Wild Wonders Await in This South American Animals Crossword!

How to Play This Online Word Puzzle?

• 1Click on a picture, and enter the letters of the matching word! If you fill in the word correctly, it will be validated automatically!
• 2Click on the "Check grid" button to see if you made mistakes and to mark incorrect letters in red.
  
• 3Use the Tabulator key on your keyboard to move to the next word in the crossword puzzle grid.
  
• 4Use the arrow keys on your keyboard, to move to the next or previous cell.
  
• 5Use the Delete or Backspace keys on your keyboard to clear a filled cell in the grid.
  
• 6To accomplish your mission and reach the final victory, find all the words in this online crossword game! Good luck!

A Continent of Contrasts

South America contains some of the most varied natural environments on Earth. Tropical rainforests may be the most famous, but the continent also includes high mountains, wetlands, grasslands, dry regions and long coastlines. Each landscape creates different opportunities and challenges for the animals that live there.

This geographical variety helps explain why South American wildlife can look so remarkably diverse. Animals may be adapted for climbing through vegetation, moving across the ground, finding food in trees or living close to water. Even species found within the same broad region can occupy very different ecological niches.

Life Among the Trees

Tropical forests provide habitats at many different heights. Life on the forest floor can be very different from life among branches or high in the canopy, where sunlight, food and shelter are distributed differently. Being able to climb, grip or move efficiently through vegetation can therefore provide an important advantage.

Color can play several roles too. Bright markings may help members of a species recognize one another, while patterns and more subdued shades can make an animal harder to notice among leaves, branches or shadows. Evolution has produced an extraordinary range of solutions for surviving in these complex environments.

Beyond the Rainforest

South American wildlife should not be reduced to the Amazon. The Andes form the world's longest continental mountain range, while enormous river systems, plains and wetlands support their own animal communities. Temperature and rainfall can change dramatically from one region to another, and wildlife reflects those differences. Players curious about animals from other parts of the world can travel north with our North American Wildlife Crossword or cross the Atlantic with the African Wildlife Crossword Adventure.

Ten Wild Clues to Uncover

This crossword brings together ten animals associated with South America. The pictures offer the first clues, but the words themselves vary considerably in length and spelling. That combination makes the grid useful for practicing animal vocabulary while discovering creatures connected with another part of the world.

Geography and language meet naturally in activities like this one: identifying an animal can lead to questions about where it lives, what it eats and how it survives. Ten illustrated clues provide ten starting points for exploring some of the continent's remarkable wildlife.