iNat’s taxonomy mostly implements what are believed to be monophyletic groups, but includes at least a handful of clearly paraphyletic groups. I thought it might be useful to have a list of these to add to as they come up, and I couldn’t find one. In a previous discussion, now closed, here: https:…

Comparing Wikipedia list to iNat taxonomy shows some examples like Vespoidea excludes Apoidea.

Here’s a similar discussion about why polyphyletic groups aren’t allowed: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-id-category-called-mangroves-that-captures-the-different-families-that-make-up-mangrove-species/6927 Just some food for thought

@neontetraploid that discussion was about paraphyletic group with different parent taxons, here it’s about groups that don’t consist of all children taxons, like birds are treated out of reptiles while they’re still them.

Yeah I know. I just thought people coming into this thread might want to read a discussion on a tangentially related topic

I’m really personally confused why those two different situations are called the same name, in my mind it was what is discussed in that second topic and now it’s something else, need to read about it later!

Taxa with different parent taxa that nevertheless get lumped together are polyphyletic. Taxa that are defined to exclude one or more of their daughter taxa are paraphyletic. I think the discussion @neontetraploid linked to was mostly about polyphyletic groups, not paraphyletic.

Thank you, yeah, I definitely needed sleep at that time! This one, it’s not big though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyly

Discussions like this could become pretentious if we’re not careful. Birds may be phylogenetically within reptiles, but including them in reptiles would require a lot of changes to our practical definition of reptiles; to the point that it would be nigh impossible to have a useable definition. Ther…

Birds follow the same rules and as we discussed they just lumped what other groups had, we have no problem calling other dinos reptiles and some of them look almost exactly as birds while not related to them closely. In practice nothing will change, as we already treat crocodilians other way than li…

List of paraphyletic groups in iNat's Taxonomy

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Why is inat so inconsistent with paraphyletic groupings that are still useful to have General	42	2346	October 7, 2021
Please subdivide Lepidoptera (Butterflies & Moths) and create a sub order Lepidoptera (Moths only) General	32	4306	September 14, 2020
Why is crustacean a group but fish is not? General	16	696	March 17, 2026
Make crustaceans and myriapods iconic taxa Feature Requests under-review	52	2392	December 26, 2024
Pancrustacea over Hexapoda and Crustacea Nature Talk question	8	856	November 2, 2023

List of paraphyletic groups in iNat's Taxonomy

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