Huttonia Explained

Huttoniidae is a family of ecribellate^[1] araneomorph spiders containing a single genus, Huttonia, itself containing a single described species, Huttonia palpimanoides. It is known only from New Zealand.^[2]

Very few specimens of the genus were known until it was discovered that they primarily inhabited dead fronds of rainforest ferns.^[3]

Taxonomy

It was first described by Octavius Pickard-Cambridge in 1880.^{[4] [2]} Originally placed with the ant spiders, it was moved to a family of its own, Huttoniidae, in 1984, in the superfamily Palpimanoidea.^[5]

Fossils of this family have been found in Cretaceous (Campanian) amber from Alberta and Manitoba, Canada. This extended the known geological age of the Huttoniidae back about 80 million years, supporting the theory of H. palpimanoides being an ousted relict species.^[6] They are probably most closely related to the now extinct family, Spatiatoridae.

Although only one species is described, about twenty more undescribed species are thought to exist.^[7]

Notes and References

1. Griswold. C.E.. etal. 1999. Towards a Phylogeny of Entelegyne Spiders (Araneae, Araneomorphae, Entelegynae). Journal of Arachnology. 27. 53–63. https://web.archive.org/web/20060211140329/http://www.americanarachnology.org/JoA_Congress/JoA_v27_n1/arac_27_01_0053.pdf. dead. 2006-02-11.
2. Gen. Huttonia O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1879. World Spider Catalog Version 20.0. 2019-06-11. 2019. Natural History Museum Bern. 10.24436/2.
3. Book: Platnick . Norman I. . Spiders of the World: A Natural History . 2020 . Princeton, NJ . 9780691188850 . 99.
4. Pickard-Cambridge. O.. 1880. On some new and rare spiders from New Zealand, with characters of four new genera.. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 681–703. 47. 4, for 1879. 10.1111/j.1096-3642.1879.tb02701.x. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge.
5. Forster. R. R.. Platnick. N. I.. 1984. A review of the archaeid spiders and their relatives, with notes on the limits of the superfamily Palpimanoidea (Arachnida, Araneae). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 178. 87.
6. Penney. D.. Selden. P.A.. 2006. First fossil Huttoniidae (Araneae), in Late Cretaceous Canadian Cedar and Grassy Lake ambers. Cretaceous Research. 27. 442. 10.1016/j.cretres.2005.07.002.
7. Book: Forster. R.R.. Forster. L.M.. 1999. Spiders of New Zealand and their Worldwide Kin.