A wheel of animals that is already filled in — no typing a list first. Spin the wheel and land on a real species, with its photograph, scientific name and three facts. The rarer the animal is in the world, the rarer the slice you landed on.
Slice colour is the animal’s IUCN Red List status — green is common, red is critically endangered.
VulnerablePhoto: GinaFranchi · CC BY-SA 4.0
Panthera leo
The lion is a big cat that roams the grasslands of Africa and the forests of India. Known for its powerful build and striking mane, the lion is a symbol of strength and courage in the wild.
Every slice is coloured by the animal’s status on the IUCN Red List — the same scale conservationists use. Green slices are species of least concern; red slices are critically endangered. Landing on a red one is genuinely uncommon, because animals in that category are genuinely uncommon.
Grey slices are extinct species and prehistoric animals, which sit outside the Red List rather than at the top of it. Blue slices are species nobody has assessed yet.
Most spinner tools hand you an empty wheel and a text box: you type the options in yourself. That is the right design when you are picking who does the dishes, and the wrong one when you want a random animal — nobody wants to type out two hundred species before they can spin.
So this is a wheel of animals rather than an animal wheel spinner you have to load first. Every spin redraws twelve species from a library of more than thirteen hundred, mixed across mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects and dinosaurs, so the wheel is never the same twice and never twelve beetles.
People call this a few different things — a random animal wheel, a random animal generator wheel, a wheel of animals — and they all mean this: press the button, watch it slow down, get an animal you did not choose.
Prefer a button to a wheel? The random animal generator draws from the same library and shows the same cards, and there are button versions narrowed to dog breeds, birds and dinosaurs.