Dysderidae C.L. Koch, 1837, 1804

Zamani, Alireza, Marusik, Yuri M. & Szűts, Tamas, 2023, A survey of the spider genus Dysdera Latreille, 1804 (Araneae, Dysderidae) in Iran, with fourteen new species and notes on two fossil genera, ZooKeys 1146, pp. 43-86 : 43

Family Dysderidae C.L. Koch, 1837

Comments.

The family was divided into four tribes (i.e., Dysderini , Harpactini , Orsolobini and Rhodini ) by Cooke (1965), of which three were elevated to subfamilies (i.e., Dysderinae , Harpacteinae and Rhodinae ) by Deeleman-Reinhold and Deeleman (1988), and one was elevated to the family-level (i.e., Orsolobidae Cooke, 1965) by Forster and Platnick (1985).

Although Dysderidae appears to be a monophyletic family often considered restricted to the Palaearctic, it is in fact distributed only in the West Palaearctic (from Canary Islands to west Xinjiang) and polyphyletic with its current generic composition. Eleven species of five genera are known from fossils ( Dunlop et al. 2020): Dasumiana Wunderlich, 2004 (3 spp.), Dysdera (1 sp.), Harpactea Bristowe, 1939 (5 spp.), Segistriites Straus, 1967 (1 sp.), and Mistura Petrunkevitch, 1971 (1 sp.). Judging by the position of the legs (i.e., legs I-III directed forwards) and the overall somatic features of Segistriites cromei Straus, 1967, this monotypic Neogene fossil genus is herein transferred to Segestriidae Simon, 1893. At the time of the description of Segistriites , Segestriidae was not a separate family but rather a subfamily (i.e., Segestriinae Simon, 1893) of Dysderidae . Furthermore, Strauss (1967) explicitly mentions the close affinity of this genus to Segestria Latreille, 1804, the type genus of Segestriidae . The monotypic Neogene fossil genus Mistura also appears to be misplaced in Dysderidae : the holotype specimen of Mistura perplexa Petrunkevitch, 1971 has an unknown arrangement of eyes and several characters different from Dysderidae , including a lack of claw tufts, the presence of an onychium, and long spinnerets ( Petrunkevitch 1971).

Composition.

More than 600 species in 26 genera ( Dunlop et al. 2020; WSC 2022; current paper).