The brain has specialized areas for recognizing categories such as faces and houses, but how does it distinguish items within a category? The authors showed human volunteers pictures of bugs, birds and primates and compared neural response patterns in the lateral occipital complex area with the volunteers' behavioural judgements of the pictures. This revealed a continuum of cortical activity patterns that reflected the degree of 'animacy' of the pictured animals (increasing from insects to birds to primates). Future studies may establish whether inanimate objects and humans are reflected on this same continuum of neural representations.