Option "verbatim" in method species.name_usage throws error for specific taxon

[GrazingScientist]

Option "verbatim" in method species.name_usage throws error for specific taxon

[GrazingScientist]

Since in Python, raising an exception is the most accepted way, I would suggest to throw a custom Exception that is more explanatory. When seeing the exception, I felt like I did something wrong.

[CecSve]

Thank you for logging this issue and sorry for the late reply. You are right, we should include are custom exception explaining what the issues is in this case.

The issue is to do with the data itself. When you query a key in a checklist, then there is a verbatim value and the query is successful:

However, if you query a key from the GBIF taxonomic backbone (also technically a checklist, but the source GBIF use to interpret all the verbatim values we get from publishers), there is no verbatim value associated with the key (example below shows the backbone version of the same organism from the above example):