Methodology
How a page on this site is put together, and the rules it is not allowed to break.
Where do the facts come from?
Each value is taken from a named open dataset and keeps a link back to the record it came from. The small “src” marker beside a fact opens that record. The full list is on the sources page.
What happens when a fact is missing?
It is shown as “Not recorded”. Values are never estimated, inferred from photos or generated. A filter on a measurement leaves out animals that have no recorded value rather than guessing which side of the line they fall on.
Who writes the summaries?
The short summary at the top of each species page and the answers under “Common questions” are assembled by fixed templates from the structured facts on that page. They cannot state anything the facts table does not contain. A question only appears when the data answers it.
Longer descriptive passages are quoted from Wikipedia under its share-alike licence. They appear in hatched, labelled blocks with their own credit and are kept apart from our text.
How are weights and sizes resolved?
Where a source gives several adult values, such as male and female weights, the page shows the range and uses their mean for sorting. Values tagged as birth or juvenile measurements are excluded. Size comparisons use a fixed 170 cm human figure for scale; that figure is an illustration, not a measurement.
What do the country lists show?
They show countries with openly licensed sighting records on GBIF, with the number of records. They include captive animals and introduced populations, and they miss places where nobody has uploaded a record. They are not range maps.
Where does conservation status come from?
The IUCN Red List category is read from Wikidata, which records it as open data, and each page links out to the Red List for the full assessment. The Red List’s own detailed content is not reproduced here because its terms do not allow commercial reuse.
How are groups such as “big cats” defined?
By branches of the classification, not by hand-picked lists. Each group page shows the branches that define it.