Date: February 12, 2019
Source: Pensoft Publishers
A new to science
species of tarantula with a peculiar horn-like protuberance sticking out of its
back was recently identified from Angola, a largely underexplored country
located at the intersection of several Afrotropical ecoregions.
Collected as
part of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, which aims to
uncover the undersampled biodiversity in the entire Okavango catchment of
Angola, Namibia and Botswana, thereby paving the way for sustainable
conservation in the area, the new arachnid is described in a paper published in
the open-access journal African Invertebrates by the team of Drs John
Midgley and Ian Engelbrecht.
Although the
new spider (Ceratogyrus attonitifer sp.n.)
belongs to a group known as horned baboon spiders, the peculiar protuberance is
not present in all of these species. Moreover, in the other species -- where it
is -- the structure is completely sclerotised, whereas the Angolan specimens
demonstrate a soft and characteristically longer 'horn'. The function of the
curious structure remains unknown.
The new
tarantula's extraordinary morphology has also prompted its species name: C. attonitifer, which is derived from
the Latin root attonit- ("astonishment" or "fascination"),
and the suffix -fer ("bearer of" or "carrier"). It refers
to the astonishment of the authors upon the discovery of the remarkable
species.
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