Fantastic Nature Reserve

aka: Supernature Preserve

Safely guarded from the Muggle world that's so ignorant and hostile to it, the Fantastic Nature Reserve is one of (if not the) last refuge for mythical beings. Much like the Bazaar of the Bizarre, the Fantastic Nature Reserve will have many species of flora and fauna heard of only in myth and fairy tales. Entire ecosystems may be preserved in lush "biomes," or individual beings kept in cages much like a zoo (which is likely to also have an evil Zookeeper).

It may be hidden somewhere deep in the dark, forgotten places of the world, in the labyrinthine corners of a human city thanks to some powerful illusions, Another Dimension entirely, or even bravely visible to the world at large. If it's hidden, that's because there is safety behind the Masquerade as a Hidden Elf Village, and by banding together they can cooperate to fend off those pesky humans. If out in the open they may hope to survive by raising awareness of their existence, which may be exactly what's called for if the residents are subject to Gods Need Prayer Badly and Clap Your Hands If You Believe. If located in another world, it may be Where the Magic Went.

Another possibility is that the residents have formed this Reserve because Mana is a part of their "diet", and with it becoming scarce in the Muggle world they have to seek sources of magic and live near them. Because of this the Fantastic Nature Reserve is likely a settlement on the magical equivalent of a proven well. If this miniature Cosmic Keystone is stolen or destroyed, the Fantastic Nature Reserve will fall with it. Whether natural or artificial, the Fantastic Nature Reserve residents are likely fiercely protective of the place, its residents and its secrecy. Unless of course they're not there of their own free will.

It's also possible for a Fantastic Nature Reserve to be "person"-made. A benevolent "zoo keeper" likely does this to preserve the Uniqueness Value inherent in these creatures and to protect them from poaching. The less altruistic Collector may justify objectifying these creatures (whether sentient or not) on the basis that they're saving them from destruction. An outright evil zoo keeper will use them as shock troops and as a self replenishing treasure trove of magical ingredients. It's easy to harvest Eye of Newt when you can apply Healing Factor laden troll blood to keep the newt from going blind.

Sister trope to Extinct Animal Park, where extinct creatures are restored and displayed for a viewing public. See also Outcast Refuge, which is a (relatively) safe haven for more sentient species. Modern Nature Heroes often safeguard one of these.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: There's a dragon preserve in Iceland that's enchanted so that muggles don't notice it.
• Dragon Ball Super: Android 17 works on a nature reserve island protecting dinosaurs and minotaurs (endangered bull-like creatures with valuable horns) from poachers.
• The Keeper Wants to Build a Zoo in Another World, so He Tames Monsters: Ikuhara's ambition is to build the first zoo for "monsters".
• Pet Shop of Horrors: The Count's shop is played up as one, even if he does occasionally sell some of the residents. Luckily, the residents typically volunteer for this so everyone is happy in the end provided the humans don't mess things up.
• Rosario + Vampire: The Headmaster has one of these in a pocket dimension. It's for monsters that could never adapt to the Masquerade.

Comic Books

• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): An early one-issue plot has a misguided intergalactic collector who captures the Freedom Fighters, Robotnik and Snively and puts them in one of these. He collects them for their Uniqueness Value, and while he provides a safe place for them, he is compared to a kid who collects ants in an ant farm, even seen tapping on the glass of his reserve when tech-loving Robotnik seems to be acting lazy and not at all responsive to the provided unpolluted nature-style environment. He mends his ways and returns them when Robotnik breaks free and ejects the collector from his ship and the Freedom Fighters rescue him from going adrift in space.
• Dan Dare: In Operation Triceratops, Dan visits a zoo on the Isle of Wight where animals from all over the solar system are kept in pressurized cages.
• DC Comics:
  • Superman:
    • The Fortress of Solitude has an alien zoo. In All-Star Superman it also has a zoo filled with bizarro animals.
    • The bottled city of Kandor (also in the Fortress) has a zoo which contains some of the last Kryptonian animals in existence.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • The island of Themyscira in post-crisis Wonder Woman (Vol 2 & Vol 3) has mythical creatures from Greek mythology such as sphinxes, centaurs, dragons, chimeras, and pegasi. There are also sea-creatures, including some megalodons, patrolling the water outside the island.
    • In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Paradise Island is the last stronghold of the magic tied to classical mythology left in the world and as such is the last place one can find chimeras, sirens, Mares of Diomedes and the like. It is implied Zeus' plot to subjugate humanity, and the Amazon revolt against him in retaliation lead to the deaths of all such creatures alongside the Amazons, though Pegasus escaped to help Diana and Steve Trevor.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Scrooge McDuck owns a zoo with such fanciful creatures as a unicorn and a sacred Egyptian crocodile.
• Fables: The Farm, which is where animal and more monstrous Fables who are too poor or too lazy to get a glamour to pass as human in Fabletown wind up.
• Judge Dredd:
  • Mega-City One's alien zoo is a popular tourist attraction.
  • There's a Dinosaur National Park full of cloned dinosaurs, twelve years before Jurassic Park was written.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: As a nod to Dan Dare, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier has an interplanetary zoo on Wight complete with a Tralfamadorian, lazoons, Metaluna mutants, green martians, Gorgo's mother and Triffids.
• Marvel has Monster Isle, where all their Kaiju or other dangerous mutant beasts are sent. It's implied to be somewhat close to Japan.
  • The Savage Land was also revealed to have been built by aliens on commission from other aliens.
• The Phantom has Eden, an island where even normally predatory animals are peaceful vegetarians, and live together with their would-be prey. Aside from the lions, dolphins, tigers (in Africa!), gorillas, etc., there are some miniature dinosaurs and a family of cave monsters.

Fan Works

• The Bridge: Solgell Island effectively became this continuity's Monster Island (see films) though in this case it's the kaiju willingly choosing to live there, making Solgell and the rest of the Mu Island chain the home for numerous Terran kaiju. It's home to both neutral kaiju just wanting a place to live outside of human influence, along with the Defender faction's base of operations. The story opens up with it getting invaded.
• Lost Tales of Fantasia: In It's a Small World University, the Hundred Acre Project is a sanctuary on Earth for extra-terrestrials in the Disney universe.

Film

• Destroy All Monsters: Godzilla and several other monsters are placed on Monster Land/Monster Island, although it's not to protect them, but to protect humanity from them. It seems to be working well at first, with several provisions in place to prevent the monsters from leaving the island. However, the monsters are turned loose once the Kilaaks take over.
• Die, Monster, Die!: Nahum Whitley has a menagerie of monsters that were animals mutated by radiation. As Reinhart puts it "It looks like a zoo in Hell!".
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Newt Scamander's suitcase houses his vast collection of magical creatures, including a specimen or several of almost every beast from the Harry Potter universe.
• Nightbreed: Midian is the last city for the eponymous Nightbreed, who have been persecuted for all of human history.
• Predators: The main characters think they're in a jungle on Earth, but it turns out they're on a Predator game preserve planet that Predators bring humans and other aliens to for hunting purposes.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: The Hidden Elf Village of Ta Lo is also the home for all manner of creatures from Chinese mythology.
• Shrek: Played for Laughs when all of the fantasy beings Lord Farquaad has exiled are sent to Shrek's swamp.
• The Troll Hunter: The premise of the film is that Norway's government are secretly keeping gigantic trolls in an electric-fenced troll preserve in the northern wilderness.

Literature

• Animorphs:
  • When the Ellimist first revealed himself, this is how he billed his mission: Earth was going to be conquered by the Yeerks, but he would move some humans and animals to another planet so that they could live on.
  • The free Hork-Bajir's valley sort of counts; at the end of the series, all of the Hork-Bajir left on Earth actually move to Yellowstone, since a big nature reserve actually suits them well.
• Avalon: Web of Magic: Ravenswood was a normal nature reserve before the war in Aldenmor, at which point it was repurposed into an interplanetary refugee camp. Every so often the portal opens and a new wave of animals comes through; previous entrants include an amputee unicorn and a POW leopard with wings. Fortunately, the Magical Girl Warriors stewarding the place are very good at their job.
• Broken Homes has a very small one of these hidden in the centre of a Council Estate, deliberately created to be hard to access from the muggle section.
• Carry On by Rainbow Rowell: Watford is like Hogwarts, a Wizarding School with various magical creatures living in the grounds but the snow devils are actually specified to be a protected magical species. It's illegal to attack them even after they throw snowballs at you.
• Doctor Who: Various novels and comics show the TARDIS having a zoo where endangered animals like the dodo and alien creatures like the Kymbra Chimera are kept in small but Bigger on the Inside cages.
• Dragonrider: In A Griffin's Feather, Barnabas Greenbloom has quit his job to set up one of these in Norway, staffed by a mixture of humans, Talking Animal characters, and some of the fantastic beings themselves. The plot kicks off with the difficulties of hand-rearing a clutch of orphaned Pegasus foals.
• Ella Enchanted: Ella visits the royal menagerie, which has dragons, centaurs, gnomes and ogres.
• Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones is about a man who inherits a house and a surrounding "field of care" from his magician grandfather, which is a magical area that keeps The Fair Folk hidden from the rest of the world.
• Fablehaven is about a secret nature preserve protecting the beings of myth and legend from the outside world, complete with caretakers that act almost as park rangers.
• The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip, where Sybel has a menagerie of legendary animals which she and her ancestors called using magic to their crystal-domed white hall. Animals include a giant black cat that knows witch's spells, a dragon that killed many men, a boar that knows the answer to every question but one and a falcon that rode on heroes' arms.
• The Goblin Reservation: The reservation we get to see is one of many such areas created all over the world, and its inhabitants are various kinds of Fair Folk: goblins, fairies, trolls, banshees and so on. Actually, they are stagnant Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who colonized Earth and many other planets hundreds of millions or billions years ago.
• Harry Potter: It's implied it's how fantastic creatures survive, and a number of such preserves show up throughout the series:
  • Hogwarts' grounds work like this, especially the Forbidden Forest which has a tribe of centaurs, giant spiders, unicorns and a giant, and seems to be where the Hogwarts staff turn loose the magical creatures they keep once they no longer need them. The lake has a giant squid and a village of mer-people at the bottom of it.
  • There's a dragon preserve in Romania. Ron's brother, Charles, works there. It's where Norbert (later revealed to be a "Norberta") is taken after it's found out Hagrid was trying to raise the dragon in secret.
  • Relatedly, there are plenty of wild magical creatures throughout the world in the setting, whose existence and secrecy is protected by hordes of wizards with memory charms.
  • From what we hear of them, the few remaining Giant colonies are a much darker version of this. After being on the losing end of several conflicts with humans, can now only live in distant mountains, where their numbers slowly dwindle due to in-fighting, and are very aggressive towards outsiders. When Harry asks why Muggles never stumble upon these colonies, Hagrid merely replies that their deaths are reported as mountaineering accidents.
• Impossible Creatures (2023): The Archipelago is the last place on Earth where magical creatures live, because it's where the Background Magic Field is at its strongest. A long time ago, it was hidden away from the outside world to protect them from human civilisation.
• Island of the Aunts: The titular aunts live on an island taking care of sick creatures. Most of them are real animals but they also look after mermaids and krakens.
• The Jupiter Theft: The Cygnans have a zoo on their Generation Ship where they keep specimens from the various solar systems they have visited and raided for Jupiter-mass planets to use as fuel sources, including a species of birdlike pink humanoids, the crew of a human space mission sent to contact them, and the last Jovians left after the Cygnans turned Jupiter into a fuel source.
• Jurassic Park: The titular park is this in John Hammond's eyes, even in theme park form. Let's just say it went horribly right. Technically, there are two islands: Isla Nublar (the park) and Isla Sorna (site B). The first was the zoo variant of this trope, before everything went haywire, while the other was InGen's experimental site and ended up turning into the free-ranging nature reserve variant after InGen collapsed.
• Keeper of the Lost Cities: Elves keep a couple of every endangered species, fantastic or known to man, in the Sanctuary to protect them from human pollution and hunting. They have never let a species go extinct and protect several species human think have disappeared long ago. In order to avoid predation, the animals are exclusively fed vegetarian food that can taste like meat.
• Larry Niven:
  • In the Svetz stories, the titular character is a time traveler from a Bad Future where most animals are extinct and the Earth is a badly run, horribly polluted wreck. He's part of a government agency that used Time Travel to obtain animals from the past to stock a zoo for the Secretary General's viewing pleasure, but since a) they're hilariously ill-informed about the animals they seek, and b) time travel is technically impossible and unbeknown to them their "time machine" goes into fantasy worlds instead, their zoo is filled with a variety of fantasy creatures such as a Feathered Serpent they think is a snake, a unicorn they think is a horse, a fire-breathing dragon they think is a gila monster, and a sperm whale that happens to be Moby-Dick.
  • Man-Kzin Wars: In "Cathouse" and "Briar Patch" by Dean Ing, the human main character and his Kzin captors come across a barren planetoid whose craters were closed off by force fields by an unknown alien race (speculated to be the Outsiders) and filled with the biospheres of different planets from thousands of years in the past, but incompletely — the vegetation was there, but the animals and people were in temporal stasis and had to be released. They land at the replica of the Kzin homeworld, one of the few places in the galaxy home to sapient Kzin females (the highly macho Kzinti engineered their females to be nonsapient millennia in the past), and the main character later settles in a dome based on ancient Earth, home to mammoths, aurochs and telepathic Neanderthals.
• League of Magi: The Menagerie, in the story of the same name, is more of a zoo, but it hits large parts of the trope.
• A Memoir by Lady Trent: Isabella tries to conserve dragons and other rare species and protect their habitat wherever she goes. In The Tropic of Serpents, she convinces the Oba to let the indigenous Moulish people keep control of their home jungle of Mouleen, instead of damming its rivers in the name of "progress", which would eventually lead to the extinction of the unique dragon species there. In the 5th book, the Sanctuary of Wings crosses this with Hidden Elf Village as a home for the last surviving Draconeans.
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Children with supernatural powers are hidden in time loops to keep them safe from monsters. The second book introduces Miss Wren's Menagerie, which house Peculiar animals instead.
• The Monstrumologist: The Monstrumarium series is a darker version of this, home to a number of man-eating beasties.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Camp Half-Blood is home to satyrs, nymphs and winged horses. The forest houses monsters from Greek mythology, such as Hell Hounds and giant ants, although dryads and satyrs also reside here; the monsters are hunted by the demigod campers during training, but are just as likely to be the ones hunting the campers as the other way around.
  • Geryon owns the Triple G Ranch, where he breeds fire-breathing horses and giant scorpions, among other dangerous monsters from Greek mythology, although he also keeps less dangerous animals, such as Apollo's sacred cows and hippalectryons — horses with the back halves of chickens.
  • In the Sequel Series The Heroes of Olympus, the Georgia Aquarium has a VIP section where the sea gods Keto and Phorcys keep various mythological sea monsters, such as Sea Serpents and Giant Squid. They try to capture Percy and Frank so they can have a show where demigods fight off the monsters, and so that they could have the only captive descendants of Poseidon in the world.
• Play Places: The Kem compound is home to all manners of animal-people that are genetically modified animals held in an advanced mega-cage somewhere.
• "Build Me a Wonderland" from the anthology Robots Vs Fairies is about a theme park centered around fairies that is secretly being used as one by the engineers, keeping magical creatures safe and hidden in plain sight under the guise of attractions. Unusually for the trope, the owner is completely out of the loop, and just thinks that his engineers are really good at making realistic animatronics.
• Schooled in Magic: Whitehall has a menagerie with a Mimic and portals leading off to enclosures of centaurs and unicorns.
• The Talking Parcel by Gerald Durrell is set in one of these, Mythologia, an obvious metaphor for Durrell's real-life conservation work.
• Thursday Next: Sword of the Zenobians, an unpublished High Fantasy work whose author never developed it beyond an extremely rich setting, was repurposed by Jursifiction to serve as preserve for fictional creatures from various works. Aside from a great diversity of fantasy and science fiction creatures, it's home to unicorns from various stories written by little girls that have to be demolished when they’re never published, excess rabbits from Watership Down (they never did get the lid on breeding there) and grammasites, metafictional organisms that feed on words themselves.
• Village of the Mermaids: In the titular village, mermaids are a protected species and humans aren't even allowed to hurt them in self-defense.

Live-Action TV

• Sanctuary (2007) involves a team that seeks out "abnormals" (aka. the genuinely existing hidden supernatural creatures that provided the inspiration for various otherwise imaginary animals and creatures from myths and legends as well as modern cryptids) and relocates them to the titular sanctuary where they can live freely and safe from potential danger against them by modern humanity.

Podcasts

• Residents of Proserpina Park: The titular park acts as a nature reserve for creatures from cross world mythology and folklore. The end of season two introduces Kukunochi Park in Japan.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: This is the premise of the Hollow World beneath Mystara, which according to in-game mythology serves as a place where the Immortals could store civilizations and species that would have gone extinct in the outside world.
• Rifts: The Preserve, a vast jungle covering nearly a quarter of Atlantis and fading into temperate forests to its north, is kept as a vast hunting reserve for the Splugorth and their demonic and monstrous allies and minions. Consequently, it's deliberately kept stocked with creatures such as dinosaurs, dragons, hydras, manticores, gryphons, perytons and the like to serve as exciting quarries, although the main game kept there are the sapient humanoids — chiefly humans, orcs, ogres, goblins and wolfen — who are either released there as hunting stock or runaway slaves who were allowed to "escape" into the jungle to be hunted down at a later date. Periodic arrivals from The Bermuda Triangle just off the coast also keep the Preserve's game nice and varied.
• Warhammer: There's the Imperial Zoo at Altdorf, a popular tourist attraction holding numerous fantastic beings and monsters, such as pegasi, hippogriffs, wyverns and chimeras, brought back by adventurers and armies from all over the world. It also serves as a home for the Empire's fiercer war beasts, such as griffons, including Emperor Karl Franz's favorite mount, Deathclaw, and the Imperial Dragon.

Video Games

• Castlevania: It's implied all of the creatures in his castle have died out centuries ago in the real world.
• Hogwarts Legacy: During the Student's time at the wizarding school, they are introduced to the house elf Deek and the Room of Requirement to help them catch up with their peers at the fifth-year level. Knowing all too well the risk posed by the local poacher cabal, the Ashwinders as well as various lone-wolf operations, Deek urges them to use a Hammerspace carrying bag to rescue wild and vulnerable creatures around the Highlands like Hippogriffs, Thestrals, and Unicorns. The Room helps by providing Vivariums where these creatures can be set free in a safe place, and with various magical implements, the Student can feed, groom, and play with them, the second former of which also allows for the collecting of ingredients useful for enhancing their equipment.
• Fallen London:
  • The Labyrinth of Tigers in London is a strange cross between this and an insane asylum, housing normal animals, strange creatures from the Neath and madmen and criminals alike in its cages. In Sunless Sea, you can expand their collection by selling them things like the fry of a sea serpent that uses its woman-shaped tail tip to lure zailors to their doom or live specimens, which in-game can be anything from a small worm-like thing you won from a drowned man to a predatory monster with many-jointed limbs that you caught before it could catch you to the autonomous organs of a sea monster.
  • Sunless Skies: Leadbeater & Stainrod's Nature Preserve, created by the titular company, is a reserve for the wildest, most verdant and strangest of the Reach's flora and fauna. L & S seemingly decided to beat everyone to the punch, as it's founded on the edge of the Reach, one of the least explored star systems in the Empire where no actual nature destruction is going on, but it's a valuable spot for both tourists and researchers who want to see impossible lifeforms (and Albion, the heart of the Empire, saw its share of natural destruction itself).
• Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis: Naturally, being based on the Jurassic Park film series. With every species to make major appearances in the three films up to that point, the player can either make Jurassic Park the success Hammond never could or set it up to re-enact the films. The Spiritual Successor Jurassic World: Evolution uses the same concept.
• Mario Kart 8: N64 Yoshi Valley takes place in and around the Wild Yoshi Sanctuary, a nature reserve for the Yoshis.
• The titular setting of Monster Sanctuary was created to protect monsters and their keepers from people who wanted to exploit nature, and is magically sealed off from the outside world with an invisible barrier.
• In Overlord II, the elves are trying to create one of these to save magical creatures (including themselves) from The Empire (the other Empire). Their queen's hippy-ish right hand man is actually the Emperor himself.
• Palworld has the Wildlife Sanctuaries, which are artificial islands hosting rare mons and items. In contrast to the Safari Zones below, just setting foot on them is considered trespassing and actually trying to catch (or worse, hunt) the Pals present will get you shot on sight by the City Guards. Fortunately, the species exclusive to the sanctuaries can be found as Field Bosses or bred, allowing you to obtain them legally. They can also be found on the Black Market, which is also illegal but not enforced. On a darker note, however, the Sanctuaries are strangely barren, bordering on rocky wastelands other than large populations of "Beautiful Flowers" from which highly questionable substances are made - it's implied PIDF Chief Marcus Dryden is using the Sanctuaries' protected (and remote) nature to fund his drug-pushing operations.
• Pokémon:
  • The various Safari Zones, although they might better qualify as Fantastic Hunting Preserves. They're typically home to Pokémon based on exotic animals (such as kangaroos, giraffes or rhinos) and/or that cannot be found elsewhere. The Kanto Safari Zone in the first generation was also home to Dratini and Dragonair, the games' only wild Dragon-types.
  • The Great Marsh in the Sinnoh games functions much like the Safari Zones. It's an extensive stretch of wetland set aside as a nature/hunting preserve and home to unique Pokémon found nowhere else in the region, such as the giant cobra Arbok, the leaf-winged sauropod dinosaur Tropius and the human-sized Venus flytrap Carnivine.
  • More literal in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 with the Nature Preserve. No legendaries, but a nice shiny Haxorus for the catching.
  • The first generation games and their remakes also have an actual zoo in front of the Safari Zone, which also includes an extinct Pokémon cloned from a fossil.
• Risk of Rain 2: Petrichor V, the very planet you're on, is one big Fantastic Nature Reserve created by Providence, the Final Boss of the last game. His brother, Mithrix, calls him more of a hoarder who takes aliens from doomed and dangerous planets with reckless abandon and puts them in a cage.
• In Star Ocean: The Second Story, Claude, Rena and the others must visit one in order to obtain a wild Psynard. The keeper is understandably reluctant to let them into the preserve, but accompanies them inside, and can potentially be recruited if the player wishes.
• Stellaris:
  • Non-Xenophobe empires can build Alien Zoos, where alien animals from the empire's worlds are proudly displayed. They can also be built to home near-sapient species and keep them out of trouble while you work on uplifting them.
  • A Xenophile Fallen Empire keeps a wide range of species on protected planetary preserves within their borders, and may request that a player empire send some of their own population to them as well in the likely (by their calculations) event that your own empire collapses.
• Touhou Project takes place entirely within Gensokyo, a Magical Land that was sealed off from the rest of Japan in the Meiji Era, and explicitly exists to preserve the supernatural creatures who would otherwise die off due to lack of belief.
• Wild ARMs: The Elw Dimension is essentially this, preserving a piece of the world in its older, more natural state.
• World of Warcraft: The Netherstorm area of Outland has four arcane eco-domes containing various species, while the Conservatory of Life in Ulduar is inhabited by dragons and living flora.
• Zoo Tycoon: The original game has a few Easter eggs that can be used to create exhibits with certain mythical creatures, such as bigfeet, yetis, mermaids, unicorns, and Loch Ness monsters. Both the first and second Zoo Tycoon games allow for the player to obtain dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as well.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick has the pit full of monsters from previous editions, including dracolisks, a variety of demonic creatures and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing^note a monster that looks like a stump with a rabbit sitting on it and ambushes unsuspected passersby, the intent of which wasn't so much to protect the beasties as to keep them away from harming PC's.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • Woodsworth's Zoo is an otherwise normal zoo that regularly receives donations (in the form of animals just appearing in its enclosures) from one William Woodsworth, a Bold Explorer who, from the notes he sends back, seems to be on an extended trip of The Multiverse. Among the things he sends back are a brontothere, a Kentrosaurus, a pair of giant Martian arthropods and a school of bioluminescent piranhas from the "para-Amazon".
  • Anomalous Item 20224 (A Video Oddity) is a somewhat disturbing take on this trope. It's a series of DVDs showing a "nature" documentary through one such preserve, starting with regular shots of savannah wildlife and showing more and more fantastical/surreal things as time passes, from some Misplaced Wildlife and sky-blue ants to a quagga pegasus and carnivorous fungi big enough to eat small rhinos to strange, alien creatures and a colony of humans that seem to have been abducted and forced into the "preserve".

Western Animation

• Blake and Mortimer: The Marcabians in "The Secret of Easter Island" keep specimens of each of the sapient species that they exterminate as samples in their ship.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: The Planeteers are captured by an alien who keeps a zoo of extinct creatures. But he isn't being evil, he believes humanity is endangered and wants to preserve it before it disappears.
• Futurama has a few:
  • The planet Pluto has been turned into a penguin reserve.
  • The planet Simian 7 has a zoo filled with various alien monsters and a two-way glass dome where you can see human couples who think they're on a private romantic resort planet.
  • Cyclophages^note one-eyed monsters that eat cyclopes are endangered and kept on the Cyclophage Preserve. The zoo on Simian 7 also has one.
  • "I Dated a Robot": Fry's quest to do everything he ever dreamed of doing includes going to a "Jurassic Kiddie Park", where he gets to ride on the back of a T. rex. He then gets his hands bitten off after feeding it a live pig that he bought from a vending machine.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Monster Isle off the coast of Townsville is filled with various Kaiju that attack the town. If they can survive a fight with The Powerpuff Girls and make it home, they're hailed as heroes by the other monsters.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Lisa on Ice": Lisa imagines a future where she's exiled to Monster Island. She's told not to worry as it's just a name. She finds out as she's being chased by Mothra, Gamera and Rodan that it's actually a peninsula.
  • "Days of Future Future": Adult Bart works at Cretaceous Park, where cloned dinosaurs perform for treats like dolphins at Sea World.
  • "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song": Principal Skinner wants to write the Great American Novel called Billy and the Cloneasaurus about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. A furious Apu then goes into a long rant explaining how it's already been done before.
  • "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder": Ron Howard tells Homer that he's taking his kids to "different zoo" filled with animals that Homer's never heard of, including a fantastipotamus that sings twice a day.
  • "Treehouse Of Horror XVI": Bart falls into a zoo enclosure full of peacocks, then sees a sign that says they're mutant peacocks covered in scorpion-style stingers.
  • "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner": Kang and Kodos abduct the Simpsons and put them in an alien zoo on Rigel 7. The Couch Gag for "See Homer Run" does the same thing.
  • "Friend With Benefits": Mike's private island has a mermaid petting zoo.
• Spirit Rangers: The Rangers patrol Xus Park, an ordinary national park. However, Xus' reflection in the Spirit World is a place where Native American mythology is very real. Therefore, everything — from planets to dandelions — is sapient, there's a fish monster in the lake, and storms are caused by thunderbirds flapping their wings.
• Superman: The Animated Series: In one episode, Supes and Lobo are captured by an alien who keeps a collection of creatures who are the Last of Their Kind, including dinosaurs and a dodo. The irony is the alien hires Lobo to capture Superman, the last Kryptonian, before revealing that he wants the last Czarnian as well (as Lobo is the self-made last Cazarnian). Once the owner of the place is killed, Superman moves the non-sapient inhabitants into the Fortress of Solitude. One of the creatures captured by the collector is Starro, who later became the antagonist in the two-part Batman Beyond episode "The Call" where he took over the bodies of Superman and the other member of the Justice League. At the end, Starro and its offspring were sent back to its homeworld.

Real Life

• Iceland is famous for officially avoiding disturbing elf territories. Entire road projects have been re-arranged because of this.
• The belief in spirits and ghosts is so ingrained in Okinawa's culture that entire areas may be left alone because of the belief that a spirit roams the place and may become hostile if disturbed. One of the most famous examples is the Nakagusuku Hotel that was never finished for this reason.
• There is still a strong belief in The Fair Folk in Ireland, to the point that people who don't necessarily believe still try not to disturb faerie lands or disrespect them.

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