Misumessus is a genus of North American and Caribbean crab spiders first described by Nathan Banks in 1904. They look similar to members of Misumena, but are much spinier. It was considered a monotypic genus until 2017, but its taxonomic standing has been debated throughout the 20th century, first as a synonym of Misumenops, then later as its subgenus. It was raised to genus status in 2008, but has still been confused with similar genera, some of which were only known by character descriptions made by Eugène Simon nearly fifty years earlier.
GENUS
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Misumessus is a genus of North American and Caribbean crab spiders first described by Nathan Banks in 1904. They look similar to members of Misumena, but are much spinier. It was considered a monotypic genus until 2017, but its taxonomic standing has been debated throughout the 20th century, first as a synonym of Misumenops, then later as its subgenus. It was raised to genus status in 2008, but has still been confused with similar genera, some of which were only known by character descriptions made by Eugène Simon nearly fifty years earlier.
== Species == it contains seven species: Misumessus bishopae Edwards, 2017 – Puerto Rico, Dominica, Grenadines Misumessus blackwalli Edwards, 2017 – Bermuda Misumessus dicaprioi Edwards, 2017 – USA Misumessus lappi Edwards, 2017 – USA Misumessus oblongus (Keyserling, 1880) – Canada, USA Misumessus quinteroi Edwards, 2017 – Central America, Caribbean Misumessus tamiami Edwards, 2017 – USA
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).