Identifying monsters.

Is there any way in game, or otherwise without going through the wiki, to find out what these monsters are called?

For most of these monsters, I can see that after a few games I will start to get an idea of what they do, how they behave, etc. Of course, the artwork in the album isn't quite the same as the artwork in the game, so matching them up seems to be a little bit of a challenge.

But their names? For that matter, the big dudes that don't move but just pop up big alert messages -- how is anyone supposed to figure out what they do without looking at the wiki?

What is the in-game trick that I am missing?

There is no in-game trick. The game is intentionally obfuscating here. Or unintenional and it's a side-effect of the gameplay and UI. Part of the idea I think was to reward people for searching for the info.

The data is in the game files, and it takes some playing the game to figure out which sprite you see corresponds to which monster in the files.

The wiki entries were made by comparing the monsters in the game to Endless Legends species, and digging through the game files for statistics. A lot of the wiki monster names were just me needing to come up with one for the entry and asking the devs if they minded me calling them that :P