Is there any way to map the children of deleted backbone taxa to their updated parents? For example, if I wanted to find all the taxa that used to be children of Actinopterygii for the purposes of developing a query to look for the ray-finned fishes.
Said another way, because WoRMS still accepts Actinopterygii, I can query OBIS for this taxon, but I’m not sure how to efficiently set up an analogous, even if imperfect, query on GBIF.
Also worth mentioning I’m not a taxonomist. Is what I’m describing a bad idea for any reason?
Generally, you can access previous versions of the backbone here: GBIF Hosted Datasets. The deleted taxa are also put in a zipped file in this folder: GBIF Hosted Datasets.
But perhaps a better solution is to use the Catalogue of Life Checklist on GBIF. They still have Actinopterygii but as a Gigaclass: Actinopterygii. You can get the children and their corresponding backbone key. It is a bit easier using the API: https://api.gbif.org/v1/species/195043175/children (the nubKey correspond to the keys in the backbone). I hope this helps!