About — All the Animals

The idea is simple: most wildlife references are organised alphabetically or taxonomically, which is useful if you already know what you are looking for and useless if you don't. This one is organised by place. You spin a globe, tap a region, and see what actually lives there — from the animals everyone can name to the several thousand species recorded by people with cameras who happened to be standing in the right spot.

What is on the site

91 written profiles covering the world's best-known wild animals, each with habitat, behaviour, diet, notable facts and conservation status. These are at /animals.
32 regions, from the African savanna to the Antarctic ice, each with its climate, landscape, and full species checklist. These are at /regions.
Nine animal groups — mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arachnids, mollusks and a catch-all for everything else — at /groups.
A 3D globe on the home page with every region pinned in place, plus search across all 6,685 species and a translation layer covering several languages.

Where the information comes from

Three separate things, and it is worth being clear about which is which.

The written profiles are original. Every profile, region introduction and group description on this site was written for this site. They are not scraped from anywhere, and they are not reproductions of Wikipedia articles — where you want the encyclopedia entry, each profile links out to it directly.

The species records come from iNaturalist, an open platform where naturalists upload and identify their observations. The regional checklists are built from research-grade records, which is why they include a great many species that never appear in a general wildlife guide, and why the record counts vary so much between regions — they reflect where people have been looking.

The photographs are contributors' own work, used under the Creative Commons licences they chose (CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA). Every photograph on the site is credited to its photographer on the page it appears on. If you are a photographer and want your image removed or a credit corrected, get in touch and it will be done.

Conservation statuses follow the IUCN Red List. Statuses change as assessments are revised; if you spot one that is out of date, please say so.

Accuracy

Wildlife information dates. Populations recover, statuses get reassessed, and long-standing explanations for animal behaviour get overturned by better research — several profiles on this site mention exactly that happening. Everything here is written carefully and checked against current sources, but it is a general-audience reference, not a scientific citation. For anything that matters, follow the links out to the IUCN, iNaturalist or the primary literature.

How the site is funded

All the Animals is free and has no account, no paywall and no newsletter. It is funded by advertising, kept deliberately light — at most one ad per view, blended into the layout and labelled. There are no pop-ups, no interstitials, no auto-playing video and no anchor units covering the content. If that balance ever stops being reasonable, the ads will change rather than the content.

Details of what advertising and analytics involve are set out in the privacy policy.

The app

There is a native iOS version of the globe with the same catalogue, built with Capacitor from the same source. It runs entirely offline apart from the photographs.

Who makes it

All the Animals is an independent project, built and written by one person. It is not affiliated with iNaturalist, the IUCN, Wikipedia or any conservation organisation. Corrections, suggestions and complaints are all genuinely welcome at the contact page.