The World Spider Catalog (WSC) is an online searchable database concerned with
spider
Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species d ...
taxonomy. It aims to list all accepted families, genera and species, as well as provide access to the related taxonomic literature. The WSC began as a series of individual web pages in 2000, created by
Norman I. Platnick
Norman Ira Platnick (December 30, 1951 – April 8, 2020) was an American biological systematist and arachnologist. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Peter J. Solomon Family Curator Em ...
of the
American Museum of Natural History. After Platnick's retirement in 2014, the
Natural History Museum of Bern (Switzerland) took over the catalog, converting it to a
relational database.
, 50,151 accepted species were listed.
The order
Araneae (spiders) has the seventh-most species of all orders. The existence of the World Spider Catalog makes spiders the largest taxon with an online listing that is updated regularly. It has been described as an "exhaustive resource" that has "promoted rigorous scholarship and amplified productivity" in the taxonomy of spiders.
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References
External links
{{Wikidata property, P3288
Archive of previous versions
Databases in Switzerland
Online taxonomy databases
Spiders
Arachnology