Dwarf tarantulas, also known as sheet funnel-web spiders are a type of spider from the family

Family (biology)

In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...

 Mecicobothriidae. Dwarf tarantulas are one of several families of the sub-order Mygalomorphae

Mygalomorphae

The Mygalomorphae, , are an infraorder of spiders. The latter name comes from the orientation of the fangs which point straight down and do not cross each other .-Description:...

; this larger group also includes the true tarantula

Tarantula

Tarantulas comprise a group of often hairy and often very large arachnids belonging to the family Theraphosidae, of which approximately 900 species have been identified. Some members of the same Suborder may also be called "tarantulas" in the common parlance. This article will restrict itself to...

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Description

Dwarf tarantulas, as the name indicates, appear like other species of tarantula, but are physically much smaller. Many specimens are smaller than 1 cm in length, and the largest in the family are seldom larger than 2 cm. The spiders, like all Mygalomorphae, have downward pointing fangs; dwarf tarantulas also have long spinnerets.

Classification

There are currently only 4 recognized genera

Genera

Genera is a commercial operating system and development environment for Lisp machines developed by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the MIT AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with LMI and Texas Instruments...

 and 9 recognized species in this family. These are:

Hexura Simon, 1884

• Hexura picea Simon, 1884 — USA
• Hexura rothi Gertsch & Platnick, 1979 — USA

Hexurella Gertsch & Platnick, 1979

• Hexurella apachea Gertsch & Platnick, 1979 — USA
• Hexurella encina Gertsch & Platnick, 1979 — Mexico
• Hexurella pinea Gertsch & Platnick, 1979 — USA
• Hexurella rupicola Gertsch & Platnick, 1979 — USA

Mecicobothrium Holmberg, 1882

• Mecicobothrium baccai Lucas et al., 2006 — Brazil
• Mecicobothrium thorelli Holmberg, 1882 — Argentina, Uruguay

Megahexura Kaston, 1972

• Megahexura fulva (Chamberlin, 1919) — USA