8/8
The discovery of Osmooka aphana highlights Madagascar’s tremendous, still-undescribed biodiversity—and the power of combining museum science, fieldwork, and genomics.
Open-access paper in Insect Systematics & Diversity: academic.oup.com/isd/article/...

7/8
Was this a relic of ancient Gondwana?
Probably not. Divergence dating puts their common ancestor at ~57 million years, long after Gondwana broke apart (~130 Ma).
The most likely explanation: Cenozoic long-distance dispersal.

6/8
Morphology and phylogenomics together place both genera in the family Paraplectanoididae, which now expands beyond a single genus—reshaping spider family-level classification.

5/8
Genomic analyses delivered the biggest surprise:
Osmooka’s closest known relative is an Australian spider, Paraplectanoides.
A Madagascar–Australia link with no known intermediates.

4/8
To find more, the team conducted intensive fieldwork in northern Madagascar with Malagasy collaborators. Even with targeted searches, they found just one male in 2022 and several females in 2024.

3/8
The male was first noticed in a San Francisco museum collection, where it didn’t fit any known spider family. A matching female later surfaced at the Smithsonian, collected back in 1993.

2/8
This species is exceptionally rare—only eight adult specimens exist worldwide, collected across 30 years from museum archives and two recent expeditions (2022 & 2024).

Among other things we are interested in how Portia performs in hunting spiders after sleep disruption. #spider #sleep