Mesothelae

The Mesothelae are a suborder of spiders (order Araneae). As of April 2024, two extant families were accepted by the World Spider Catalog, Liphistiidae and Heptathelidae. Alternatively, the Heptathelidae can be treated as a subfamily of a more broadly circumscribed Liphistiidae. There are also a number of extinct families. This suborder is thought to form the sister group to all other living spiders, and to retain ancestral characters, such as a segmented abdomen with spinnerets in the middle and two pairs of book lungs. Extant members of the Mesothelae are medium to large spiders with eight eyes grouped on a tubercle. They are found only in China, Japan, and southeast Asia. The oldest known Mesothelae spiders are from the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. Taxonomy Reginald Innes Pocock in 1892 was the first to realize that the exceptional characters of the genus Liphistius (the only...