Metazooa asks you to name one mystery animal a day, and it uses your mistakes as clues. Each guess is added to a family tree built from taxonomic ranks such as phylum, class and order, branching off where it parts ways with the answer, so the more your animal shares with the target, the more you find out. The example on the site places a clownfish, a platypus and a chimpanzee on ever closer branches to humans. You get 20 guesses, and the slow zoom down the tree is the hook.
The list opens with games that share Metazooa's ancestry-tree feedback, including a plant counterpart and a version for languages, then moves to animal identification games that grade guesses by family, genus or other traits. It ends with lighter animal puzzles for anyone who mainly comes to Metazooa for the creatures.
The plant counterpart that Metazooa's own page suggests once you have found the day's animal: plants you guess build the same kind of ancestry tree that grows with each try, and you get 25 tries to reach the mystery species.
Also places each guess in the tree of life according to how closely it is related to the day's animal, and adds hints from a capybara host plus a mosaic picture that gets sharper with every miss.
Applies Metazooa's tree idea to linguistics: each language you guess appears on a family tree next to where the hidden one sits, you have 20 guesses at most, the same as Metazooa, and a hint to lean on.
Taxonomy-based feedback for birds: you start from a photo and have six guesses at the species, each compared with the answer's order, family and genus, so a near miss tells you which branch to search.
Covers marine and freshwater mammals only, otters and whales among them, in six tries. A yellow mark means your guess belongs to the correct family, much like a shared branch on Metazooa's tree, and further clues cover appearance, range and status.
A bundle of eight animal games. The closest to Metazooa has you deduce a mystery animal from its taxonomy and habitat, and others ask you to mark its continents, read a pixelated photo or sort animals in a Venn diagram.
A messier route to the right animal: you study a close-up photo of droppings and get six guesses, each compared on traits with the answer, with arrows showing whether the culprit weighs more or less.
Puts animal knowledge in a grid: each of nine squares needs an animal matching two crossed traits, such as forest living and pointy ears, and a single animal satisfies every category at once.
Bird identification for North American species: you work from cropped pieces of a picture and brief recordings of its call, and a large archive lets you keep going after the daily, unlike Metazooa's single animal.
Yes, 20 a day, and a single mystery animal is up for grabs. A countdown on the home page shows when the next one arrives. Since every miss still lands somewhere on the family tree, an early guess from a broad group, such as a fish or a mammal, can show you which large branch to search before you commit to a species.
Metazooa follows the NCBI taxonomy, which does not use Reptilia. It places reptiles and birds together in the class Sauropsida, because some animals usually called reptiles are closer to birds than to other reptiles; crocodiles, for example, are nearer to birds than to lizards. Classifications on Wikipedia can differ for the same reason.
Yes. Once you have found the day's animal, Metazooa's page points you to Metaflora, where plants form the same kind of ancestry tree and you get 25 tries. For other trees, Language Tree places guessed languages on a family tree, and Capybaropolis maps animal guesses onto the tree of life with a mosaic picture as extra help.
