Eight new species of the genera Scorpiops Peters, Euscorpiops Vachon, and Chaerilus Simon (Scorpiones: Euscorpiidae, Chaerilidae) from Tibet and Yunnan, China
Author
Qi, Jian-Xin
Author
Zhu, Ming-Sheng
Author
Lourenço, Wilson R.
text
Euscorpius
2005
2005-12-31
32
32
1
40
https://mds.marshall.edu/euscorpius/vol2005/iss32/1/
journal article
10.18590/euscorpius.2005.vol2005.iss32.1
1536-9307
Subfamily
Chaerilinae Pocock, 1893
Comments
. According to the
Catalog of Scorpions of the World
(Fet, 2000a), this monotypic family includes 21 species, all belonging to the genus
Chaerilus
Simon, 1877
. In a recent revision, Kovařík (2000) defined 18 species as valid, and added two more species most recently (Kovařík, 2005a). This genus was originally described and placed in the family
Chactidae
; subsequently it was moved to its own subfamily
Chaerilinae
, and placed in the family
Iuridae
by Pocock (1893). A few years later, Laurie (1896) moved the
Chaerilinae
as a subfamily to the family
Buthidae
. Finally, Kraepelin (1899) raised the
Chaerilinae
to the rank of family. Vachon (1963) defined a unique pattern of cheliceral dentition for the
Chaerilidae
. Some years later, the same author (Vachon, 1974) characterized the unique trichobothrial pattern of
Chaerilidae
, defined as
Type
B, a totally different
type
from both
Buthidae
(
type
A) and all other families (
type
C).
The family
Chaerilidae
is distributed only in South and Southeast Asia. To explain this pattern of distribution, Lamoral (1980) suggested that the ancestors of the chaerilids originated in Pangaean times as an eastern Laurasian relic that moved into the Oriental Region after the Indian plate connected with Eurasia. They became isolated in the Oriental Region as the Himalayas formed (Sissom, 1990). Santiago-Blay et al. (2004) described a fossil genus
Electrochaerilus
and subfamily
Electrochaerilinae
from the Cretaceous amber of
Myanmar
(
Burma
). In
China
, representatives of this family were poorly known until now. The only one known species and another, new species are both from the
Tibet region
.