About GeoZoo

GeoZoo is the creation of David Blomstrom, a naturalist and former wildlife biologist turned web publisher. It is one of the few animal websites that endeavor to tackle the entire animal kingdom in any detail.

The key word is endeavor; for years, GeoZoo has lingered on the Internet as little more than a taxonomic database. But wait...

In January 2011, a massive upgrade of all Geobop websites began. Work on GeoZoo 2.0 began the following summer. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the site has been given a facelift, and new content is added almost daily.

Structure

GeoZoo consists of two basic units, Biopedia and Earth Safari.

The Biopedia consists primarily of the Topics, Reference and Glossary sections, which work together as a user-friendly encyclopedia of life. The best place to get oriented is the GeoZoo home page or the Topics home page. Or you can begin reading the introductory articles here.

Earth Safari consists of the Life and World sections, supported by the Biopedia.

The Life section functions as a taxonomic tree of life. For example, if you visit the muskox page, you’ll see the following navigation links at the top of the page:

No one can write quality articles about every species of living thing - not in ten lifetimes. But there are alternative strategies.

For example, pages in the Life section will be linked to relevant resources in the Biopedia. Thus, the Gila monster page might be linked to the Introduction to Reptiles series, along with articles about venomous animals.

Eventually, GeoZoo will also include links to other online resources, such as the Catalogue of Life, Encyclopedia of Life and Animal Diversity Web.

User Friendly

GeoZoo is designed for novices as well as professional biologists. This is accomplished partly through the Biopedia, which covers a lot of territory, with articles about anatomy, physiology, ecology, evolution and more.

GeoZoo also employs a dual classification strategy, embracing both the traditional taxonomic scheme and “pop groups” - essentially a classification based on popular, morphological and ecological groups.

For example, suppose you’re looking for information about tamanduas, tamanduras, or however it’s spelled. You visit Life > Mammalia (mammals) but are confused by all those unfamiliar orders. (What’s an elephant shrew?)

If you opt for a pop group classification, you can quickly eliminate marine mammals, hoofed mammals, primates and other groups. If you know a little about tamanduas, then you might then search for them in groups like Arboreal Mammals, Animals with Prehensile Tails or Ant-Eating Animals.

Eventually, you’ll hopefully discover that tamanduas are tropical American arboreal anteaters. If not, be patient - still more aids are on being developed.

Pop groups are built into page navigation in the Life section. If you go back to the muskox page, you’ll see the muskox’s “parents,” grandparents, etc. in the navigation links near the top of the page. A little farther down, you’ll see a tab labeled My Groups. Clicking that will reveal a list of pop groups the muskox belongs to (when finished).

On pages other than species pages (e.g. Bovidae), you’ll also see a My Children tab. Clicking it will reveal all the genera belonging to the family Bovidae or something similar, depending on the page.

Politics

No, GeoZoo isn’t a political website; Geobop’s website Politix covers that beat. However, GeoZoo does tackle political issues occasionally.

For example, how will genetically modified agriculture, as promoted by the Bill Gates/Monsanto alliance, affect Africa’s people and wildlife? What about the trail of depleted uranium the U.S. military leaves everywhere it goes these days? And when will oil companies be held accountable for catastrophic oil spills?

Don’t expect any other animals website to even broach such topics.

Progress Report

GeoZoo 2.0 begins with parallel introductory series offering an overview of plants and animals - 95 articles total, along with a variety of associated articles and reference pages. That project will hopefully be finished by the end of the year (2011). However, the GeoZoo Glossary probably won’t be up and running until early 2012.

After New Years, the focus will shift more to developing the Life and World sections; in fact, some work has already been done in this area.