History Main / MisplacedWildlife

* ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda1'' has an elderly Galapagos tortoise living in ancient China as one of the film's main characters, It's justified, as his backstory has him being born in the Galapagos Islands and eventually traveling to China.

* In ''Film/TenThousandBC'', woolly mammoths built pyramids that resemble the Egyptian ones. Even a layman should be able to figure out giant woolly animals wouldn't live anywhere near a desert, though in all fairness it's quite clear that they were deliberately captured and brought there for use as laborers just like the human slaves, not that they're actually native to the desert. But even accounting for that, they're a remarkably poor choice for the job given that plenty of other, non-woolly mammoths and other elephant relatives existed that would be better able to handle the heat. Then there's the [[FeatheredFiend Terror Birds]] in the jungle, which were probably meant to be (South American) Phorusrhacids. More likely, they were there so that the producers could say they ''technically'' had dinosaurs chasing cavemen in their movie.

* The spiders in ''Film/{{Arachnophobia}}'' are ''Delena cancerides'' from New Zealand, [[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099052/trivia a species known for being slow and harmless]]. This is somewhat evident to the arachnology fan watching the film, as they are so slow and inert that they sometimes have to be urged to move by sticks that are visible in-shot. The "big bad" spider toward the end is a bird-eating tarantula, more dangerous owing to being large and aggressive (if not particularly venomous). The film is set in the USA, though the spiders supposedly come from South America.

* Many domestic species are like this: wild (actually feral) horses in the United States are descendants of animals brought over from Europe by Spanish explorers or that escaped from captivity. Likewise, feral populations of cats, dogs, goats, sheep, pigs, and pigeons are now common in many places that they're not native to. Pigs in particular have proved so able to colonize new territory that they've become a serious ecological problem in places like California, Hawaii, Florida, Texas, and Australia. However, horses evolved in North America, and only got to Eurasia relatively recently. They died out in North America about 10,000 years ago, before being reintroduced. Mustang defenders have argued that wild horses should be allowed in National Parks in the American Southwest because the archeological record shows they lived there before humans did.

* The South American coypu, also known as nutria (looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver), has invaded many parts of the USA and Europe after being introduced there by fur ranchers.

* The famous problem of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia rabbits in Australia]]; they were initially brought over by colonists for food and hunting, and became so pervasive they damn near destroyed the Australian ecosystem.

* ''Film/JurassicWorldDominion'': The prologue scene (cut in the theatrical version, but included in the extended edition), set at the end of the Late Cretaceous, shows many animals together which did not coexist in real life due to vast distances of both location and [[AnachronisticAnimal time]].
** The centrepiece of the scene is a ''Tyrannosaurus'' fighting a ''Giganotosaurus'' that is meant to set up an ancient rivalry between the two apex predators. However, ''Tyrannosaurus'' is only known from North America while ''Giganotosaurus'' is only known from South America, and the two landmasses were separated by the ocean during the Cretaceous (and ''Gigantosaurus'' had been extinct for nearly thirty million years by the time ''T. rex'' appeared).
** Other animals which appear include ''Oviraptor'' (only known from Mongolia), ''Iguanodon'' (only known from Europe), and ''Dreadnoughtus'' (only known from South America). ''Moros'', ''Pteranodon'', ''Quetzalcoatlus'', ''Ankylosaurus'', ''Nasutoceratops'' were all at least from North America, but only ''Quetzalcoatlus'', ''Tyrannosaurus'', and ''Ankylosaurus'' actually lived together at the very end of the Late Cretaceous.

* Lay's once sold a line of potato clips called Crunch Tators featuring an alligator mascot who lives in a ''desert'' and dresses like a cowboy. Apparently gator rhyming with tator was the main reasoning, but it's curious that a swamp wasn't selected as the backdrop.