The Animal Diversity Web


The Animal Diversity Web is a collection of pictures and information about animals. Accounts of individual species include information on distributions, natural history, conservation, and economic importance, along with pictures and sounds if available. Synopses of some higher taxonomic groups are also provided. The information is arranged in a taxonomic hierarchy for ease of navigation, and "shortcuts" (either through searching for specific names or characteristics or through direct links to some taxa) make it simple to find particular species or groups of species.

Originally created for Biology 108 (An Introduction to Animal Diversity) at the University of Michigan, much of the Animal Diversity Web is available to all users. Due to copyright restrictions, however, some images can be seen only from the UM domain.

For a quick look at a representative species account (complete with pictures and sounds!), check out the account of the gray wolf.

The majority of species accounts available on the Animal Diversity Web were written by students (including the gray wolf account). We review most accounts, but we can not guarantee their accuracy or completeness. If you're interested in providing corrections or amplifications, please send them via email to ADW.Feedback@umich.edu. If you'd like to rewrite an account entirely or provide a new account, please see our Guidelines for New Accounts (not yet available).

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we strongly suggest you turn on auto-loading of images to look at the Animal Diversity Web (unless you are connected via slow modem). However, please respect copyright restrictions. If you're using Netscape, you should ALSO set it to launch JPEGView for viewing the pictures. Otherwise, you will have to suffer with poor color mapping.


Last updated 7 June 1996, Bio108Web@umich.edu