Is it possible to download a list of all insect families with its temporal ranges from a fossil database?

You may be able to find what you need at the Palaeobiology Database:

https://paleobiodb.org/

FossilWorks is also a good site to download biostratigraphic data from:

http://fossilworks.org/?a=home

Thanks alot for your quick response, Gabriel! I've already tried both databases, but couldn't figure out how to do this at family level. I've downloaded a file from fossilworks, but only insect genera were listed here. Could you give a description how to do this with insect families?

Gabriel Stroup

Ah, unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way to download just family data, but it is possible to get both genus and family data from the Paleobiology Database through the following:

In the "Download Records" page, you can specify the taxa you want your data set to include (In this example, the order Odonata, see screenshot 1).

Then after downloading your generated data, you can sort the set based on column K (accepted_rank), by highlighting the entire set, right-clicking, and going into "Sort --> Custom Sort," then selecting "accepted_rank" in the "Sort By" box.

After sorting this way, you should have the family data among the first parts of the data set (see screenshot 2). The genus-specific data will then be pushed underneath all the family-specific data.

One can imagine that this may be effective if you've got all the major insect families in one file, but still might be clumsy to process.

Other than this, I'm not aware of any program devoted just to family data, but I hope this was helpful.

Hemen Sendi

Thank you for your clear explanation! It seemed to work fine until I checked the number of families with fossilworks. Unfortunately not all families are listed within the downloaded generated data. For example for Thysanoptera only 3 of the in total 10 families are listed, (although the species of some missing families are present). It's a shame EDNA fossil insect database doesn't work properly anymore.

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