Revision of the South African geogarypidae (arachnida: Pseudoscorpiones)

[摘要] English: Despite a recent order-level revision published by Harvey (1992b), where, through the use of 126 morphological characters, 24 families were recognized, detailed morphological and ecological data is still sorely lacking for the vast majority of pseudoscorpions, including the poorly-known South African fauna. Taking this into consideration, the need for detailed revisions of our indigenous fauna was recognized. To this end, the family Geogarypidae, originally a subfamily of Garypidae, but recently elevated to full familial status (Harvey 1986), was chosen to spearhead this endeavour as our indigenous fauna only consisted of eight described species in two genera (Afrogarypus Beier, 1931 and Geogarypus Chamberlin, 1930). This study is the first holistic approach to the classification of South African pseudoscorpions, taking both morphological as well as molecular phylogenetic (COI and 28S) data into consideration. Results showed the morphology and phylogenetics complemented each other and that there are 18 distinct species of Geogarypidae within South Africa, nine of which are new to science namely, A. carmenae sp. nov., A. castigatus sp. nov., A. megamolaris sp. nov., G. deceptor sp. nov., G. liomendontus sp. nov., G. modjadji sp. nov., G. octoramosus sp. nov., G. tectomaculatus sp. nov. and G. variaspinosus sp. nov. These are divided into three major clades, one corresponding to Geogarypus and two to Afrogarypus. Four species previously from Geogarypus were found to belong to the Afrogarypus clades and are transferred. The data also supports the separation of G. olivaceus (Tullgren, 1907) and G. flavus (Beier, 1947) (synonymised by Beier in 1964), with the latter revalidated. Lastly, the two subspecies A. excelsus excelsus (Beier, 1964) and A. excelsus excellens (Beier, 1964) are synonymised under A. excelsus (Beier, 1964) stat. nov.

[发布机构] University of the Free State