Animals of Asia

Asia spans more latitude and more altitude than any other continent, and its fauna reflects that. A single landmass carries Arctic tundra in Siberia, cold desert on the Tibetan Plateau, temperate forest in Korea and Japan, monsoon woodland across India and Indochina, and equatorial rainforest through Sumatra, Borneo and New Guinea's western half. No other continent asks its animals to solve so many different problems.

The Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau form the defining feature of the map. They are high enough to work as a wall: species on the northern side — snow leopard, Tibetan antelope, wild yak — belong to a cold-adapted fauna with no equivalent to the south, while the forests below the range hold tigers, gaur, sloth bears and the primates of the Indian subcontinent. Further east, the Indonesian archipelago is split by Wallace's Line, the abrupt boundary where Asian mammals stop and Australasian marsupials begin. It runs through a strait a few dozen kilometres wide, and it is one of the few places where a biogeographic border is visible on a road map.

Asia also concentrates the continent-scale conservation emergencies. Southeast Asia's forests are being cleared faster than anywhere else, and the region's mammals are hunted heavily for meat, traditional medicine and the pet trade — pangolins most of all. Many of the species assessed here are known from a single island, a single mountain range, or a handful of specimens collected decades ago, and their assessments say so explicitly.

Species mapped: 324
Countries covered: 45
Threatened species: 97
Data updated: August 9, 2026

Conservation status of these species

Countries covered

The 45 countries whose name appears in at least one Red List range description in this dataset, with the number of species recorded in each. A wide-ranging animal is counted in every country it crosses.

The families found here

Muridae 76
Cricetidae 27
Soricidae 27
Bovidae 24
Sciuridae 21
Felidae 16
Cervidae 15
Dipodidae 11
Pteropodidae 9
Calomyscidae 6
Molossidae 6
Canidae 5

Species to know

48 of the 324 species recorded here, threatened ones first. Select any of them to open it on the globe.

Other continents

Counts recomputed from the mapped dataset; countries are derived from the range descriptions of each assessment. Species data from the IUCN Red List, last refreshed on August 9, 2026.