Help with custom post types and custom taxonomy

Hello everyone,

I’m here to ask for a little help/hint on how to do a specific thing in wordpress, I’d be most grateful if anyone could point me on the right way, because I can’t seem to find good info on this one.

I have a custom post type called “animal”, and I have a taxonomy called “type”. I want to list every animal in a page, grouped by type, and to include a link to the post and the featured image as a thumbnail.

With a query like this I can show all of the posts

<?php query_posts( 'post_type=animal'); ?>

And I can show the posts thumbnails with

<?php the_post_thumbnail(‘medium’, array( ‘class’ => ‘alignleft’ )); ?>

But I don’t really know how I can filter them by taxonomy, for example, to list every type of animal, each type on its column.

Any help regarding this matter would be awesome, thanks