UK species finder
Look up a species or group by its English, Welsh, Gaelic or scientific name, and see its place in the tree of life, its names across the UK, and its nearest relatives.
Names, classification and relatives shown here follow the UK Species Inventory and can be incomplete, out of date or wrong; a silhouette is a drawing of the species or its group, not an identification guide.
How the finder works
The names and the classification come from the Natural History Museum's UK Species Inventory, the standard list of UK species names that recorders and the national recording schemes work from. The English, Welsh and Gaelic names shown alongside the scientific name come from the same list.
The silhouettes
Each drawing comes from PhyloPic, an open library of organism silhouettes, and is credited to the person who drew it, with its licence, wherever the licence asks for that. Where a species has no drawing of its own, the finder shows the drawing for its nearest group instead and says so.
What it does not show yet
Conservation status, legal protection and where a species has actually been recorded are not part of the finder today. For those, the Species page names where to look.
Keeping it current
The list is refreshed when the Museum publishes a new release, and the finder states which release it is showing, so you can tell how recent the names and the classification are.
The full credits for the names, the silhouettes and everything else behind the finder are set out on the Sources and Credits page.