Ryan Jones
Ph.D. Degree Candidate
Advisor: Dr. Paula Cushing (Denver Museum of Nature and Science)
When: Friday, October 17th, 2025, 12:00pm
Where: Science Building, Room 2001
A phylogenomic and biogeographic hypothesis for North American solifuge family Eremobatidae (Arachnida: Solifugae) and the resurrection of genus Eremospina Roewer
Quantifying and qualifying biodiversity is as important as it has ever been as we endure Earth’s sixth mass extinction event. Solifuges, commonly called camel spiders, are an understudied group of arachnids of which our understanding of even their basic biology is still nascent. One family of solifuges, Eremobatidae, is distributed across western North America, including the Front Range. Using subgenomic data generated from hybrid enrichment of fresh collected and historic museum material, I generated multiple family level phylogenomic hypotheses for Eremobatidae and reconcile them to generate a consensus hypothesis for the family, the first for Solifugae. I also perform divergence dating and ancestral range estimation to explore historical biogeographic explanations for present day eremobatid diversity. In addition, I begin to rectify the conflict between molecular evidence and morphology-based taxonomy by elevating a clade of México-distributed solifuges to take the genus Eremospina. Using integrative taxonomic approaches, I refine previous species hypotheses and propose three new species.