Three new ‘club-tailed’ scorpions join the tree of life

A team of researchers—including Dr. Lauren Esposito, Curator of Arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences and colleagues the American Museum of Natural History and Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)—have painstakingly revised a large group of Neotropical “club-tailed” scorpions. After sifting through DNA and comparing the physical traits of hundreds of specimens to reorganize (and strengthen) scientific understanding of this scorpion group, the scientists described three two new genera and new species. The authors also restored a long-forgotten group called Heteroctenus. The colorful, new-to-science club-tailed scorpions hail from the tropical regions of North, Central, and South America. The results appear this summer in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.