I nearly forgot to post this...
A completely new specie of jumping spider was discovered last year about 5 minutes away from my house, which is my hometown. They identified the spider this year as a whole new species.
A jumping spider previously unknown to science has been discovered on the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
www.falmouthpacket.co.uk
Anasaitis milesae - a tiny jumping spider - is less than 3mm long, and was found on the grounds of the University of Exeter's campus in Penryn, before being spotted at a second site 30 miles away
www.cornwalllive.com
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Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasaitis_milesae
Its nearest known relatives are found in the Caribbean region, suggesting that A. milesae likely arrived in Britain from distant tropical or subtropical regions through international trade and travel.
The species was discovered by Tylan Berry during a "bioblitz" on the Penryn campus in
Cornwall,
England, home to the
University of Exeter and
Falmouth University. Immature and female spiders were first collected on 29 April 2023, adult males on 17 May 2023. It was confirmed as a new species and named by Russian arachnologist
Dmitri Logunov of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
[3] The specific name
milesae honours Claire Miles (1958–2023), a former honorary curator at the
Manchester Museum where the
holotype is kept.
[2]
Logunov provisionally assigned the species to the genus
Anasaitis, based on the diagnostic features of the genitalia of the two sexes. It most resembled three
Anasaitis species from the
Greater Antilles:
A. emertoni,
A. peckhami, and
A. squamata. However, there were differences from other
Anasaitis species, including less differentiation in body colour between males and females.
[2]