The appearance of animals largely depends on melanins present in their integument. However, it is unclear how different melanin forms create different animal color phenotypes. Reflectance spectrophotometry was used to measure the color expression of feathers and hairs of 59 species of birds and 12 species of mammals, comprising a significant part of the palette of melanin-based colors, and analyzed for the first time the detailed chemical composition of melanins on the same samples by HPLC.