Animals of South America

South America spent most of the last sixty million years as an island continent, and it evolved a mammal fauna unlike anywhere else — marsupials, sloths, anteaters, armadillos and an enormous radiation of rodents that includes the capybara, the largest in the world. When the Isthmus of Panama closed around three million years ago, North American carnivores and hoofed animals moved in and much of the endemic fauna disappeared. What survived that exchange is what the continent still holds.

The Amazon Basin dominates the map, and it dominates the species counts: more mammal species live there than in any comparable area on Earth, most of them bats, rodents and primates, many known from a handful of localities. The Andes run the entire length of the continent and act as a second centre of endemism, stacking distinct faunas on top of each other every few hundred metres of altitude — which is why so many Andean species have ranges measured in tens of square kilometres. Between and around them sit biomes that get far less attention and are in worse condition: the Cerrado savannas, the Chaco dry forest, the Atlantic Forest of coastal Brazil, and the Patagonian steppe.

The Atlantic Forest is the clearest case of what fragmentation does. It has been reduced to roughly a tenth of its original extent, in patches, and its endemic primates — muriquis, lion tamarins, howler monkeys — now appear on the map as scattered dots rather than a range. Several of them exist only because individual reserves were created for them.

Species mapped: 232
Countries covered: 14
Threatened species: 55
Data updated: August 9, 2026

Conservation status of these species

Countries covered

The 14 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

Cricetidae 74
Phyllostomidae 29
Atelidae 9
Cebidae 9
Pitheciidae 9
Chlamyphoridae 7
Callitrichidae 6
Cervidae 5
Didelphidae 5
Felidae 5
Otariidae 5
Canidae 4

Species to know

48 of the 232 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.