Found the study - they used 100 common species.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.477...
The part about distinguishing the animals from one another is still a problem, but I think that if Pokemon were actually real animals kids would distinguish them just fine anyway.
Mother Nature, alas, does not have this luxury.
Only if you assume no intent on the part of the study's authors. For example, I wonder if they would have had quite a different result if they'd used, say, 14 year olds. Or a mix of ages.
I wasn't overly encouraged that two of their citations were for the Biophilia Hypothesis. An interesting book, for sure, but not exactly rigorous science.
I was left with the definite impression that this study was as much about politics as science. To that end, maybe not dumb just not particularly impartial.
I suppose if they were trying to force a conversation about (say) getting children to zoos, it wasn't dumb.
But in the sense of extending the human race's knowledge, it was dumb.
There is an important aspect of this finding that the article doesn't discuss. They don't link to the study, so I can't check for myself.
All the Pokemon names they mention are first generation. There are only 150 first generation Pokemon. It's a relatively small closed corpus. They also have bright colors and are very easy to distinguish. How many species of animals or plants does England have? Way more than 150, of course. How large was the sample from which the ones used in the study were chosen? It wouldn't surprise me if there were more than 150 relevant species that are needed to be knowledgeable in "nature stuff" in England.
Of course kids in urban environments don't know much about naming animal or plant species, that's just common sense. My beef with the study is that it doesn't seem to go beyond the common-sense notion because of the problems above... Knowing a small limited corpus of highly distinct entities will always be easier than knowing the very large (although still finite) corpus of animal and plant species that might be quite similar on the surface (e.g. cork oak vs holm oak, bee vs wasp, cat vs lynx, etc)