Dolomedes Latreille, 1804

Sankaran, Pradeep M. & Kadam, Gautam, 2025, On the spider family Dolomedidae Simon, 1876 in India and Sri Lanka (Arachnida: Araneae), Zootaxa 5594 (2), pp. 258-268 : 259

Dolomedes Latreille, 1804

Type species: Araneus fimbriatus Clerck, 1757 , by subsequent designation ( Latreille 1804).

Diagnosis: For family and genus description and diagnosis, see Morris et al. (2025).

Remarks. This is the first record of the family and the genus from India. Images of a Dolomedes species from West Bengal (Mondal, pers. comm.) were presented in Mondal et al. (2020: 165), but misidentified as a species of Eucamptopus Pocock, 1900 . Pocock (1900) described the monotypic pisaurid genus Eucamptopus for Eucamptopus coronatus Pocock, 1900 based on a male specimen collected from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Tikader & Malhotra (1976) redescribed E. coronatus based on its holotype, which was supposed to be deposited at the Natural History Museum of London ( Tikader & Malhotra 1976), but is currently unavailable there, and may be misplaced or lost (D. Sherwood, pers. comm.). Even though the palpal illustrations of E. coronatus provided in Tikader & Malhotra (1976: figs 1–3) are highly schematic, the overall shape and orientation of palpal sclerites, particularly the embolus together with the general shape of the habitus, and the presence of four retromarginal teeth on the chelicerae show similarities with genera currently included in Dolomedidae . Moreover, the palpal illustrations of E. coronatus show a close similarity with that of Dolomedes spp. , suggesting a possible synonymy of Eucamptopus with Dolomedes . The recent discovery of D. mizhoanus in Tamil Nadu (see below), will suggest a possibility that E. coronatus could be a synonym of D. mizhoanus . But confirmation of all these require the examination of the holotype or topotype material of E. coronatus .