Animal group names

I was lying in bed last night, pondering what a group of velociraptors might be called. Then I started trying to remember group names of other animals. Thank goodness for the internet! I found a big old list of them.

Some that amused me unduly:

A shrewdness of apes
A battery of barracudas
An obstinacy of buffalo
A destruction of feral cats
A coalition of cheetahs
A quiver of cobras
A gulp of cormorants
A cast of falcons
A flamboyance of flamingos
A skulk of foxes
An implausibility of gnus
A glint of goldfish
A kettle of hawks in flight
A bloat of hippopotami
A charm of hummingbirds
A richness of martens
A scourge of mosquitoes
A rhumba of rattlesnakes
A dazzle of zebras

A lot of these terms describe people’s opinions of these animals, or the animals’ behavior. Apes sit around and look shrewd. Foxes skulk around. Do rattlesnakes do the rhumba with their tails? Do cobras quiver?

People like martens if a bunch of them is a richness, whereas mosquitoes are a scourge.

So what about extinct animals like dinosaurs? We don’t know about their behavior or what we’d think of them. Would duckbills nesting together be a shout? Or a mess? Or a hive?

Would a bunch of velociraptors be a cunning? A preen? A strut? A pride?

What about sauropods, the long-necks? A hydra? A pod? A surge? A thunder?

What about tyrannosaurs?

What about a bunch of megamouth sharks? Or sabertoothed tigers, or mammoths, or any of those other weird extinct mammals?


One thought on “Animal group names

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s
