Cheiracanthium insigne O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1874

Esyunin, Sergei L. & Zamani, Alireza, 2020, ‘ Conundrum of esoterica’: on the long-forgotten genus Eutittha Thorell, 1878, with new taxonomic considerations in Cheiracanthium C. L. Koch, 1839 (Araneae: Cheiracanthiidae), Journal of Natural History (J. Nat. Hist.) 54 (19 - 20), pp. 1293-1323 : 1310

Cheiracanthium insigne O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1874

Cheiracanthium insigne O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1874, p. 408 , pl. 52, fig. 32 (description of ♂ ♀ syntypes from INDIA: Bombay; J. Hobson leg., and INDIA: Ceylon; G. H. K. Thwaites leg.) . Eutittha gracilipes Thorell, 1895, p. 47 (description of ♂ from MYANMAR: 70 miles north of Eaugoon , Thayarwaddy; E. W. Oates leg. 1884–1887; synonymised by Dankittipakul and Beccaloni 2012, p. 78 ; not ♀ = C. truncatum ). For the complete list of taxonomical references see the World Spider Catalog (2020) .

Comments

The history and difficulty of studying this species were recently covered in detail by Dankittipakul and Beccaloni (2012). The same authors noted that this species is known only from males because they ‘were unable to locate the female syntype in the collection of NHML [ Natural History Museum , London, UK] and it is presumably lost’ and ‘although males of C . insigne were subsequently collected and illustrated several times, no record of a female was documented’ ( Dankittipakul and Beccaloni 2012, p. 81).

The male of C. insigne is neither conspecific with the type species of Eutittha nor the type species of Cheiracanthium . This species is characterised by the following combination of characters (after Dankittipakul and Beccaloni 2012): (1) two-branched tegular flange: prolaterally curved, anteriorly extended and exceptionally elongate, semi-transparent posterior branches; (2) short triangular cymbial spur; (3) embolus elongated with additional loops and running along the margin of the tegular flange, (4) tegular apophysis and conductor absent, (5) tibia of male palp with RTA and DTA.