Clade & Seek

Daily

Guess any animal

20 of 20 guesses left

Stuck? Reveal the next group down.

Family tree

Holds the mystery animal Links your guesses Mystery animal Guess already ruled out Drag to move. Pinch or Ctrl + scroll to zoom.

The whole tree

Every animal in the game, nested by shared ancestry. Open a group to see the groups and species inside it.

Groups follow NCBI Taxonomy, with placeholder groups removed and well-supported clades added. Every group has a plain-English name.

Photos are Wikipedia lead images from Wikimedia Commons; each species card credits its photographer and license. Sounds are CC0 recordings from Freesound, credited under How to play. A remix of the idea behind Metazooa.

How to play

Find the mystery animal in 20 guesses.

Guess any animal by its common or scientific name.
You learn the most specific group your guess shares with the mystery animal. Guess a goldfish when the answer is a cod and you learn it is a Clupeocephalan, the group that holds both carps and cods but not eels.
The lineage panel keeps every group the mystery animal is known to belong to. Each guess branches off at the point where its own ancestry splits away.
A hint reveals the next group down the lineage and costs 3 guesses.
A guess that the board had already ruled out is marked in red with the reason: for example a mammal after you learned the answer is a fish, or a trout after a salmon showed the answer is not a salmon or trout.

Every group shows each nested group from Animals down to your best clue. Branch points shows only the groups where a guess split off.

Daily puzzles are the same for everyone and use well-known animals. Practice rounds can draw from the whole list.

The speaker button turns on nature sounds: rainforest by day, crickets at night, and a sound for each guess that suits the animal you picked.

Photos: none requested yet.

Daily statistics

New practice round

Which animals can the mystery animal be?