is also the catamount, which is a squashed version of cat-of-the-mountain, if you are in New England.

Guinness counts more than forty names in English alone.

Not forty in all the world's languages. Forty in English.

The list runs: painter, ghost cat, deer tiger, red tiger, silver cat, painted cat, spotted cat, stone cat, screamer, mountain screamer, American lion, southern lion, Colorado lion, Indian lion, long tail, tall grass creeper, slough walker, swamp devil, lord of the forest. And on it goes.

Add the indigenous names from across its range, roughly twenty five in North America and eighteen in South America, and one wildlife refuge puts the grand total at eighty three.

Eighty three names. One animal.

And there is a reason, and it is a good one. This cat has the largest range of any land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. It lives from the Yukon to the southern Andes, in mountains, deserts, forests and swamps. So it met an enormous number of different peoples, and every single one of them named it, and none of them were in touch with each other.

Now here is the part that makes it worse.

It is not a big cat. Not in the technical sense. Real big cats are the genus Panthera: lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars. This animal is in the other lineage, the one informally called the small cats, despite a big male being able to outweigh a leopard.

Its closest living relatives are the jaguarundi and the cheetah.

So an animal that four hundred years of English has been calling a lion, and a tiger, and a panther, is not any of those things and is a cousin of the cheetah.

Twenty of its forty names are actively wrong about what it is.

Which is why somebody had to fix it

Put yourself in the eighteenth century for a second.

You are a naturalist. You are trying to write down what lives on Earth. And you keep getting letters describing an American lion, and letters describing a catamount, and letters describing a painter, and you have no way of knowing whether that is three animals or one. You cannot see them. You only have the words.

This was not a small inconvenience. It made the entire project impossible. You cannot build a science of living things when nobody can tell whether two people are talking about the same creature.

So Carl Linnaeus did something that sounds boring and was not.

He said: every kind of living thing gets exactly two words. A genus and a species. Latin, so that no country owns it. Fixed, so it does not drift. One organism, one name, everywhere on Earth, forever.

Our cat is Puma concolor. Puma, and concolor, which means of one colour, because it does not have markings.

Linnaeus named it himself, in 1771, and there is a lovely detail in that. He called it Felis concolor, because he had it in the wrong genus. Later work moved it. The name changed and the system worked anyway, because the system was built to be corrected. That is the actual genius of it. Not that Linnaeus was right, he often was not, but that he built the one naming scheme in history designed to survive being wrong.

And notice what binomial nomenclature actually is. It is a scientific name that does not describe anything. It is not trying to tell you the cat is large, or tawny, or dangerous, or from the mountains. Those are the things common names try to say, and it is exactly why common names go wrong. Puma concolor says almost nothing and it is therefore permanently correct.

Meanwhile the word cougar arrived by an absurd route. A naturalist in Brazil wrote down a local word, roughly cuguacu ara. It got copied. Then Buffon, in 1774, mangled it into cuguar. English filed the corners off and got cougar.

So one of the two most common English names for this animal is a French mispronunciation of a Portuguese transcription of a Brazilian word for a cat that mostly lives somewhere else. And it beat the actual name.

Taking the list apart

Read the top of this list and something odd happens.

It opens with cat, cattle, dog, donkey, goat, guinea pig, horse, pig, rabbit. Then it stops, restarts, and goes alphabetical: aardvark, aardwolf, African buffalo, African elephant, albatross.

That is not a mistake. It is the oldest division in the whole subject, and every list of animals ends up making it whether it means to or not.

Those first ones are the domesticated ones. They are not a category of animal. They are a category of relationship. A dog is a wolf that agreed to something. Cattle are aurochs that agreed. A horse, a goat, a pig, a rabbit.

And the striking thing is how few of them there are. Humans have been trying to domesticate animals for something like ten thousand years, and we are still, essentially, working with the same short list our ancestors sorted out before writing existed. Not for want of trying. People have had a serious go at zebras, at bears, at antelope, at cheetahs, and it did not take, because domestication needs an animal that will breed in captivity, tolerate people, not panic, and accept a hierarchy, and it turns out almost nothing does all four.

So the head of this list is a fossil. Those nine animals are, more or less, the entire result of ten thousand years of effort, and they were mostly settled before anybody wrote anything down.

The alphabetical part underneath is everything else. Every creature we never persuaded.

And you can hear the difference in the names. The domestic ones are short, blunt, ancient, Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Cat. Dog. Goat. Pig. Horse. Cow. Those words are old because we have needed them every day for a very long time.

The wild ones are long, borrowed and awkward. Aardvark is Afrikaans, earth pig, which is another common name lying to you. Alpaca is Quechua. Albatross came in through Portuguese and Arabic and got confused with a Latin word for white on the way.

So the shape of this list is the shape of the relationship. The animals we live with have small worn-down names. The animals we met later have names that are still carrying the passport stamps.

Where these animals came from

Nothing clever.

These were assembled by hand, one at a time, using the common names people actually use, brackets and all. Hit Generate and it pulls at random from what is left, with nothing repeating inside a single batch.

Everything runs on your device, and nothing you type is transmitted.

Questions people ask

Is the American buffalo a buffalo?

No. It is a bison. True buffalo live in Africa and Asia and are not close relatives. The name is a four hundred year old guess by people who saw a big cow-shaped animal and used the word they had, and it is now far too late to do anything about it.

Why does one animal have so many names?

Because names are local and animals are not. The cougar ranges from the Yukon to Chile, so it met an enormous number of separate peoples who each named it without consulting anybody. Guinness gives it over forty names in English alone, which is the record.

Why do scientists use Latin names?

Because they had to. When your evidence arrives as letters describing a painter, a catamount and an American lion, you cannot tell whether that is one animal or three. Two fixed Latin words, one per species, solved it. The name does not describe the animal, which is precisely why it does not go out of date.

Is a red panda a panda?

Not in the way you mean. It is not closely related to the giant panda. They share a diet and a name and very little else, and the red panda got the name first, which makes the whole thing more awkward rather than less.

Why are only a few animals domesticated?

Because an animal has to pass several tests at once: breed in captivity, put up with people, not bolt at every noise, and accept being told what to do. Almost nothing passes all of them. We have had ten thousand years and a lot of motivation and the list is still short.

Is a cougar a big cat?

Technically no, which surprises everyone. The big cats are the genus Panthera. The cougar sits in the other branch, with the small cats, and its nearest relatives are the jaguarundi and the cheetah. A large male can still outweigh a leopard, so the category is about lineage and not about size.

References

1. Mammal with the most names. Guinness World Records. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/78143-mammal-with-the-most-names
2. Cougar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar
3. Puma concolor (Linnaeus, 1771). Global Biodiversity Information Facility. https://www.gbif.org/species/113275153
4. A Cat by Any Other Name. Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge. https://education.turpentinecreek.org/2022/09/17/a-cat-by-any-other-name/
5. Cougar. WorldAtlas. https://www.worldatlas.com/animals/cougar.html