In this paper, we present an adaptive observer for nonlinear systems that include unknown constant parameters and are not necessarily observable. Sufficient conditions are given for a nonlinear system to be transformed by state-space change of coordinates into an adaptive observer canonical form. Once a nonlinear system is transformed into the proposed adaptive observer canonical form, an adaptive observer can be designed under the assumption that a certain system is strictly positive real. An illustrative example is included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.