For developers
Every species page is also available as data. Read-only, no key needed. This is version 0: fields may change until the schema reaches 1.0 (currently 0.1.0-fixture).
How do I get a species as JSON?
Add .json to the page address. Either the common-name slug or the scientific-name slug works.
curl https://creaturedata.com/animals/lion.json
curl https://creaturedata.com/animals/panthera-leo.jsonThe response holds summary, taxon (classification and resolved facts), facts, trait_values (every source row behind the facts, with its source URL and licence), conservation, common_names, synonyms, countries (record counts), media, text_blocks, external_ids and sources. A missing value is null; it is never estimated. An unknown slug returns 404 with {"error":"not_found"}.
Is there a plain-text version?
Add .md for Markdown with the same facts, classification, countries, questions and sources.
curl https://creaturedata.com/animals/lion.mdHow do I find the slugs?
The sitemap index lists every indexable page by type. /llms.txt describes the URL patterns in plain text.
What are the terms?
Each value carries the licence of the source it came from, listed under sources and on the sources page. Facts from Wikidata are CC0. Country counts derive from GBIF records under CC0 and CC BY. Photos are licensed individually and must be credited as shown in media. Text in text_blocks is CC BY-SA and must keep its attribution and licence.
Credit the page you used, for example: “CreatureData, Lion (Panthera leo), https://creaturedata.com/animals/lion”.
Are there limits?
Please cache responses and keep to a few requests per second. Responses are cacheable for a day. There is no rate limiting or paid tier yet; both are planned, along with bulk downloads of the derived tables.