| Assassin spiders Temporal range:
| |
|---|---|
| |
| Austrarchaea sp. | |
Scientific classification 
| |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Subphylum: | Chelicerata |
| Class: | Arachnida |
| Order: | Araneae |
| Infraorder: | Araneomorphae |
| Superfamily: | Palpimanoidea |
| Family: | Archaeidae C. L. Koch & Berendt, 1854 |
| Diversity | |
| 5 genera, 90 species | |
| |
Archaeidae, also known as assassin spiders and pelican spiders, is a spider family with about ninety described species in five genera.[1] It contains small spiders, ranging from 2 to 8 millimetres (0.079 to 0.315 in) long, that prey exclusively on other spiders.[2] They are unusual in that they have "necks", ranging from long and slender to short and thick. The name "pelican spider" refers to these elongated jaws and necks used to catch their prey. Living species of Archaeidae occur in South Africa, Madagascar and Australia, with the sister family Mecysmaucheniidae occurring in southern South America and New Zealand.[1]
Assassin spiders were first known from 40 million-year-old amber fossils which were found in Europe in the 1840s and were not known to have living varieties until 1881, when the first living assassin spider was found in Madagascar.[3]
The fossil record of this family was first identified from Baltic amber dating to the Eocene, although many taxa from these deposits have been reassigned to Mecysmaucheniidae, Malkaridae, and Anapidae. Currently valid Baltic species include Archaea levigata and Archaea paradoxa. In 2003, Afarchaea grimaldii was described from Cretaceous Burmese amber aged between 88 and 95 million years, extending the record of this group considerably, the oldest fossil known of the group is Patarchaea muralis from the Middle Jurassic (Oxfordian/Callovian) of Inner Mongolia, China.[4]
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
NMBEwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Wood HM, Scharff N (2018). "A review of the Madagascan pelican spiders of the genera Eriauchenius O.". ZooKeys.
- ^ Koch, C.L. & Berendt, G.C. (1854). Die I'm Bernstein befindlichen Crustaceen, Myriapoden, Arachniden und Apteren der Vorwelt [The organic remains of antiquity found in amber] (in German). Berlin.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Selden, Paul A.; Diying, Huang; Dong, Ren (2008). "Palpimanoid spiders from the Jurassic of China". Journal of Arachnology. 36 (2): 306–321. doi:10.1636/CA07-106.1. ISSN 0161-8202. S2CID 73616235.