This. Is . Spam. from a fake account. So easy to do on the iNat forum!
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My mother thought grebes and coots were ducks
Grebes are actually more related to flamingos than ducks!
And coots are more related to rails
Cetaceans are fish. I also heard seals are fish from an adult once. A bug is a specific group within insects called hemiptera but many use it to mean arthropods in general. Pteranodons and mosasaurs are dinosaurs because they are extinct reptiles.
Fish is a very overloaded word but I that that in sensu strictissimo it is quite clear that it refers to Pisces in the paraphyletic sense (excl. Amphibia, Reptilia,…).
Box turtles have a hinged part to their shell which enables them to close the shell up. It is a little like a box I guess.
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There are a couple of different groups of turtles called box turtles: Terrapene in North America and Cuora in Asia. In different families but similar in having a hinged plastron.
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I don’t know if this would count, but when my mother was a nurse, she cared for a woman who truly believed unicorns were real but had been hunted to extinction! Other than that, the most common errors I saw when I was a UTA were thinking mushrooms were a type of plant, and thinking slime molds were a type of fungus. As far as specific errors go, everyone Systematic Botany class mistook Luetkea pectinata for a saxifrage, but I’d consider that a more advanced mistake.