First fossil Huttoniidae (Arthropoda: Chelicerata: Araneae) in late Cretaceous Canadian amber David Penney * , Paul A. Selden School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK Received 4 April 2005; accepted in revised form 25 July 2005 Available online 30 March 2006 Abstract The first fossils of the extant New Zealand spider family Huttoniidae are described from Cretaceous (Campanian) amber from Alberta and Manitoba, Canada. The specimens are juveniles and poorly preserved, but the following combination of characters permits identification as hut- toniids: general habitus, carapace without a raised cephalic region or fovea, eight eyes in two rows of four, three-clawed tarsus (with tiny median claw), elongate patella, ventral preening comb on metatarsus 3, spines absent on legs 1 and 2 but present on legs 3 and 4, and spatulate setae on anterior metatarsi. The fossils cannot be assigned reliably to the single, extant, monotypic genus Huttonia O. Pickard-Cambridge, and no new taxa are erected. The fossils extend the known geological age of Huttoniidae back approximately 80 myr and, by inference, that of their putative sister taxon Spatiatoridae back approximately 35 myr, both to prior to the K/T extinction. The relative abundance of this family in the two Ca- nadian amber deposits is similar, which suggests the deposits sampled are from similar habitats. The disjunct distribution of the fossil and extant members of this family supports the theory of ousted relicts over mobilistic biogeography for explaining the strictly austral distributions of the extant organisms. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Biogeography; New Zealand; Palpimanoidea; Spatiatoridae; Spider 1. Introduction Cretaceous Canadian amber has been known for more than a century, and fossil inclusions were first reported by Walker (1934). Spiders were listed as present in Canadian amber by McAlpine and Martin (1969) and Pike (1994, 1995), but the only works to formally describe spiders from this source are those of Penney (2004), who described a new genus of the enigmatic fossil family Lagonomegopidae from Cedar Lake, Manitoba, and Penney (2006) who described a new species of Oonopidae from Grassy Lake, Alberta. A research trip by DP to study Grassy Lake amber in the collections of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (RTMP) in Drumheller, Al- berta, Canada and a reassessment of Cedar Lake amber on loan to PAS from the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard, Massachusetts, USA identified specimens of the family Huttoniidae in both collections, which are re- ported here. The spider family Huttoniidae Simon, 1893 (superfamily Palpimanoidea sensu Forster and Platnick, 1984) contains a single, described extant species, Huttonia palpimanoides O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1879, from New Zealand; although For- ster and Forster (1999) mentioned about 20 undescribed species, all from New Zealand. This small spider resembles other palpi- manoids in having distally spatulate setae prolaterally on meta- tarsi 1 and 2 but, in contrast to other palpimanoid families such as Palpimanidae and Stenochilidae, these do not form a thick scopula. From Archaeidae, huttoniids differ by not having a raised pars cephalica (Forster and Platnick, 1984), and from Lagonomegopidae, a strictly fossil family (see Penney, 2005), they are most easily separated by their eye arrangement. The strictly fossil spider family Spatiatoridae Petrunkevitch, 1942 was erected for the following species preserved in Tertiary Baltic amber: Adorator brevipes Petrunkevitch, 1942, * Corresponding author. E-mail address: david.penney@manchester.ac.uk (D. Penney). 0195-6671/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cretres.2005.07.002 Cretaceous Research 27 (2006) 442e446 www.elsevier.com/locate/CretRes