No animal species are currently known to occur only in Uruguay.
Endemic means a species lives naturally in one place and nowhere else. For this post we use a strict rule: a species must have its entire wild range inside Uruguay’s political borders. Using that definition, there are no confirmed vertebrate species that meet the rule. Taxonomic lists and global databases do not show any animals whose whole range is limited to Uruguay alone.
This result appears because of how biogeography and borders work. Uruguay is small and sits in the Pampas and coastal plains. Those habitats continue into Argentina and Brazil. True endemics usually evolve on islands, in isolated mountain ranges, or in places cut off by big barriers. Uruguay has few of those barriers. Also, scientific names and ranges change with new research. Some organisms first described from Uruguay later prove to live across the border, or they are reclassified as subspecies rather than full species. For up-to-date range data consult IUCN, GBIF, BirdLife and Uruguay’s natural history collections.
Look instead at close alternatives and related categories. Many species are characteristic of the Pampas and are important to Uruguay’s wildlife—examples include the Pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) and the Pampas fox (Lycalopex gymnocercus). Marine visitors like the southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) use Uruguay’s coast but are not endemic. You will also find endemic subspecies, many invertebrates, freshwater fishes, and plants that were first described from Uruguay. Explore near-endemics, endemic subspecies, plants and invertebrates, and country-level conservation lists (IUCN and Uruguay’s red lists) for the information you likely want.
