Book review: A long-awaited book about spiders from the Asian part of Russia

The authors of the book are well known scientists in Russian arachnology. Yuri Marusik has written more than 250 articles and several monographs. As a result of his work the number of known species from this region has increased from 500 at the end of the 1970s to approximately 2000 at present. He has described more than 400 new species and genera as well as having compiled check-lists for the majority of sub-regions of the Asian part of Russia. Yuri Marusik has reported many new records for the region and sometimes for the entire country. For example, many of the following families he recorded were previously unknown: Leptonetidae, Theridiosomatidae, Mysmenidae, Ctenidae, Cybaeidae, Oonopidae and Nesticidae. The second author – Nikolay Kovblyuk – works primarily in the Crimea (Ukraine) but has written a number of articles with Yuri Marusik or by himself concerning many taxa from Siberia and the Russian Far East. The book was edited by Professor B.R. Striganova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is dedicated to Dr Kirill Eskov who was the first Russian researcher to make significant contributions to our knowledge on the spider fauna of this region. ZooKeys 154: 89–93 (2011)