This page is the floor of an African rainforest. Move your pointer through the leaves and your animal will knuckle-walk, creep, flutter or march after you. Choose a different animal at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
The Congo rainforest right now checking the sky…
A grown male is called a silverback, after the silver-grey hair on his back. He leads and protects the family.
A gorilla walks on all fours, taking its weight on the knuckles of its hands.
Gorillas eat leaves, stems and fruit, and a big male can eat about 18 kilograms in a day.
Each gorilla builds a fresh nest of leaves and branches to sleep in every evening.
A silverback beats his chest with cupped hands. The sound carries a long way and tells others how big he is.
Western lowland gorillas are critically endangered, from hunting, disease and the loss of their forest.
Meet them all
Gorilla gorilla gorilla
The largest of the apes: black-haired and broad-shouldered. Grown males have a saddle of silver hair across the back.
Pan troglodytes
Our closest living relative: black-haired, with a pale face, big ears and long arms.
Okapia johnstoni
A shy forest animal with a velvety dark brown coat and zebra-like stripes on its legs and hindquarters.
Psittacus erithacus
A grey parrot with a white face, a black beak and a bright red tail, famous for its intelligence.
Chamaeleonidae
A slow-moving lizard with swivelling eyes, gripping feet, a curled tail and a skin that changes colour.
Goliathus
One of the largest insects on Earth: a heavy beetle with a black-and-white striped back and chestnut wing cases.
Through the year
It is warm and wet all year in the rainforest, so these animals can be seen in any month. The animal following you is shown in red.
Good to know
A rainforest has floors like a building: the dim forest floor, the understorey, the leafy canopy and a few giant trees above it all.
It rains on most days of the year, often in a heavy burst in the afternoon.
So little sunlight reaches the ground that the forest floor is surprisingly open and easy to walk through.
Africa's great rainforest covers an area bigger than western Europe, and stores a vast amount of carbon.
Rainforests cover a small part of the Earth but hold more than half of all its kinds of plants and animals.
Choose wood and paper with the FSC mark, and support charities that protect forest and work with the people who live there.
Real photos of the animals on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
The Congo Basin is the second largest rainforest on Earth. Most of the animals on this page live nowhere else, and all of them depend on it staying standing.
Back to the topAfrican river animals live on the African river page: choosing one takes you there.
Animals from other parts of the world live on their own pages: change area.