Genomic data reveal a new subfamily in Brazilian Caatinga
Published in Arthropod Systematics and Phylogeny, 2026 - https://doi.org/10.3897/asp.84.e174748

Within the last 20 years, more than 1,100 new species have been added to the family Pholcidae, and assignments of new species to higher taxonomic ranks (subfamilies and genera) have usually been unproblematic. This is particularly true at the level of subfamilies, even though subfamily-level relationships and exact compositions of subfamilies have proven difficult to resolve in some cases. For more than 100 years, the subfamily division of Pholcidae was essentially a slowly evolving version of Eugène Simon’s classification from 1893, with numerous corrections and changes but without any new subfamily-level names. For more than a century, no new species had been discovered that would defy assignment to one of the subfamily-level taxa of Simon (1893) or their current emended versions. Here, we report on two newly discovered species (males shown below) from semiarid Brazilian environments for which genomic data suggest they are neither included into nor sister of an existing subfamily (phylogeny below). As a consequence, they require the creation of a new subfamily. We chose the name Caipirinae (genus Caipira), referring to the traditional rural culture of Brazil.