About AnimalWiki

AnimalWiki is a free encyclopedia of animals: 756,338 species, with photographs, common names, and the family each one belongs to.

What you will find

756,338 animal species have a page here, and 250,258 of them have a written entry rather than just an index record. Each page tells you what the animal is called, what it is related to, how threatened it is where that has been assessed, and, wherever there is a photograph, what it looks like — credited to the person who took it.

Three ways to find something

• Search. The box at the top of every page will find an animal by its common name or its scientific one, and it starts answering after two letters.
• Browse. The tree starts with the great branches of the animal kingdom and opens downward, group by group, as far as you care to go.
• Lists. Curated collections gather animals by what they do rather than what they are descended from: the deep sea, the great migrations, animals that regenerate, record breakers.

How complete is it?

Not complete, and it is worth being straight about that. Science has described somewhere around 1.5 million animal species, and this edition indexes 756,338 of them. Vertebrates are essentially all here — every mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish. The shortfall is almost entirely invertebrate, and it follows what people photograph: there are far more beetles, wasps, flies, snails and worms in the scientific literature than in any public dataset of identified organisms.

Of the species that are here, 250,258 have a written article and the rest are index entries with a working page. Both gaps are open to anyone who wants to close them. The current figures are here.

Where the information comes from

• Names and classification come from the iNaturalist taxonomy, released into the public domain (CC0).
• Photographs come from iNaturalist contributors, used under the Creative Commons licence each photographer chose and credited on the page where they appear.
• Conservation status follows the IUCN Red List, with the assessment cited on the page.
• Written articles are contributed by people, and are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse, as long as you credit and share alike.

Anyone can fix it

Nothing here is locked. If a page is wrong, or thin, or missing the one thing you know about that animal, there is an Edit this page link in the margin of every article that will take you straight to it. Changes are reviewed before they go live, and you do not need to know anything about how the site is built to make one — though if you would like to, that is written down too.