Mesothelae is a suborder of spiders (order Araneae) that includes a single extant family, Liphistiidae (the Tube Dwelling spiders), and a number of extinct families. This suborder is thought to form the sister group to all other living spiders, and to retain ancestral characters, such as a segmented abdomen with spinnerets in the middle and two pairs of book lungs. Members of Liphistiidae are medium to large spiders with eight eyes grouped on a tubercle. They are found only in China, Japan, and southeast Asia. This suborder is considered one of the most basal of all living spiders.
The Heptathelidae were once considered their own family; today they are considered a subfamily of the Liphistiidae (i.e. as Heptathelinae).
In Popular Culture[]
- An unspecified member of Mesothelae appears in Walking with Monsters, where a female serves as the main character of the Carboniferous segment of the second episode and hunts Petrolacosaurus. The creature from the series is based on the South American Megarachne, which was considered the largest spider to ever exist. However, during production it was discovered that this animal is a eurypterid, so the authors decided to replace it with an unspecified Mesothelae. In fact, no known spider, modern or fossil, reaches the size of a human head. Two mesothelae spiders, Arthrolycosa and Palaeothele, lived in Kansas 300 million years ago, but, due to their small sizes, they were likely hunted by Petrolacosaurus.