Abstract
The animals are the important part of human enviroment since the very begining of existence of our swpecies. The hunter- gatherer human societis that are iliterate are able categorized and name animal species alike the current linguistic scientists (Berlin 1992).
Evolutionary psychologists suppose that human mind is shaped by previous coevolution with animals to respond specifically when human encounters animal stimuli (Barkow et al. 1992). There is for example innate predisposition for effective learning of fear elicited by dangerous spiders and snakes (Davey et al. 1998).
On the other hand there are animal taxons that evoked positive emotions. In our chapter we concentrate on three groups of terrestrial vertebrates (Amniota): the traditional "reptiles", birds and mammals.
We try to describe some piece of knowledge and principles that we found in our long term studies dealing with human evaluation of beauty of the animals. First, we define the term of animal beauty and how this is related to its atractivity for humans.
We give here list of the species that are evaluated as the most beautifful and the ugly one. We try to understand which features of the animals involve this aesthetic evaluation by humans.
For this purposes the understanding to morfological and species diversity inside particular higer taxon is essential as well as the improvement of the methodology of proper measurment of human aesthetic preferences towards animals. Finally we try to explain why is the studying of animal beauty and human aesthetic preferencis towards some animals important with respect to the current nature conservation policy.