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Among the most diverse animals, spiders inhabit every continent except Antarctica, from deserts to rainforests, from arctic tundra to human habitation.
This guide, written by six world experts, offers a captivating journey through these astonishingly adaptable and always intriguing arachnids. Bringing together spectacular iconography, it illustrates the diversity of spiders and describes some of their behaviors, characteristics and evolution.
After a general introduction to these animals, it presents the portrait of more than a hundred families classified according to a phylogenetic logic. Each of them is organized around a genus and a few representative species. The reader will find distribution maps, a summary of the characteristics of each genus presented and observations on the biology of spiders.
Norman I. Platnick, who died accidentally in 2020, was curator of spiders at the American Museum of Natural History, where he managed the world's largest collection of spiders. A Harvard Ph.D., he described more than 1,800 species of spiders, making him the second most prolific arachnologist in history. Platnick was recognized as the world leader in spider taxonomy.