About Beat Darwin

What is Beat Darwin?

Beat Darwin is a free daily animal guessing game. Every day a new mystery species is chosen from the iNaturalist global biodiversity database. Your job is to identify it from a photo — in 3 attempts or fewer — before Charles Darwin makes you feel bad about it.

Think of it as Wordle, but instead of five-letter words you're identifying wildlife. Wrong guesses unlock progressive hints: first a geographic range, then a size or feature clue. Get it in one and Darwin sulks. Fail all three and he does a victory lap.

Why did I build it?

I wanted a daily game that was genuinely educational — one that would leave you knowing something real about the natural world, not just a word or a flag. Wildlife felt perfect: there are hundreds of thousands of described species, every one with a fascinating story, and most people couldn't identify more than a handful beyond common pets and zoo animals.

Each species page on Beat Darwin links to its IUCN conservation status and full taxonomy. When you're shown the answer, you learn something about where the animal lives, how it's classified, and how rare it is. That's the real game.

The data

All species data comes from iNaturalist, an open biodiversity observation platform run in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. iNaturalist hosts over 200 million wildlife observations contributed by naturalists worldwide.

Conservation status data comes from the IUCN Red List — the world's most comprehensive inventory of the conservation status of species. Species summaries come from Wikipedia.

Who made it?

Beat Darwin was built by Jonathan Clegg. I'm a developer with a long-standing interest in wildlife, conservation, and building things that teach people stuff without feeling like school.

You can follow Beat Darwin and the daily animal reveals on Twitter/X or subscribe to the newsletter for daily animal facts.