How do I get a List

I have a class called Animals what contains two List<T>. One is a list of bears, and one is a list of pinguins.

I can pretty trivially get the list of bears by just calling Bears on the animals variable - but how do I get it via reflection?

I have created a static helper class ListHelper, with a generic method that takes either Bear or Pinguin as the generic type, and animals as the argument which should return the list of bears if Bear is the generic type.

That doesn't happen. Instead it crashes with this message : System.Reflection.TargetException: 'Object does not match target type, and I cannot understand why, because the type is correct when I inspect it via the debugger.

Fully "working" example below.

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;
using System;

class ReflectionTrouble
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var animals = new Animals
        {
            Bears = new List<Bear> {new Bear {Name = "Bear1"}, new Bear {Name = "Bear 2"}},
            Pinguins = new List<Pinguin> {new Pinguin {Name = "Pingo1"}, new Pinguin {Name = "Pingo2"}}
        };

        var lists = ListHelper.GetList<Bear>(animals);
        foreach (var bear in lists)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(bear.Name);
        }
        //expected to have printed the names of the bears here...
    }
}

public static class ListHelper
{
    public static IEnumerable<T> GetList<T>(Animals animals)
    {
        var lists = animals.GetType().GetRuntimeProperties().Where(p => p.PropertyType.IsGenericType);
        foreach (var propertyInfo in lists)
        {
            var t = propertyInfo.PropertyType;
            var typeParameters = t.GetGenericArguments();
            foreach (var typeParameter in typeParameters)
            {
                if (typeParameter == typeof(T))
                {
                    // This is where it crashes.
                    var list = (IEnumerable<T>) propertyInfo.GetValue(t);
                    return list;
                }
            }
        }

        return Enumerable.Empty<T>();
    }
}


public class Animals
{
    public IList<Bear> Bears { get; set; }

    public IList<Pinguin> Pinguins { get; set; }
}

public class Bear
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class Pinguin
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}