An ideal animal A-Z: Part 1

Friends have been pitching in their pet peeves to the pedantic puffin. One question that's come up is whether the perfect preschool animal A-Z book exists?

It's a beloved format for teaching kids their ABCs: match each letter to a colourful animal for emphasis. In our house it's Oliver Jeffers' Book of Animals because we're big fans of his illustrations, but the choice of species could certainly be improved. It's not as frustrating as The Very Hungry Caterpillar's ABC by Eric Carle (him again!) or ABC Zoo by Rod Campbell (another repeat offender!)

Rather than picking apart each and every book, I've listed the key complaints:

• Mythical creatures alongside real ones is a hard no for me. I have an embarrassing story about linking dinosaurs and dragons that I cannot live down and do not wish to pass on to the next generation!
• Extinct species without context isn't helpful. (Note: I love the look of Jennifer Cossins' A-Z of Endangered Animals but it's for older kids.)
• Likewise, mixing infant and adult names complicates things. It's adding a whole extra concept to include common names that differentiate age or sex.
• Jumping around from class to species, through genus and sub-families willy nilly is confusing. If this is all sounds like Latin to you, I'm just saying including B for Bird, G for Gull and Q for Quetzal in the same list makes my head spin.
• Mammals are totally over-represented. If 16/26 of the animals in your A-Z are mammals, maybe it should be a mammal A-Z?

Taking all of that into account, I'm going to attempt to make my ideal animal A-Z. I can't make it proportionally representative or we'd end up with an A-Z of nematodes (which account for about 80% of all individual animals on Earth). Instead, I'll aim for variety.

There's no denying there are some tricky letters to find examples for, which might explain the seemingly batshit approach to taxonomy in the books we've encountered. I'll start with the difficult letters first, which means dipping a toe into mathematical waters - life ring at the ready! I found this interesting blog post where the author John D Cook analysed the initial letter frequency of words in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I thought it was as good a starting point as any so I set about researching animals names from the least frequent initial letter to the most (X-S). A-Z animals.com is useful too albeit with two caveats: it's US-centric and I had to filter out a lot of domestic dog breeds (all of them distractingly good boys and girls). Still, it helpfully lists the number of animals alongside each letter which means I can fine tune my initial letter frequency scheme.