Why doesn’t iNaturalist have a taxon for invertebrates?

It has a label for Arthropods, and the other ones, but why doesn’t invertebrates have a taxon?

because invertebrates are distributed across many different groups and do not all fall into a single taxon. For example, flatworms are in an entirely different phylum to arthropods.

You can view all records of invertebrates by first searching for all animals, and then excluding vertebrates: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=1&without_taxon_id=355675

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In general a taxon is monophyletic, meaning it consists of all the descendents of some individual and nothing else. For instance, there once lived some particular ancient bird that all modern birds (and no other animals) descend from. A consequence of this is that animals within a taxon are more closely related to each other than they are to any other living animals.

Invertebrates are not like this. Vertebrates are just one particular relatively small lineage in the animal kingdom. Having an invertebrate taxon would be a bit like having a taxon for “non-sparrow birds”. In fact, some invertebrates like tunicates are much closer related to us (and other vertebrates) than they are to many other invertebrates (like, say, insects or snails).

It’s worth noting a very small number of taxa on iNaturalist aren’t monophyletic. For instance birds should be classified under dinosaurs, which should in turn be classified under reptiles, which in turn should be classified, along with mammals and amphibians as lobe-finned fish! After all, all terrestrial vertebrates descend from some population of lobe-finned fish whose fins gradually evolved into limbs. I believe it is due to historic reasons that these are treated the way they are on iNaturalist.

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Reminds me of this book I used to have: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/your-inner-fish-a-journey-into-the-35-billion-year-history-of-the-human-body_neil-shubin/249055/item/16056545/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=us_shopping_zombies_lvs_21821394433&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=717525408665&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21821394433&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45gAgeZ7mIm3G8OWIIfyHiwZH&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzt_FBhCEARIsAJGFWVlPeqxVAB0TIkGhpgn19f_quuT-4m8VEJZS2af5RyT7w1_0oQu6p7saAoozEALw_wcB#idiq=16056545&edition=6792999

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