A new wood-inhabiting mite species of the genus Dendroseius Karg, 1965 (Acari, Mesostigmata, Rhodacaridae) from Central Europe (Slovakia) Peter Mašán 1 1 Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 845-06 Bratislava, Slovakia Corresponding author: Peter Mašán (peter.masan@savba.sk; uzaepema@savba.sk) Academic editor: F. Faraji  |  Received 5 August 2020  |  Accepted 24 September 2020  |  Published 4 November 2020 http://zoobank.org/5EEF002A-6019-4449-B613-8A20A4F682C1 Citation: Mašán P (2020) A new wood-inhabiting mite species of the genus Dendroseius Karg, 1965 (Acari, Mesostigmata, Rhodacaridae) from Central Europe (Slovakia). ZooKeys 984: 49–57. https://doi.org/10.3897/ zookeys.984.57256 Abstract A new rhodacarid mite of the genus Dendroseius Karg, 1965, D. reductus sp. nov., was described based on females found in wood detritus and under bark of dead and dying poplar trees in a food-plain forest in South Slovakia. Te new species is unusual among the known congeners in the specifcally formed triramous epistome of which the central projection is reduced in length, truncate, and markedly shorter than lateral ones. In other congeneric species, the anterior margin of the epistome possesses three pointed projections of similar size. A dichotomous key for identifcation of females of the world species classifed in the genus Dendroseius is provided. Keywords Description, morphology, poplar tree, saproxylic habitat, systematics Introduction Dendroseius was originally described as a subgenus of Dendrolaelaps Halbert, 1915 by Karg in 1965, and treated at the generic level by Hirschmann (1974), Lindquist (1975), Evans and Till (1979), Shcherbak (1980), Karg (1993), and other acarologists. Te ZooKeys 984: 49–57 (2020) doi: 10.3897/zookeys.984.57256 https://zookeys.pensoft.net Copyright Peter Mašán This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. RESEARCH ARTICLE Launched to accelerate biodiversity research A peer-reviewed open-access journal