A new website World Cetacea Database is now up and running at www.marinespecies.org/cetacea. It is primarily a taxonomic facility, but some information on biology, distribution, etc. is included. Coverage is limited to the living species, although one of them, the baiji or Yangtze river dolphin is possibly now extinct. Coverage of taxa includes families, genera, subgenera, species and subspecies. Names covered include junior synonyms, unjustified emendations, suppressed names, misspellings and other non-operative names; this is to help deal with the older literature. The core of the World Cetacea Database (WCD) is derived from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). Sources for the WCD include numerous taxonomic references (Mead and Brownell in Wilson and Reeder's Mammal Species of the World; Jefferson et al.'s Marine Mammals of the World, Rice's Marine Mammals of the World, Hershkovitz' Catalog of Living Whales, Perrin et al.'s Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, and others). It will be updated as changes occur and new taxa are described. The major sections of the database are Synonyms, Sources, Child Taxa [e.g., subspecies], Vernacular Names, Distribution, Habitat, Notes and Images. The vernacular names include obsolete names, again to help with the older literature. Please let me know of any omissions, typos, or errors you encounter. I'm also happy to review and discuss other issues, such as synonymies, controversial taxonomic assignments, or broader classification questions and to initiate changes if they are warranted. All inquiries and discussion will be evaluated promptly but critically and if deemed reasonable included quickly into the database. Additional vernacular names that you may know about are welcome (please specify the language they are in); we have a lot for Europe and the Americas but not many for other parts of the world. Some of the notes, images and other details are inherited from previous entries in the core database and are here a work in progress; comments and corrections are welcome. We also need good photographic images for most of the species; these should be submitted as jpg files (_<_50mb). Happy surfing. Bill Perrin - william.perrin@noaa.gov -- William F. Perrin, Ph.D. Senior Scientist for Marine Mammals NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center 8604 La Jolla Shores Drive La Jolla, CA 92037 Tel. (858) 546-7096 Fax (858) 546-7003