About PhyloPic

PhyloPic is a community-driven project by T. Michael Keesey. Its purpose is simple: provide free access to scientifically accurate silhouettes of various life forms. These can be used as either icons or as small graphics.

This is useful in a variety of ways, whether you are looking for custom symbology or you need scientifically-accurate icons in your next presentation. All icons are available for reuse under a Creative Commons license.

The website uses a taxonomic database to search for silhouettes, so if you can’t find an exact genus and species, you can typically find a relative.

Anyone Can Upload Silhouettes

If you want to contribute to PhyloPic by creating your own silhouettes, you can! All you have to do is go to the contribute.phylopic.org subdomain (or click the upload a silhouette button on the homepage) and create an account by entering an email. Once you’ve done that, you can create, edit, and manage your silhouettes. 

Licensure

When you are browsing PhyloPic, you can also filter by certain licensure requirements, such as No ShareAlike Requirements, or Public Domain specifically, and Free for Commercial Use. If you’re not sure what any of these means, each filter has a helpful tooltip next to it that links you to the appropriate answer on the official Creative Commons licensure website.

Browse, Use, and Contribute

Right on the homepage, you’ll find API documentation, a codebase, and API recipes for anything you need to incorporate. The site, as of the time of this writing, has 12,483 silhouettes on its website filterable by lineage. 

You can browse silhouettes, use the silhouettes based on the Creative Commons license, and if you want to contribute in a financial way, you can donate via the links on the homepage. You can also create collections of your favorite or most commonly used silhouettes to keep them consolidated into an easy-access page. 

The site’s 2.0 form that is currently online raised over $14,000 on a crowdfunding platform back in 2018 – 115% over its original goal for production. Regular support and contribution (either in silhouettes or in donations) is important to keeping free-access resources just like PhyloPic available for the scientific community.