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It's always good to know what makes flies fit into their various families - but the nice thing about having experience of our local fauna is that we can usually just know when a fly is a tachinid or muscid etc by sight and not have to look for meral bristles :) Of course, in all the families mentioned only the Tachinidae or rhinophoridae (I think) have a subscutellum, so that narrows it down a bit too :)