About My Animal Generator

My Animal Generator is a small independent website that does one thing: it shows you a random real animal, with a photograph, its scientific name, its conservation status and a few things worth knowing about it.

It exists because almost every other random animal generator hands you a bare word. "Okapi" is not much use if you do not already know what an okapi looks like. The whole point of a random animal is the moment of recognition — or of surprise — and you cannot get that from a text label.

Who makes this

The site is built and maintained by an independent developer, not a publisher or an institution. It is a side project, run on a small budget, and it is free to use with no account required. If something on the site is wrong, I would genuinely like to know: write to contact@myanimalgenerator.com and I will fix it.

I am not a zoologist. What this site offers is not original research — it is careful assembly of public scientific data into something more pleasant to use than the raw sources. That distinction matters, so it is stated plainly here rather than buried.

Where the data comes from

Every animal in the generator is a real, documented species or breed. Nothing is invented, and no part of the dataset is AI-imagined.

Species records come from Wikidata, the structured database behind Wikipedia. From it we take the accepted scientific name, the taxonomic group, the English common name and — where the species has been assessed — its IUCN Red List conservation status. Wikidata content is released under CC0.

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons. Every image was checked individually against the Commons licensing API, and only images under licences that permit commercial reuse are included: public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Images under non-commercial or no-derivatives licences were excluded, as were a handful under licences we could not confidently classify. Where a licence requires attribution, the photographer and licence are printed under the picture, and there is a full image credits page explaining the terms.

We do not use iNaturalist or similar community platforms, because their default licence forbids commercial use and this site carries advertising.

Which animals make the cut is decided by how widely a species is documented — specifically, how many language editions of Wikipedia have an article about it. That is a rough but effective proxy for "would an ordinary person recognise this?", and it is what keeps the generator from serving you the fourth subspecies of an obscure warbler. It also means the pool is deliberately smaller than the roughly 30,000 species that have both a photo and a conservation assessment.

Because raw documentation counts over-represent birds — bird articles were mass-created across dozens of language wikis — the selection is balanced by group rather than taken straight off the top. Otherwise half of all results would be birds.

How the fact cards are written

The descriptions and facts on each card are written specifically for this site. They are not copied from Wikipedia.

There are two reasons for that. The legal one is that Wikipedia's prose is licensed CC BY-SA, and republishing it verbatim would place obligations on this site's own content. The practical one is that the same paragraphs already appear on hundreds of scraper sites, and copying them would add nothing.

So the process is: a language model reads the relevant Wikipedia summary as source material and writes fresh copy from it, under instructions to re-express the facts rather than paraphrase them, to invent nothing the source does not support, and never to state a number that does not appear in the source. Output is automatically checked for overlap against the source text and rejected if it echoes the original too closely.

This is honest about its limits. Automated writing can still get things wrong, and with nearly two thousand animals it is not possible for one person to fact-check every sentence by hand. The underlying data — names, taxonomy, conservation status — comes straight from the structured sources and is reliable. The prose is a summary written from a reliable source, which is a slightly weaker guarantee. If you spot an error, please report it and it will be corrected.

What this site is not

It is not a field guide, and it should not be used for identification of anything that matters. It is not a veterinary or pet-selection resource — the dog and cat breed generators are for browsing and curiosity, not for choosing an animal to live with. It is not a substitute for the IUCN Red List, whose assessments are far more detailed than a one-word status badge.

For anything serious, go to the primary sources: the IUCN Red List, and the Wikipedia article linked at the bottom of every card.

How it is paid for

The site is free and carries advertising. Ad revenue covers hosting and the cost of building the dataset. Advertising has no influence on which animals appear or what the cards say — the selection is decided by the documentation-count rule described above, and nothing on the site is sponsored.

Contact

Corrections, questions, broken images, or a species you think should be included: contact@myanimalgenerator.com.