I just thought of a possible solution. Instead of listing all the phyla, orders, classes, families, genera and species in one big table, create separate tables for each taxonomic level.
Each taxon would then have two parents. the genus Sus' (pigs) parents would be both the subfamily Suinae and family Suidae. But the genus Panthera doesn't belong to a subfamily, so its family (Felidae) would be listed as both Parent and Parent2. NAME | PARENT | PARENT2 Sus | Suinae | Suidae Panthera | Felidae | Felidae Then I could write PHP scripts focusing on either Parent or Parent2, depending on what I want to do. Does this sound sensible? ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]