Identify Any Plant, Animal
or Insect by Photo

Nothing here is typed by hand. The entries in our free keys are matched against the public databases that keep the record for them, and the figures on every page are read from that snapshot at build time: 502 entries carry a GBIF taxon key, 482 carry an iNaturalist taxon id, 48 minerals carry a published Mohs range and chemical formula, and 20 fossil groups carry a first and last appearance in millions of years. The 420 that resolve to a single species stand on 634,096,345 georeferenced occurrence records between them.

That is a deliberate constraint rather than a feature. A number a person types is a number that goes stale silently — it sits on the page long after it stopped being true and nothing notices. So the build fails if a figure appears in the editorial text instead of coming from the snapshot, and the same rule governs the comparison pages, where every price is read from a dated App Store record rather than remembered.

The consequence is that you do not have to take any of it on trust. The whole snapshot, dated 2026-09-04, is published as one downloadable file under CC BY 4.0 — species, taxon keys, record counts, month-by-month histograms, hardness ranges, geological ranges — so a figure you read here can be checked against its source, or used for something else entirely. As far as we know nobody else has published this particular join: occurrence databases are organised by taxonomy, field keys are organised by what you can see, and putting the two in one table is what lets a question like "of the things this could plausibly be, which are actually recorded near me, in this month" have a computed answer rather than a guessed one.

There is one caveat we put on the page rather than in a footnote, because it changes how the numbers should be read. An occurrence count measures recording effort as much as it measures the organism: far more people walk outdoors with a camera in July than in January, so almost every raw curve peaks in summer regardless of what it describes. On the key pages we divide each species' monthly curve by the baseline for its own key, which cancels the shared seasonal effect and leaves the part that actually belongs to the species — and both versions are drawn, so you can see the correction rather than take it on faith. Coverage is also heavily skewed toward North America and Europe, so a low count for a tropical species usually means nobody uploaded it rather than that it is rare.

Download the open field data · browse the free keys · who compiles this