first attempt to add molecular data to the analysis of relationships in
Pholcidae (Bruvo et al. 2005), this new
analysis is based on a much larger sample of species. Most material has
resulted from expeditions to Latin America and Africa, which in turn
means that the large and diverse East Asian fauna continues to be a
major gap in the analysis.
Even so, our dataset of seven markers sampled
from 165 pholcids is a major step forward, and in several previously
problematic cases molecular and morphological data are converging
towards a single hypothesis.
This is also the first study that explicitly
addresses the age of pholcid diversification. The results suggest that
the family is much older than revealed by the fossil record alone. The
first pholcids seem to have appeared and diversified in the early
Mesozoic about 200 million years ago. The oldest known fossil is just
about 53 million years old (Penney 2007).