Geomagnetic field (GMF) is an important geophysical field of the planet Earth. It is the field that shields organisms from the solar wind and other cosmic rays, and plays an important role in protecting the atmosphere and hydrosphere escape from earth which are crucial to life survival to provide a mild survival habitability of our planet planet. Besides, it is widely recognized that the intensity，declination and inclination of the GMF can provide navigational reference information for animals during their migration. It has been found that a big group of birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and other animals can use the GFM for orientation and navigation. However, the magnetoreceptor which allows an organism to detect a magnetic field, the mechanisms of magnetoreception and the related neural pathway of magnetoreception is still largely unknown. In this review, we describe the three major well-known magnetoreception mechanisms and their corresponding evidence: (1) Electromagnetic-induction-based magnetoreception; (2)Photoreceptor-based magnetoreception; and(3) Magnetite-based magnetoreception.The magnetoreception neural pathways and the brain regions involved in magnetic information processing of mechanism (2) and (3) in birds will be discussed: the photoreceptor-cryptochrome in the retina which obtain the direction of the geomagnetic field can transmit the magnetic information to the brain through the visual pathway to acquire direction information; and the magnetite receptors, based on tiny particles of magnetite either in the skin of the upper beak or/and inner ear lagena of avian which transmitted the magnetic strength information to brainstem neurons through the trigeminal nerve/ lagena afferent terminations as a part of the ‘navigational map’ to obtain positional information. We also summarized the recent progresses on mammals geomagnetic navigation and raised some key scientific issues in the further researches on animal geomagnetic navigation .