Molecular phylogeny and revision of the false violin spiders (Araneae: Drymusidae) of Africa

Revision of recluse spiders (Araneae: Sicariidae: Loxosceles) preserved in Dominican amber and a total-evidence phylogeny of Scytodoidea reveal the first fossil Drymusidae

“…Our findings partially contradict the results found with morphology by Labarque and Ramírez (2012), who recovered Scytodidae (rather than Sicariidae) as closer to Periegopidae + Drymusidae; because our dataset includes a morphological matrix almost identical to Labarque and Ramírez's, it seems that the signal of the massive number of molecular markers (1912 markers) overrides that of morphological data (79 variant characters). Our results also contrast with those of Labarque et al (2018; Sanger sequences) and Li et al (2020;transcriptomes), who obtained Ochyroceratidae as sister to Scytodidae. It seems the phylogenetic position of ochyroceratids and psilodercids is far from settled (e.g., see the low bootstrap below Althepus maechamensis in the parsimony analysis, Fig.…”

“…It is not unlikely that the separation between the African Izithunzi and the American Drymusa pre-dates the separation of these continents, as is the case of Sicarius and Loxosceles (Binford et al 2008;Magalhaes et al 2019). A more complete phylogeny of drymusids, building on previous efforts by Labarque et al (2018), will be useful to put this hypothesis to test, and will certainly benefit from the new morphological data on D. aculicaput comb. nov. gathered here.…”

Giant Goblins above the waves at the southern end of the world: The biogeography of the spider family Orsolobidae (Araneae, Dysderoidea)

“…Of these, 38 are in the family Orsolobidae, 16 are other Dysderoidea (Oonopidae, Dysderidae, Segestriidae) and 12 are outgroup taxa belonging to other haplogyne families (Caponiidae, Filistatidae, Leptonetidae, Scytodidae, Tetrablemmidae, Trogloraptoridae). There is consensus that the family Orsolobidae belongs to the superfamily Dysderoidea, along with three other families: Dysderidae, Segestriidae and Oonopidae (Fernández et al., ; Forster & Platnick, ; Labarque, Pérez‐González, & Griswold, ; Platnick, Coddington, Forster, & Griswold, ; Ramírez, ; Wheeler et al., ). However, hypotheses regarding the internal relationships within Dysderoidea vary, so we have therefore included a variety of outgroups from Dysderoidea, as well as taxa that were suggested as sister groups to Dysderoidea.…”

Echiniscidae (Heterotardigrada) of South Africa

“…The available data imply that the majority of originally Gondwanan South African echiniscid fauna was outcompeted by rivals dispersing from the Northern Hemisphere, as it was documented for the mite clade Hydrachnidia (Proctor et al 2015). An analogous scenario, in which relictual Gondwanan descendants with restricted distributions survived only in some parts of the continent, was the case for several beetle (Toussaint et al 2017), orthopteran (Allegrucci & Sbordoni 2019), and spider lineages (Labarque et al 2018;Chousou-Polydouri et al 2019). The post-Gondwanan lineages seem to be absent in the South African echiniscid fauna, since typical components of some post-Gondwanan lands, such as genera Antechiniscus, Barbaria, and Mopsechiniscus, or the family Oreellidae, closely related to echiniscidae and of Gondwanan origin (Mcinnes & Pugh 2007), have not been found in africa (kristensen 1987;Guidetti et al 2017; but see also the critique of the term "Gondwanan" in McGlone 2005; Goldberg et al 2008).…”