Random Animal Generator

Welcome to our Random Animal Generator! This tool will randomly generate between 1 and 10 animals. Though fun for anyone, the generator is especially useful for budding child biologists who want to learn more about the natural world. If you are looking to adopt a new pet dog or cat, please let us know. We can get more specific with felines and canines and other pets that you can bring into your home. For now we focus on all animals, including those that predate humans!

How to Use the Random Animal Generator

1. Choose how many animals you’d like to generate. Our tool defaults to four animals but can generate between one and ten animals on each go-around. Use the sliding selection tool to choose how many animals you’d like to generate.
2. If you’d like to generate a specific type of animal, hit the settings button. This button allows you to select what type of animal you’d like generated based on their class. For instance, you can choose to only have mammals generated. Or you can go for dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, fish, or arthropods – or any combination of the above.
3. You can also restrict options based on spellings. If you’re using this tool to practice your English, you can ask the tool to generate results based on what letters the animal’s name starts with, ends with, or contains.
4. Finally, you can choose whether you’d like images to show up with the animal. Again, if you’re practicing your English, you might want to generate results without an image, so you can test if you are able to identify the animal. You can decide if you’d be willing to have duplicate animals generated as well. For instance, if you decide to generate a group of ten animals with duplicates turned on, you might find two of your generated animals are mountain goats.
5. Once you’re happy with your settings, hit the green ‘random’ button. A list of animals will appear on the page, alongside photos if the image setting is on.
6. To learn more about an animal, click or tap on it. A pop-up will appear with a couple of brief paragraphs from Wikipedia about the animal in question.
7. To copy the names of your animals, simply click the grey copy button. You can paste these into any word-processing program.
8. Want to share this tool on social media? Use the simple sharing buttons below the animal pictures. You can also share the tool via email using the grey email widget.

Uses for the Random Animal Generator

There are tons of different ways you can use our Random Animal Generator, including:

1. Teaching your child about animals.

If your child is starting to get into animals, it might seem like there’s an overwhelming amount of information out there to teach them. There may be as many as 2 million animal species on Earth, according to scientists – where do you even begin? Try starting with our animal generator. It can give you a few easy animals to start out with, and the random element of it can be a fun way to keep impatient kids engaged.

2. Playing a game.

Similarly, our random animal generator can form the basis of a fun, biology-based guessing game. Generate a random animal for each player. Then, in a Charades-like game, ask players to act out their assigned animal. The goal is to get the other players to correctly guess what your animal is. Of course there are hundreds of other uses and games in which one could use the generator.

3. Practicing your English – or another foreign language.

As an adult, you probably know the names of all these animals. But do you know them in multiple different languages? It’s hard to memorize tons of new nouns. If you're an ESL learner, use this tool to reinforce your English language skills: simply generate random animals and work on memorizing their English names. Or to test your speaking abilities in another language, challenge yourself to translate each of the animal names into whatever foreign language you’re working on learning.

4. Developing your artistic skills.

If you want to get better at drawing animals – or better at drawing, period – this tool can be a great way to practice your skills. Generate an animal, then challenge yourself to draw it. You can choose to try to mimic the picture provided, to create a cartoon version of the animal, or to draw it in a completely different pose or setting. Whatever you do, practice makes perfect!

5. Practicing your knowledge of scientific classifications.

Okay, this one might be a little niche, but for any high-schoolers or college students looking to practice biology classifications, this tool can be very useful. Simply generate a few random animals and try to remember what classification they are. You can vary what you’re trying to guess based on difficulty. It’ll probably be relatively easy to remember what class an animal is, for example. But what about their genus? Family?

It works for scientific names, too. Let’s say you’re working on memorizing the scientific names of all the dinosaurs. Simply set the tool to only generate dinosaurs. Then have the tool generate a random set. You can challenge yourself to say what the scientific name of the dinosaur is before you click on the picture to get the full answer. Yes, this is basically the same thing as flashcards, but it saves you from having to go to the effort of creating a Quizlet when you’re already swamped with schoolwork.

Feedback

Did you like our Random Animal Generator, or are there features you’d like to see added? Feel free to send us feedback so we can improve the tool for your purposes! Or check out some of our other randomization tools, including our Random Word Generator, Random Sentence Generator, and Random Object Generator.