Acanthopelma beccarii Caporiacco, 1947
Type Locality and Records
Original Description
Distribution
Type Locality: British Guiana ("Guiana Britannica"), no locality given beyond the colony
Etymology
Named for Professor Beccari, one of the two Italian zoologists whose British Guiana collections the paper describes. Caporiacco does not spell the derivation out, but he named several other taxa for the same man in the same fifteen pages, among them Tetragnatha beccarii and the genus Beccaria.
Specimen Records (1)
Holotype male, and the only specimen of the species ever recorded. Held in the Museo Zoologico di Storia Naturale "La Specola", Universita degli Studi di Firenze (MZUF), catalogue number 504; the repository is known from a museum type catalogue, Berdondini & Whitman (2003), cited by the World Spider Catalog, not from either of Caporiacco's papers. Total length 23 mm. Caporiacco (1947) gives no locality beyond "Guiana Britannica", no collection date and no repository; his fuller account of 1948 figures the male (figs. 12-13). The material came from the expeditions of Professors Beccari and Romiti in 1931 and 1936, but nothing on record says which of the two brought this spider, so no collection date is entered.
Taxonomic History
- 1947 Acanthopelma beccarii Caporiacco, 1947 - described from a single male from British Guiana, in a paper of preliminary Latin diagnoses covering the arachnids Professors Beccari and Romiti had collected there. The entry runs to five lines and gives no locality beyond the colony, no date and no repository. The paper is signed "Firenze, Dicembre 1946".
- 1948 Caporiacco (1948) published the full account a year later, in his monograph on the same collections, with figures of the male. It remains the only substantial description of the species.
- 1996 Pérez-Miles et al. (1996) moved Acanthopelma out of the Theraphosinae to the Ischnocolinae incertae sedis, on its type species A. rufescens, which lacks urticating hairs and bulbal keels. The same paper moved Holothele there too.
- 2001 Rudloff (2001) considered the species misplaced. His paper reconsiders the whole of Acanthopelma - it is where A. annae leaves the genus for Reichlingia gen. nov. - and in passing he judges beccarii to be no Acanthopelma either, suggesting it may be a Holothele. He did not make the transfer, and the catalogue still carries the species here.
- Nothing has happened since. The species has not been collected again, the holotype has not been re-examined in print, and the female is still unknown, so Rudloff's doubt stands untested.