Objective To survey and analyze the current status of laboratory animals application in biomedical research and their yearly variations.Method PubMed(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) was chosen as the data-base.The use of various kinds of laboratory animals were analyzed from 1966 to 2003.The authors paid more attention to analyze the current status of application of mice and rats because they took the top two places in laboratory animal uses.Results Mice and rats were the most popular than other animals in the published articles that used animals as experiment materials.SD and Wistar closed colony rat and F344 inbred rat occupied the top three places in the use of rats.Inbred mice,such as C57BL and BABL/c,became the major selection of the biomedicial researchers when they selected mouse as experiment material,C57BL surpassed BABL/c and took the first place in 1997.The use of transgenic animals and mutant animals increased sharply in recent years.The use of other animals such as dogs,cats,pigs,etc.,decreased slowly.The use of drosophila and fish increased in recent years.Conclusion There is an increasing tendency in use of inbred animals in biomedical research.With the development of experiment techniques,transgenic animals and mutant animals would play more important roles in biomedicine research.Drosophila and fish got more attention in some study fields.