DOI: 10.15468/2nhzfp
title: A new species of Lacinius in amber (Arachnida: Opiliones)

description: This dataset contains the digitized treatments in Plazi based on the original journal article Mitov, P. G., Dunlop, J. A., Penney, D. (2015): A new species of Lacinius in amber (Arachnida: Opiliones). Fossil Record 18 (1): 37-42, DOI: 10.5194/fr-18-37-2015, URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/fr-18-37-2015Abstract. A new specimen of Lacinius Thorell, 1876; (Opiliones: Phalangiidae) from Eocene Baltic amber is described. We interpret it as conspecific with a slightly younger record from the German Bitterfeld amber, originally referred to as the extant species L. erinaceus Star ˛ega, 1966. Our new specimen reveals pedipalpal apophyses on both the patella and the tibia, features which we can now confirm in the Bitterfeld fossil too. This unique character combination for the genus justifies a new, extinct species: Lacinius bizleyi sp. nov. The Baltic amber inclusion dates to ca. 44–49 Ma, and is thus the oldest putative example of Lacinius in the fossil record. It is a further example of an arachnid species shared between Baltic and Bitterfeld amber.1 IntroductionHarvestmen in the genus Lacinius (Opiliones: Phalangiidae) Thorell, 1876 are typically characterized by a distinctive spiny ornament across the legs and body. Lacinius is currently represented by seven Recent species (Table 1), six of which are found in central Europe down into the Balkans and the Mediterranean, as well as in northern Africa, Turkey and the Caucasus (e.g. Kraus, 1961; Šilhavý, 1956, 1965; Star˛ega, 1966, 1976; Marcellino, 1975; Martens, 1978; Prieto, 2003, 2008; Novak, 2005; Çorak et al., 2008, 2014; Sánchez-Cuenca and Prieto, 2014). Additionally, one species is recognized from the USA (Banks, 1893), while a further putative American Lacinius was synonymized with a species in Odiellus Roewer, 1923 by Cokendolpher and Lee (1993). Note that the online species lists assembled by Hallan (2005) did not always include all published synonyms, compared with Crawford (1992). Over-reliance on such online data for harvestman taxonomy – and the resulting risk of errors being copied and multiplied into other publications or resources – was recently critiqued by Schönhofer (2013). Similarly, the Lacinius species from China listed in Hallan (2005), Lacinius bidens (Simon, 1880) (Acantholophus bidens; Simon, 1880), has long been referred to as Bidentolophus Roewer, 1912 (see Roewer, 1912, 1923; Wang, 1953; Li and Song, 1993), which is a junior subjective synonym of Lacinius Thorell, 1876 (see Crawford, 1992: p. 13). Note also that the Spanish species L. carpetanus (Rambla, 1959) was recently transferred to Odiellus by Sánchez-Cuenca and Prieto (2014). As shown in Table 1, three of the six Recent Palearctic species are fairly widely distributed across Europe (often through into Turkey). Others are more restricted and local in their ranges.A few years ago, a remarkable fossil assignable to Lacinius was documented by Dunlop and Mitov (2009) from the Bitterfeld (or Saxon) amber of eastern Germany, a locality whose age has been disputed – reviewed by Dunlop (2010) – but which has recently been considered to be Oligocene (ca. 24–25 Ma) and thus younger than the better known Eocene (ca. 44–49 Ma) Baltic amber. In their original description, Dunlop and Mitov (2009) considered their Lacinius fossil to be anatomically indistinguishable from the Recent species Lacinus erinaceus (Star˛ega, 1966), and tentatively assigned the amber inclusion to this taxon. This extant harvestman was first described from Abkhazia in the Caucasus Star˛ega, 1966, and was later documented from the provinces of Bayburt and Gümü¸shane in northeastern Turkey too (Kurt and Erman, 2012).Recently, a second example of a spiny, Lacinius -like fossil in amber became available, this time from Baltic amber. This small specimen (Figs. 1–2), a little over a millimetre long, is probably immature, but immediately caught our attention for possessing distinct apophyses on the pedipalp, different from the morphology of any of the living Lacinius species described to date. Baltic and Bitterfeld amber are known to host a number of arachnid species in common – including some harvestmen (Dunlop and Mitov, 2009) – a fact which led some authors to consider the two ambers to be of the same stratigraphic age. Here, we demonstrate that the new specimen does belong to Lacinius and that the Baltic and Bitterfeld examples are probably conspecific. However, their pedipalp morphology differs from Lacinus erinaceus (and other extant species); thus, we suggest that both amber specimens should be referred to as a new taxon.