Characterizing and monitoring biodiversity and assessing its drivers require accurate and comparable data on species assemblages, which, in turn, should rely on efficient and standardized field collection. Unfortunately, ...

Historical museum specimens are invaluable for morphological and taxonomic research, but typically the DNA is degraded making traditional sequencing techniques difficult to impossible for many specimens. Recent advances ...

We present a new phylogeny of the spider family Araneidae based on five genes (28S, 18S, COI, H3 and 16S) for 158 taxa, identified and mainly sequenced by us. This includes 25 outgroups and 133 araneid ingroups representing ...

The evolutionary diversification of spiders is attributed to spectacular innovations in silk. Spiders are unique in synthesizing many different kinds of silk, and using silk for a variety of ecological functions throughout ...

We present a phylogenetic analysis of spiders using a dataset of 932 spider species, representing 115 families (only the family Synaphridae is unrepresented), 700 known genera, and additional representatives of 26 unidentified ...

The modestly diverse order Amblypygi Thorell, 1883 includes five families, of which Charinidae Quintero, 1986 is the most diverse and with the widest geographical distribution. The family currently comprises three genera, ...