All animals

Every entry is a species, one row per scientific name, pulled from Wikidata and then checked by hand where a name looked off. That is why the search box speaks in species: Bobcat, Sand Cat and Domestic Cat are here, but Bengal and Ragdoll are breeds of one species and live on the breed generators instead.

Under the surface the library also carries each animal's taxonomic order and family. Type a category word such as parrot, owl or shark and the search matches on those ranks too, so a Scarlet Macaw turns up for “parrot” even though the word is not in its name. The common names carry their own history: the guide to how animals got their names puts sixteen of them, bear to aardvark, on a timeline by the year each word reached English.

Not every species is researched to the same depth. A few hundred have a written knowledge card with field notes and quick facts, and only a small handful have a real recorded call, because we only use recordings under open licences that allow reuse. The rest are here for their photo and for the body parts the hybrid generator borrows. Every photo is hot-linked from Wikimedia Commons and credited on the credits page. If you want the strangest of them explained one part at a time, start with the guide to real animals that look fake; four of its nine species, the okapi, Malayan tapir, Sunda pangolin and narwhal, are in this library. Teachers will find it doing the research half of the random animal classroom lessons, whose fifth sheet has each group write a field guide entry from one of these cards.