So I am once again taking the opportunity to plug the greatest website on the internet, trilobites.info—a site whose 90s design is nearly as much of a fossil as its eponymous invertebrates are. But I also just discovered diatoms.org, a (modern and professional looking, alas) site about diatom conservation and identification. Then there’s WormBook, an extremely comprehensive collection of information on the nematode species C. elegans (which is often used as a model organism, so a lot of research has been done). And there’s also Calflora, an online database of wild plants found in California (probably other regions have something similar as well).
not the same kind of awesome repository of dense information, but this post reminded me of this really nice online interactive fractal tree of life that gives you a great sense of just how much life has happened by letting you zoom in and out as far as you like, letting you tap on nodes to see example species appearing in that branch, showing you branching times and species count, and showing you pictures when available! (I’m a sucker for a neat interactive visualization.)
(While searching for it again I also found a lot of other neat ones, some more expressive at the cost of a less potent UI—a Google search for “interactive tree of life” will show you more things than I can copy-paste here!)