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New family of spiders found in Oregon cave

Friday - 8/17/2012, 8:00pm  ET

AP Environmental Writer

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) - Amateur cave explorers have found a new family of spiders in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, and scientists have dubbed it Trogloraptor _ Latin for cave robber _ for their fearsome front claws.

The spelunkers sent specimens to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which has the West Coast's largest collection of spiders. Entomologists there say the spider _ reddish brown and the size of a half dollar _ evolved so distinctly that it requires its own taxonomic family _ the first new spider family found in North America since the 1870s.


"It's a good example of how science works _ professional and citizen scientists share information," he added.




Norman I. Platnick, curator emeritus of spiders at the American Museum of Natural History, said the discovery was as exciting to spider scientists as the discovery of a new dinosaur to paleontologists.




The Oregon spider's species name _ marchingtoni _ honors Deschutes County sheriff's Deputy Neil Marchington, who was on the first Western Cave Conservancy expedition in 2010 to inventory the critters in a cave on private land outside Grants Pass. A year later he led academy scientists to the site to collect live specimens.


He said about a dozen of them collected bugs from the walls and ceiling of the cave and put them in vials of preservative, then sent them down to the academy.







On the Web:

_ California Academy of Sciences:

_ ZooKeys:
