Formins are multidomain proteins which are implicated in a wide range of actin-based processes, including cell polarization, cytokinesis, and embryonic development in all eukaryotic species studied so far. The signature sequence of formins is the formin homology-2 (FH2) domain, which is crucial for actin nucleation. Although six different formin protein families have been described so far, there is no comprehensive understanding of the actual number of genes encoding for the FH2 domains in different metazoan genomes. We systematically scan complete genomes for FH2-domain coding genes and study evolutioary history of this gene family.