Mecistocephalus is the largest genus of centipedes in the family Mecistocephalidae, with about 140 species. This genus is among the most diverse and widespread of all the genera in the order Geophilomorpha. The British entomologist George Newport first proposed this genus in 1843 to contain a group of centipedes marked by an unusual elongation of the head.
GENUS
via GBIF
Mecistocephalus is the largest genus of centipedes in the family Mecistocephalidae, with about 140 species. This genus is among the most diverse and widespread of all the genera in the order Geophilomorpha. The British entomologist George Newport first proposed this genus in 1843 to contain a group of centipedes marked by an unusual elongation of the head.
==Description== Centipedes in this genus range from 2 cm to 10 cm in length. The head, forcipular segment, and their appendages are often elongated, with a head that is obviously longer than wide. A pair of sclerotized teeth (spicula) point forward from the anterior end of the pleurites on the sides of the head (buccae). The buccae also feature setae on at least the posterior half. The smooth areas at the posterior end of the clypeus (plagulae) are separated by an areolate stripe down the middle of the clypeus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).