I have one secret animal. Type the name of any animal below to get your first hints.
Guess 1
Guess 2
Guess 3
Guess 4
Guess 5
Guess 6
Phylum. The widest step. A phylum is one basic body plan. Chordata contains all animals with a backbone: the fish, the frogs, the birds and the mammals. Arthropoda contains the insects, the spiders and the crabs.Class. The large, well-known groups in a phylum: the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the amphibians, the insects. Most people think in classes.Order. A large group in a class: the carnivores, the rodents, the bats, the beetles. An order can contain many hundreds of species.Family. A group of near relatives: the cats, the dogs, the crows, the deer. A match at this rank shows that your guess is very near to the answer.Genus. The nearest relatives, and the first word of the scientific name. Panthera contains the lions, the tigers, the leopards and the jaguars. This is the last rank before the answer.
Rules & what counts
Daily Animal — Rules, Hints & What Counts
Daily Animal is a Wordle-style zoology puzzle: one secret animal per day, the same animal for every player in the world. You get 6 guesses, and every guess reveals how closely your animal is related to the secret one.
The main hint is the tree of life. Guess a tiger when the answer is a lynx and the game tells you the family — Felidae, the cats — is right. Guess a shark and you'll learn you're not even in the same class. Each guess should narrow the branch you're hunting on.
Solve it every day to build a streak, then share your result as a spoiler-free emoji grid and challenge your friends to beat your guess count.
How to play
Type an animal name and pick it from the suggestions. Matching is lenient: accents are ignored and common names count, so "Bengal tiger" and "Panthera tigris" both find Tiger.
The tree-of-life tile reports the DEEPEST rank you share with the secret animal — same genus, same family, same order, same class, or same phylum. Same genus is nearly the answer; same class only tells you it's another mammal, bird or insect.
Rank names always come with a plain-English gloss, so "Lagomorpha" reads as "rabbits & hares" — you never need to know the Latin.
The biome tile says where the animal is most at home: ocean, fresh water, wetlands, rainforest, forest, grassland, desert, mountains, polar & tundra, or cities & farmland. Each animal has exactly one, and a domesticate is filed where it actually lives — a house cat is cities & farmland, not grassland.
Pattern and colour are the other two tiles worth studying. Pattern is plain, striped, banded, spotted, patched, mottled or iridescent: bands go all the way round the body and stripes don't, spots are countable and mottling isn't, and a patch is bigger than the animal's head. Colour is whichever one covers most of it. Together with biome these are the only tiles the tree of life can't already imply, so they're where a guess narrows the field fastest — and they cut clean across the branches, since a zebra and a tiger are both striped from different orders and a leopard and a ladybug are both spotted from different classes.
Both describe the adult as it's usually pictured, which is the same rule the weight tile uses. The mallard is the green-headed drake, the arctic fox is white, and a dog is brown rather than "it depends on the breed".
You also get match hints for diet, for when the animal is active (diurnal, nocturnal or crepuscular), for what it's covered in (fur, feathers, scales, shell, exoskeleton, bare skin or soft-bodied), and for young — eggs or live young as you'd observe it, so an animal that keeps its eggs inside and gives birth, like most vipers and the great white shark, counts as live young. These mostly agree with the class; they pay off on the animals that break it, like the egg-laying platypus.
Three more tiles are arrows rather than matches, each pointing from your guess towards the secret animal: adult weight, number of legs, and conservation status on the IUCN Red List. An up arrow on the last one means the secret animal is closer to extinction than the one you guessed.
Any tile can come up faded and inactive, and that is deliberate. It means we have no honest value for that animal — a house cat has no IUCN rating, an oyster has no waking hours — and showing a wrong value would be far worse than showing none.
After two guesses the mystery animal's class is shown to you for free — mammal, bird, insect, ray-finned fish and so on. It costs nothing and doesn't spend your clue. The tree of life only tells you where your guess diverges, so until you match the class it says very little; this guarantees you always have somewhere to stand, with order, family and genus still to work out.
Once you've matched a rank, guessing stays on that branch: match the order Rodentia and the input only accepts rodents from then on. The free class does the same. An animal off the branch has already been ruled out, so a guess there could only burn one of your six on something the board told you last turn.
After two guesses you can unlock a clue: pick any tile except the tree of life and you're told the mystery animal's value for it. A second clue unlocks after the fourth guess, so spend them on whichever traits you're least sure about — biome, pattern and colour are usually the ones that pay. The tree of life is excluded because handing over the answer's family would end the puzzle rather than help with it.
A new animal drops every day at 17:00 CET (Europe/Oslo time). Solving on consecutive days grows your streak; the Share button copies an emoji grid with the puzzle number — no spoilers included.
What counts in this quiz
The answer list is deliberately small and public. Countries are a closed set everyone already knows, so a hard country still feels fair; animals are not — there are around two million described species, and losing to one nobody has heard of just feels arbitrary.
So the animals that can actually be the secret are a curated shortlist, ranked by how often people really look them up on Wikipedia. Pageviews decide it, not anyone's taste.
A much larger set of animals is accepted as a GUESS, so naming a real animal is never punished even when it could never be the answer — up to the branch limit, which only ever excludes animals the board has already ruled out.
Where two answers were so alike that no tile could separate them, only one is eligible to be the secret. The other stays guessable — there is no point letting a day come down to a coin flip between a zebra and a plains zebra.
Entries are named the way people talk. "Tiger" is the entry and Bengal, Siberian and Sumatran are aliases of it; there is one entry for "Ant" rather than one per species.
Only living animals are in play — no dinosaurs or other extinct species.
The same animal never repeats within 90 days, and the daily draw is deterministic, so everyone on Earth gets the identical puzzle.
What's not included — and why
Names that mean different animals to different people are deliberately not accepted as aliases. An "elk" is one deer in North America and a completely different one in Europe; "robin", "buzzard" and "panther" have the same problem. Rather than silently pick one, the game makes you choose from the list.
Taxonomy uses the traditional school-textbook ranks, so reptiles are treated as a class and birds are kept separate from them — tidier than strict cladistics, and much closer to how players actually think.
Good to know
A tiger and a lynx share a family (Felidae) but not a genus — tigers are Panthera, lynxes are Lynx. A tiger and a lion DO share a genus, which is the strongest hint the game gives short of the answer.
Whales and dolphins are mammals, not fish, so guessing a shark against a dolphin scores nothing at all — different class, different phylum branch entirely.
Taxonomy hides some genuine surprises: a hippo's closest living relatives are whales, and a falcon is more closely related to a parrot than to an eagle.