Micropholcommatinae

The Micropholcommatinae are a subfamily of araneomorph spiders in the family Anapidae. They were previously treated as the family Micropholcommatidae. Micropholcommatins are extremely small, with body lengths typically between 0.5 and 2 mm. They are usually found among leaf litter or moss.

Distribution

Many genera are endemic to New Zealand and Australia, with others found also in South America.

Taxonomy

The families Micropholcommatidae and Textricellidae were synonymized with the Symphytognathidae by Forster in 1959, but again split from it in 1977. Later they were considered to be only one family, namely Micropholcommatidae, by Platnick & Forster in 1986. They were synonymized with Anapidae by Schütt in 2003 and by Lopa et al. in 2011, a change that has been accepted by the World Spider Catalog.

Further reading

• Forster, R.R. (1959). "The spiders of the family Symphytognathidae". Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand 86: 269–329.
• Griswold, C.E., Ramírez, M.J., Coddington, J.A. & Platnick, N.I. (2005) "Atlas of phylogenetic data for entelegyne spiders (Araneae: Araneomorphae: Entelegynae) with comments on their phylogeny". Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences 56 Suppl. 2: 1–324.
• Penney, David; Dierick, Manuel; Cnudde, Veerle; Masschaele, Bert; Vlassenbroeck, Jelle; van Hoorebeke, Luc & Jacobs, Patric (2007). "First fossil Micropholcommatidae (Araneae), imaged in Eocene Paris amber using X-Ray Computed Tomography." Zootaxa 1612: 47-53. PDF Abstract