AnimalBase is a service provided by the Zoological Institute of the University of Göttingen, Germany. Our work has initially been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG.

It is our scope to provide copyright-free open access to zoological works, and provide manually verified lists of names of zoological genera and species as a free resource for the public. The public use of AnimalBase data is not restricted or conditioned. Those who contribute voluntarily data or pictures to AnimalBase do this under the understanding of contributing to a free public resource. age authors). If you download content from AnimalBase please make sure that you attribute the source (in cases of downloaded books, the library, and in cases of downloaded pictures, the image authors). The legal term for this is CC BY-SA, if not indicated otherwise. In other words, it is not allowed to present pictures on other websites without either quoting the name of the image author, or providing a deep link to the AnimalBase page from where the picture was downloaded, and where the image author is quoted.

The literature was digitized by SUB Göttingen (our university library). In a first 2-year period (2003-2005) we digitized nearly all taxonomically relevant zoological literature from the beginnings around 1550 until 1770 (about 400 works, in which 10,000 specific and generic names were established). In a second period (2008-2011) we digitized more works (total number 1000-2000 volumes, comprising 600,000 pages).

Early zoological publications were digitized under the highest quality standards by the Center for Retrospective Digitization in Göttingen (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum, GDZ). If available, AnimalBase also provides links to the digitized public domain content of other providers, such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) or Gallica.

AnimalBase was originally established to link the early literature with the names of the animals described therein. The names of generic and specific taxa have all been entered manually into the database, including original and corrected spellings of names, type localities and page numbers where these names were originally established in the publications. Doing this we followed a standard established by our working group.

We compared the original works with Sherborn's Index Animalium, and at this occasion we verified Sherborn's precious compilation, detected missing names and incorrect (partly outdated) information. For the generic names we also compared with Neave's Nomenclator Zoologicus.

Today our database should include all (or at least most) names of zoological taxa established from 1757 until  the early 1790s  . Between 2004 and 2011 some 20 students of the AnimalBase Project Group (listed below) worked around one year each one, and in this period added about 50,000 names of species and genera were added to the AnimalBase content (to be compared with about 320,000 names from 1757-1850 contained in Sherborn's Index Animalium). Many more names established after 1800 are also contained, mainly for non-marine molluscs, which is a special focus of AnimalBase. home for some AnimalBase is not an aggregator, every name was inserted manually by a person which is recorded at the bottom line of every taxonomic "homepage". In the "show history of this page" sections the access to the previously inserted information, with their authors, is saved.

AnimalBase is the home for some 2200 species of European non-marine molluscs, with detailed information on their morphology, biology and distribution, and with copyright-free pictures of the majority of these species. Various European malacologists contributed the information and the pictures.

Digitized pages and figures can be downloaded for non-profit purposes and we particularly would like to encourage public institutions and libraries in non-European countries to download and print out rare old books, bind them and store them in public libraries. A copyright note (SUB Göttingen) quoted on the outprints would be fine. The international scientific community is responsible for protecting the heritage of zoological science. Duplicating old books can contribute to reduce the danger that some day in the future precious infomation could get lost.

2009-1012 AnimalBase formed part of the BHL-Europe consortium. The Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe was an EU project founded to coordinate digitization of biodiversity related literature and to create a main central portal where all works digitized in European and other projects could be accessed. Long-term preservation of digitized objects was another task of BHL-Europe. The initial plan was that digitized literature of the AnimalBase project would also be accessible there. Due to technical problems this could not be achieved.

The AnimalBase web presentation has remained stable and unmodified since 2005. It was initially designed to serve the oldest available browsers (this is why we do not work with frames). We are not planning to change this. Our server is hosted by Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen GWDG. Sometimes AnimalBase gets suddenly offline (and then only a white screen can be seen). This is due to an unknown program bug that has never been found. The only solution is to wait until AnimalBase is online again. The program must be switched on manually by GWDG staff members. At weekends this can take several hours. We apologise for the delay.

AnimalBase is not linked with other online biodiversity related databases and services. This is one of its main shortcomings. In 2010 we have asked for funding to get connected with other biodiversity services, but DFG denied our request. It seems that DFG reviewers thought that biodiversity databases get connected with each other without that anyone needs to do the work.

Collaborators have the right to login and enter data directly into the database. We encourage users to correct data if the given information is incorrect. Just follow the registration link (login is necessary to see who has created or modified information in the database). AnimalBase is a public project, there are no commercial interests involved. Non-collaborators can read every information and see all digitized pages, no login is necessary to see all contents.

Pictures of animals are more or less understood to have been released by the authors to the public domain, if not otherwise indicated. We would not encourage uploading copyrighted pictures without clear indication. The nature of AnimalBase is a free public resource.

AnimalBase Project Group:

Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum (GDZ) | Changeable adjectives | Old type localities | Proposals for AnimalBase team comments on taxon homepages
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (useful for researching dates of publication of early works)  | WORMS World Register of Marine Species.

Cite AnimalBase itself as:
AnimalBase Project Group, 2005-[current year]. AnimalBase. Early zoological literature online. - World wide web electronic publication (www.animalbase.uni-goettingen.de).

Cite particular pages in this form:
Welter-Schultes, F. 2009. Species summary for Renea veneta. - www.animalbase.uni-goettingen.de (version 21-01-2009).

To give due credits to authors, please prefer citing the authors of the references of the respective records, if they are cited by us. In some contributions from before July 2005 we erroneously gave credit to FishBase, it should have been Catalog of Fishes.

Last deploy: Do 29.11.2012

  by Francisco Welter-Schultes