Animals of North America

North America lost most of its large mammals about eleven thousand years ago. Mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, American lions and native horses and camels all disappeared within a few thousand years of people arriving. What survived is a fauna that looks complete until you know what used to be there: the pronghorn still runs fast enough to outpace a predator that no longer exists.

The map is organised by three north-south corridors. The Rocky Mountains carry cold-adapted species — grizzly, wolverine, bighorn sheep, mountain goat — far south of the latitudes they would otherwise reach. The Great Plains, once the range of tens of millions of bison, are now the most thoroughly converted biome on the continent, and the species tied to them are the ones in the steepest decline. The eastern deciduous forest was cleared and has substantially regrown, which is why white-tailed deer, black bear and coyote are more widespread now than a century ago.

The southern end of the continent is the interesting part biologically. Mexico and Central America sit at the junction where the North and South American faunas met after the Isthmus of Panama closed, and the overlap produced one of the densest concentrations of mammal species anywhere: jaguars, tapirs, opossums, armadillos and a long list of bats and rodents that belong to South American lineages but live north of the isthmus. It is also where most of the continent's threatened mammals are found.

Species mapped: 155
Countries covered: 23
Threatened species: 26
Data updated: August 9, 2026

Conservation status of these species

Countries covered

The 23 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

Phyllostomidae 25
Heteromyidae 12
Cervidae 8
Bovidae 7
Cricetidae 7
Felidae 7
Canidae 6
Mustelidae 6
Phocidae 5
Otariidae 4
Soricidae 4
Balaenopteridae 3

Species to know

48 of the 155 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.