- Article
We designate a neotype for the Eurasian spider species Araneus angulatus Clerck, 1757, thereby fixing the objective application of the species name, the genus name Araneus Clerck 1757, the family name Araneidae Clerck 1757, and the superfamily name Araneoidea Clerck 1757. By etymology and arachnological tradition, it also unofficially fixes the application of the ordinal name Araneae Clerck 1757 and thus answers the uncontroversial question, “What’s a spider?” A. angulatus also happens to be historically the first animal species ever described because Clerck (1757) has priority over Linnaeus (1758). Neotype designation is justified for three reasons: the syntypes of A. angulatus are lost; “A. angulatus” contains significant COI sequence divergence, potentially representing intraspecific variation, misidentifications, or as many as four undescribed species; and, with the neotype anchored via a COI barcode to a reference genome, future researchers can use this species as the “exemplar spider” in analyses, knowing that their results will not be compromised in the future by nomenclatural changes. Because all 1757 Clerckian names are spiders, should the considerably less uncontroversial question ever arise, “What’s an animal?” one objective answer is, “It’s a spider, and probably the neotype of A. angulatus.”
10 November 2026
![Plate 1 of Clerck [12]. Tab 1 is Araneus angulatus, fig. 1, male, fig. 2, female, fig. 3, eyes.](https://mdpi-res.com/taxonomy/taxonomy-06-00071/article_deploy/html/images/taxonomy-06-00071-g001-550.jpg)
![Species misplaced in Anelosimus by Sherwood et al. [12]. (A) Theridion dilucidum Simon, 1898 [47] female epigynum internal (above) and external (below), reproduced from [18] (figs 78–79). (B) Anelosimus blackgardens Sherwood, Mukhida & Connor, 2026 [12] (=T. dilucidum syn. nov.) epigynum internal (above) and external (below), reproduced from [12] (figs. 15G, 15C, respectively). (C) For comparison, the contrasting epyginum of Anelosimus analyticus, reproduced from [14]. (D) Theridion melanostictum O. P.-Cambridge, 1876 [48] male palp ventral, reproduced from [20] (fig. 138, from Seychelles). (E) Anelosimus covepond Sherwood, Mukhida & Connor, 2026 (=T. melanostictum syn. nov.) male palp ventral, reproduced from [12] (fig. 16G, from Anguilla). (F) Theridion melanostictum male palp ventral, re-illustrated from [22] (fig. 127A, from Galapagos). (G) For comparison, the fundamentally different palp of Anelosimus analyticus, reproduced from [14]. (H,I) Habitus of Anelosimus blackgardens and covepond, respectively. (J) Habitus of Theridion pictum, generotype of Theridion. (K,L) Typical habitus of Anelosimus species (A. vittatus and A. may, respectively), characteristic for the genus. The dorsal bands of Theridion (H,J) and Anelosimus (K,L) share superficial resemblance as variations of the same theme, but the latter is universally characterized by a dark band with a wavy white line on outer margin.](https://mdpi-res.com/taxonomy/taxonomy-06-00056/article_deploy/html/images/taxonomy-06-00056-g001-550.jpg)
