Urupuyu edwardsi, male. © 2015 W. Maddison, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 license
In the cloud forests of Ecuador we found, in 2004 and 2010, some small shiny black jumping spiders that we couldn’t recognize. Gustavo Ruiz and I have just published a paper describing them as the new amycoid genus Urupuyu, from the Quechua words for spider (uru) and cloud (puyu). This paper does a lot more than that, however. We take the opportunity to do a phylogenetic analysis of the whole clade of amycoids, and present, finally, a comprehensive phylogenetic classification of the group. I’m proud of what Gustavo and I accomplished with this paper, as it is a major step forward for salticids in the Americas.
Ruiz GRS, Maddison WP. 2015. The new Andean jumping spider genus Urupuyu and its placement within a revised classification of the Amycoida (Araneae: Salticidae). Zootaxa 4040: 251–279.
Wayne Maddison Lab 