[irach] Not Amynodontidae.
And when I searched for it the Popular Search Engine tried to change it to 'Amy - no, don't!' (Punctuation mine, three words its.)

Are you all googling like crazy in order to ask questions with words that no-one uses in daily parlance? Or are you actually *experts* in this field? Whatever - clearly this game is not for me.

(Spangle) I agree. For some time this game has irritated the poo out of me and although I may contribute early on I usually drop out if it becomes clear the answer is some arcane piece of knowledge that very few people have. If it's not at the fingertips of a well-educated person (and all of us are that) then it's inappropriate. In the '50's this game was played live and the answers were always things that anyone would know of. This gives much scope for ingenuity without getting anorakky.
In the past I have threatened to retaliate (in the unlikely event that I would ever win) with a Steam Engine. Just a Steam Engine? Dear me, no - a big one. A Big Steam Engine? Come on - be serious, this one is Quite Big but not Very Big. So it's a 4-6-0, then? Yes. Not just any old 4-6-0; there were loads of them, but a Great Western 4-6-0. A Great Western 4-6-0, then? Oh, get a grip; there were several different classes. This one is a "Hall Class". OK, a Great Western "Hall Class" 4-6-0, then? Yes. Now guess which one. It's no. 7921,

Hidden text

which is my current desktop, having taken a picture of it myself in 1959

, and one of 330.
Isn't that clever? This game is for 8 - 12 year olds and a complete f****** timewaster.

[Spangle, Rosie if they look in here again] I chose what I thought was a moderately well known extinct mammal after my living mammal was guessed in less than a day. It does say in the instructions that a search engine is useful, but I notice that further up the page, the items are a lot more general knowledge. Maybe a return to things most people have heard of wouldn't be a bad idea.
[Raak] Not a quagga.

I am sorry, I think I may have started this with my more specific topic. It happened to be an old episode of air crash investigation which I was watching at the time.

[spangle, knobbly, FGZ*] This is not a new debate. Rosie has voiced his views on this numerous times, and I don't think it's worth rehashing. But one thought did occur to me, which is that the existence of google might lead us to approach the guessing completely differently. In other words, even if the answer is not really obscure (as perhaps this one isn't; we don't know yet), we might approach it in obscure ways.

[CdM] Ah well, I'm a new player. Relatively. To this game anyway.
Volunteers to return us to our regularly scheduled game?

The reason I object to some of the extreme arcane subjects is that it denies the players the opportunity for general intelligence, which I take to be the ability to put two and two together and see connections, quite independent of any database. Digging around in Google may suit some but it doesn't exactly lift the spirits.

[Rosie] Yes, we know. You are given to saying so pretty much every few weeks.