Bandicoots are real, so are echidnas: How video games expanded my knowledge of animals that exist

While messing around on Youtube, I stumbled across a video that made a flood of memories come back.
While Moganarchy had a predicament involving bandicoots, My issue involved one of its fellow australian family members... The echidna. The bandicoot argument came later.

I grew up as a nintendo kid because that was the system I had and couldn't afford much else. I did go over to my friend's house and he had the sega systems. we would play the sonic games and be amazed as to how fast the game went.
Anyways, We were playing sonic 3 once and I was introduced to Knuckles the echidna. He stood on two legs, had spiked gloves and could fly ( sorta) I asked. "Is he some kind of bat?" My friend replied in a quick voice "He's an EEKIDDNA" I had never heard the term. I didn't even know how to spell it.

But damn did he look cool.

When I made it back to school a few days later, I had said something about the new mysterious animal. My teacher who was an older guy, smart but grumpy had overheard us talking and said something that "We must have meant echidnaderms" Which were a type of aquatic creatures. Well, us being kids kind of made a stand and told what we knew about them. They were red, they could fly and they were in a video game. The teacher, who was now more skeptical kind of gave a quick eye roll and asked what kind of game it was in.

Now, we as adults know now that adults in the 90s didn't know mario from sonic or link from a christmas elf. So the teacher said something that stuck with me for a long time...

"Just because it is in a video game, doesn't mean it exists."

Now to us, because we were just a group of dumb kids, we didn't think to look it up immediately at the library. It took some time but we finally did and this is essentially what we saw :

It was an elongated, egg-laying hedgehog,  They couldn't fly and they couldn't run incredibly fast, climb up walls or punch. 

Our discovery was a letdown. We thought we had found something cool  based off of something cool in real life, but it was an egglaying hedgehog (Actually, the egglaying part was kinda neat.) Not as cool as T-rexes, Sharks and whatever cool crap we were into at the age of 9.

A few years passed and a few of us got into the next generation of game systems. I got into stuff like N64. My cousins had a Playstation. I would go there more often because they lived down the road. It was there that I was introduced to the Twisted Metal franchise and crash Bandicoot.

Crash bandicoot was a hyperactive, shirtless cool guy that spun around and had amusing death animations.

Again, There was a group of doubters that came against kids fascination with (to us) the newly found bandicoot... They were teachers. People that had been educated already and most likely had access to resources to prove or disprove our interests, yet they didn't want to use the resources... They went with the same argument that our teacher previously had used.

"Just because it is in a video game, doesn't mean it exists."

Granted, again, we discovered the truth that bandicoots in real life weren't nearly as cool as his video game counterpart.

I think the good news now is that because almost everyone has information at their fingertips, this kind of thing probably doesn't happen much anymore. But I'm sure it's possible... So, what about you?