Endangered (EN)
Species facing a very high risk of extinction, usually through habitat loss, hunting, or a collapsing food supply.
African Bush Elephant
Largest land mammal alive, matriarch-led herds, and rumbles felt through the ground.
African Wild Dog (Painted Dog)
A coat no two dogs wear the same way, four-toed front feet, and a hunt run at up to 30 mph until the prey tires.
Alligator Snapping Turtle
The 200-pound riverbed dinosaur with a spiked shell, a 1,000-pound jaw trap, and a pink worm wriggling on its tongue.
Antarctic Fur Seal
The hyper-dense furred beach warrior that came back from commercial extinction and is now declining again.
Asian Elephant
A boneless trunk with about 150,000 muscle units, a pregnancy of nearly two years, and rumbles humans can barely hear.
Australian Lungfish
An air-breathing fish with a single lung, a body that still resembles fossils over 100 million years old, and a genome known to be the largest of any animal.
Aye-Aye
Nocturnal lemur with huge ears, ever-growing incisors, and a skeletal-looking middle finger that finds grubs by tapping.
Basking Shark
The second-largest fish on Earth, filtering up to 2,000 tons of seawater an hour through its gills to scoop up zooplankton.
Bengal Tiger
Longest canines of any big cat, stripes as unique as a fingerprint, and the only tigers at home in mangroves.
Blue Whale
The largest animal that has ever lived, built to gulp krill-laden water by the ton and rated among the loudest animals on the planet.
Bonobo
The Congo forest ape where the females rule the roost.
Chimpanzee
DNA letters about 1.23% different from a human's, tool kits that vary from community to community, and Machiavellian troop politics.
Dhole
A whistling, clucking wild dog that hunts in packs and can catch prey more than ten times its own weight.
Geoffroy's Spider Monkey
The monkey whose tail works as a fifth limb.
Giant Freshwater Stingray
The 300-kilogram Mekong river phantom with a barbed tail spine and the record for the largest freshwater fish ever caught and officially recorded.
Giant Ground Pangolin
Overlapping keratin scales, a sticky tongue up to 70 centimeters long, and a defensive ball that's next to impossible to pry open.
Giant Oceanic Manta Ray
The ocean's largest ray has three pairs of fins, a wingspan of up to 26 feet, and can dive past 1,000 metres.
Giant River Otter
The biggest of all the otters, the Amazon's "river wolf" has jaw leverage that should favor speed and an adult vocabulary of 22 distinct calls.
Golden Hamster
A 105 g Syrian burrower that keeps night hours in the lab, while wild females were active almost only by day.
Golden Poison Frog
Considered the most poisonous animal in the world: a frog no larger than a bottle cap that produces enough nerve toxin at once to kill 10 people.
Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey
Narrows the blood vessels in its skin to cut heat loss, then burns 14 percent of its body mass getting through a winter in China's mountains.
Goliath Frog
The largest frog in the world, where males haul rocks to build nests for their eggs.
Grey Parrot
A grey parrot named Griffin outperformed 5-year-old children on a cup logic test.
Kea (Alpine Parrot)
A mountain parrot that matched human infants and chimpanzees on a probability test, and was persecuted as a sheep killer for over a century.
Conservation categories are from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. AnimalTracks is independent of IUCN.