The desert Sahara in North Africa hosts a lot of scorpions species. Among these are a few genera with limited distributions, representing endemic elements in the region. The rare genus Cicileus Vachon, 1948 (Buthidae) is one of them. Wilson Lourenco and Andrea Rossi have now discovered the third species in the genus from Libya.
Cicileus latellai Lourenco & Rossi, 2015
The biogeography of the genus is also discussed.
Abstract:
New considerations are proposed on the enigmatic genus Cicileus Vachon, 1948 (Scorpiones, Buthidae) and a new species Cicileus latellai sp. .n. is described from Libya based on one female and one male, collected respectively from Wadi Teshuinat and Tin Alkoum (Jabal Akakus), both in the Fezzan Province. The genus Cicileus was previously only known by two species, Cicileus exilis (Pallary, 1928) from Djanet in Algeria, and cicileus cloudsleythompsoni Lourenco, 1999 from Niger. At present, the number of species is raised to three and the distribution of the genus enlarged to Algeria, Niger and Libya.
Reference:
Lourenco WR, Rossi A. New considerations on the genus Cicileus Vachon, 1948 (Scorpiones: Buthidae) and descritpion of a new species from Libya. Arachnida - Rivista Aracnologica Italiana. 2015;1(1):22-37.
Thanks to Andrea Rossi for sending me this article!
Family Buthidae
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