PhyloPic.org — Animal and Plant Silhouettes for your diagrams

I recently came across http://phylopic.org/ which has a very useful library of animal silhouettes that may be useful when you are preparing phylogenetic tree diagrams and the like. I’ve added a tammar, since there wasn’t one there, and there are lots of other nice silhouettes of all sorts of living things, indexed by taxonomy or with text search.

The images come in a range of sizes plus thumbnail 64 pixels square, For the tammar image I uploaded, the sizes range from 64×31 px up to the original 4444×2159 pixels. For many there are also SVG (scaled vector graphics) versions. This is a vector format that you can scale to whatever size you need without pixellation. Note that PowerPoint does not always play nicely with SVG, but there are many free apps that can scale and convert SVG to formats PowerPoint will work with. These include Inkscape, Libre Office. Adobe illustrator will also handle SVG if you have this (expensive) application on hand (and the extensive knowledge to use it).

For some species there are multiple images to chose from – eg Homo sapiens sapiens – here is a link to some of the silhouettes in a lineage tree of H sapiens that goes back to the beginning of life.

http://phylopic.org/name/105d17a4-9706-4fd5-85d7-becffaf6250a/lineage/

If you have created silhouettes that you want to share, it is simple on the PhyloPic site to add a new silhouette and place it in its correct taxonomic place.

PhylPic also has a programming interface so if you need, you may be able to grab the images programmatically if you have large jobs.

Enjoy.