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Like the science from which it is increasingly divorced, bionomy is a human endeavour in its own right.

Arguing that biology builds on bionomy and thus owes it support is moot if science's driving force is advance and not consolidation.

Just as we feel an instant sense of our insignificance when we stare into the cosmos, or experience the exhilaration of the expanding landscape as we ascend a mountain, bionomy stretches our horizon.

Like so many species, Madagascar's spectacular dragonflies have been ignored since the European monographs produced in bionomy's heyday in the 1950s.