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A searchable taxonomic database for all living things. I just discovered this tonight but I can see it will be extremely useful.

For one thing, I can search for a genus and quickly see where it fits into the taxonomic hierarchy. This will make finding things in Arnett (1) simpler. They also provide common names for most taxa. Another use would be to get a quick check for how many species there might be for a particular genus.

There does appear to be huge omissions. For example, I couldn't find Salticidae (jumping spiders) in there.
http://www.itis.gov/index.html

New URL

I have found not so useful in past--hope it has improved
A couple of years back, I donated some images to the University of Mighigan's Animal Diversity Web. They kept telling me to find names, etc. in ITIS, but I found the coverage of invertebrates was very spotty. I just did a search on "Battus", for example, and came up with no entries. A search of "Papilionidae" shows just two "children", when it should have several genera listed underneath, if I understand it correctly. If I do a search on "Papilio" in the scientific name, I get only three daughter species listed underneath. (These are the same problems I had trying to use it two years ago--incomplete, even for well-known North American species, at least lepidoptera.)

That, said, I hope you can find it more useful than I did. Coverage of dragonflies looks pretty good, and there is some coverage of beetle genera that I looked for. Maybe it is better in covering genera than of species? It is also not clear to me if it is meant to be global, or more North American in coverage. Hard to say. I look forward to you getting some more tidbits out of that system!

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