This is what you get when you try to write down everything you have heard and can remember about the world, and about as accurate.
Of course, Pliny referred to the first book and others in writing his Natural History, but it ended up as a sort of Dummy's Guide to Natural History, trying to compose a really wide subject matter into a few books over 2 years, and obviously getting a lot wrong in the process. It's fair to say nobody would have taken this seriously if not for his name.
This tangent's in response to all the downvotes for peterwwillis's opinion -- it seems reasonable to me, except maybe he should've said the standards of pre-Roman Greece.
Correctly. The moderns are mostly fools with aspirin.