Field guide
In Neon Amoeba your cell changes form twelve times on its way from a single cell to a whale, and the dish moves through five eras of life. Every form, hunter and piece of food in the game is based on a real living thing. This page says what each one is, with one true fact about it.
Where the game simplifies
The game shows one cell changing form. Real evolution does not work like that: a single animal never turns into another one. Groups of animals change slowly, over many generations. Life is also a branching tree, not a ladder. So each form in the game stands for a relative of an animal on the way, not a direct ancestor. Two forms, the frog and the hippo, are shown as cousins on purpose.
Colors follow the game's rules, not nature: your cell is always VIOLET, food is always GREEN, danger is always RED, and bounties are always BLUE.
The thirteen forms
| Level | Name | The real animal | One true fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oozle | An amoeba | It moves by pushing out parts of its body, called pseudopods (“false feet”), and flowing into them. |
| 2 | Whippy | A flagellate | It swims with a whip-like tail called a flagellum. The first complex cells could probably both crawl and swim. |
| 4 | Bunchy | A colony of flagellates | Choanoflagellates are the closest living single-celled relatives of animals, and some kinds live in colonies. |
| 6 | Pulsey | A jellyfish | Jellyfish are cousins of the animals with a left and a right side, such as worms, fish and people. They are not our ancestors. |
| 8 | Swishy | A lancelet | A small sea animal shaped like a fish, but with no backbone. Scientists study it as a model of what the ancestors of animals with backbones were like. |
| 10 | Finlet | A lobe-finned fish | All four-legged animals, including people, come from lobe-finned fish. Their paired fins have bone and muscle inside. |
| 13 | Stumpy | A fishapod, like Tiktaalik | Tiktaalik lived about 375 million years ago. It had a neck, a flat head with eyes on top, and fin bones that could bend like a wrist. |
| 16 | Hoppy | A frog | Frogs are amphibians, a side branch of the four-legged animals, not part of the line that led to mammals. The first frog-like animals lived about 250 million years ago, long after the first four-legged animals. |
| 19 | Lizzy | An early egg-layer, like Hylonomus | Hylonomus lived about 318 million years ago in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada. It looked like a lizard but was not one, and scientists still debate its exact place in the tree. |
| 22 | Sails | A sail-back, like Dimetrodon | Dimetrodon lived about 294 to 271 million years ago, before the first dinosaurs. It was more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs. Long spines on its backbone held up its sail. |
| 25 | Squeak | An early mammal relative, like Morganucodon | Morganucodon lived about 205 million years ago and was about 10 cm long, like a shrew. Whether it counts as a true mammal depends on how “mammal” is defined. |
| 28 | Wallow | A hippo | Hippos are the closest living relatives of whales. They are cousins: hippos did not turn into whales. |
| 31 | Spouty | A whale | A whale's tail beats up and down. A fish's tail beats from side to side. |
Level: the level on which you first play as that form. The cell changes at the end of the level before.
The five eras
Every few levels the dish moves to a new era, with new red hunters, new green food and a new blue bounty. When a new era begins, some hunters from the last era come back green and harmless, and you can eat them for 15 points.
| Era | Levels | Red hunter | Green food | Blue bounty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Microbes | 1–5 | A virus | Round, rod-shaped and spiral bacteria | A virus |
| 2. Cambrian seas | 6–9 | Grabber: Anomalocaris | Hopper: a tiny crustacean, like a copepod | A nautilus-like shell animal |
| 3. Early fish | 10–15 | Pincer: a sea scorpion | School: small shrimp-like crustaceans | A coelacanth |
| 4. Coal swamps | 16–24 | Snapper: a big swamp amphibian, like Eryops | Scuttler: a cockroach-like insect; Jumper: a cricket-like insect | A horseshoe crab |
| 5. Modern waters | 25–60 | Fin: a shark | Grub: a beetle larva | A blue American lobster |
True facts from the eras
- Giant viruses, such as Mimivirus, really do infect amoebas.
- Anomalocaris was one of the earliest known top predators. It hunted in the Cambrian seas about 500 million years ago and was about 35 cm long, not counting its front claws and tail.
- A nautilus swims by squirting water out of its body, a kind of jet propulsion.
- Sea scorpions were not true scorpions; they were close relatives of spiders and scorpions. They lived from about 480 to 252 million years ago, at first in the sea and later also in fresh water.
- The coelacanth belongs to an old line of lobe-finned fish that still lives today, in deep water. Living coelacanths are deep blue with pale spots.
- Eryops lived about 293 million years ago. It was usually 1.5 to 2 m long and probably ate mostly large fish and other water animals.
- Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based protein called hemocyanin.
- Blue lobsters are a rare but real color form of the American lobster.
Sources
The facts on this page come from these articles, checked on October 2 and 3, 2026: Misconceptions about evolution (University of California, Berkeley); Wikipedia: Amoeba, Last eukaryotic common ancestor, Choanoflagellate, Cnidaria, Lancelet, Sarcopterygii, Tiktaalik, Frog, Hylonomus, Dimetrodon, Morganucodon, Whippomorpha, Whale, Mimivirus, Anomalocaris, Nautilus, Eurypterid, West Indian Ocean coelacanth, Eryops, Roachoid, Horseshoe crab, American lobster.
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