The monophyletic status of the squat lobster superfamily Galatheoidea has come under increasing doubt by studies using evidence as diverse as larval and adult somatic morphology, sperm ultrastructure, and molecular data. Here we synthesize phylogenetic data from these diverse strands, with the addition of new molecular and morphological data to examine the phylogeny of the squat lobsters and as...

For most of the family Porcellanidae, which comprises 283 species, larval development remains to be described. Full development has been only described for 52 species, while part of the larval cycle has been described for 45 species. The importance of knowing the complete larval development of a species goes beyond allowing the identification of larval specimens collected in the plankton. Morph...

The main goals of this investigation were to describe the community structure of anomuran and brachyuran crabs inhabiting reefs constituted by colonies of Schizoporella unicornis, and to provide a species importance ranking for this community. Collections were carried out on S. unicornis reefs at two-month intervals from May 2003 to May 2004, in the rocky sublittoral of the southeastern Brazili...

The porcellanid crab Petrolistheshastatus Stimpson, 1858, has been traditionally viewed as a highly variable species with a wide distribution in the West Pacific. For more than a century there has been taxonomic confusion of this species with morphologically similar taxa, some of which were synonymized with Stimpson's taxon. We redefine Petrolistheshastatus, resurrect Petrolisthesinermis as a v...

A new porcellanid crab, Petrolisthes uruma sp. nov., is described based on a single specimen collected from Okinawajima Island in the Ryukyus, southwestern Japan. The unique holotype was collected from a subtidal depth of 10 m, though vast majority of the genus occur in intertidal to shallow subtidal zone. The new species is morphologically closest to P. noluccensis (De Man, 1888), but is disti...

the family porcellanidae is a group of crab-shaped anomurans and there are a series of studies on this group in the persian gulf. the first report of porcellanid crabs from the persian gulf was by heller (1861); who referred incidentally to two species of this group in a discussion of crustacea of the red sea.