Buthus trinacrius Lourenco & Rossi, 2013

Sousa, Pedro, Arnedo, Miquel A. & Harris, D. James, 2017, Updated catalogue and taxonomic notes on the Old-World scorpion genus Buthus Leach, 1815 (Scorpiones, Buthidae), ZooKeys 686, pp. 15-84 : 36

50. Buthus trinacrius Lourenco & Rossi, 2013

Buthus trinacrius : Lourenço and Rossi 2013: 10-12, fig. 1-9.

Buthus europaeus (MIS): Simon 1879: 97; Simon 1910 (part): 69.

Buthus occitanus (MIS): Kraepelin (1901): 266.

Type material.

1 M holotype, Palermo Province? (approx. 38.05°, 13.32°), Sicily. Paratypes: 1 M, 1 F. All type material in bad conditions (MNHN N° RS3247).

Distribution.

Recorded from Sicily.

Remarks.

Although Lourenço and Rossi (2013) report that the collector is not mentioned in Simon's notes, Kraepelin (1901), in his list of all the scorpion material present in the MNHN Paris, writes that Letourneur collected the Buthus material from Sicily and Corfu (Greece), which causes doubts regarding the correct collection locality of the specimens used to describe this species. Simon (1879) had doubts about the actual existence of Buthus in Sicily (when examining the specimens that would eventually be designated as type material for B. trinacrius ): "il habite probablement aussi le midi de l’Italie et la Sicile", and Buthus has never been found in mainland Italy. Furthermore, the authors also claimed that Simon (1910) "referred to the almost impossibility to distinguish Buthus populations from North of Africa with those from Spain and Sicily", which is only partially correct. Simon (1910) solely refered to the distinction of Buthus populations of Algeria and Spain from those of Egypt, although in a subsequent paper, Simon does state that Buthus exist in Sicily without any further comments.