What is it? - It is a simplified (and somewhat abbreviated) classification scheme for the whole animal kingdom. It represents a fairly traditional view of animal phylogeny (and is basically the scheme followed for information organization within the Zoological Record indexing service).

What is it for? - It allows you to easily position an animal group within the overall scheme of things, and link to related information. Use the 'find on page' function of your browser (Ctrl+F in Netscape and Internet Explorer) to help to locate the name of an animal or group of animals.

How is it arranged? - It gives a hierarchical listing of the major groups of animals, with short notes, representative taxa and links to sites with extensive further information. The relative rankings of the groups are indicated by their horizontal position (indentation) and coloration eg all groups at the rank of class are in red.

Points you should note:

• other authors may advocate different arrangements based on recent research findings - the world of biological classification is in constant flux as new discoveries are made - in particular there is much uncertainty at the bases of the arthropod, chordate and craniate lineages
• numerous less well-known groups, particularly fossils, are excluded for brevity - a more complete list can be found in the Zoological Record Systematic Thesaurus.