Chaerilinae Pocock, 1893

Qi, Jian-Xin, Zhu, Ming-Sheng & Lourenço, Wilson R., 2005, Eight new species of the genera Scorpiops Peters, Euscorpiops Vachon, and Chaerilus Simon (Scorpiones: Euscorpiidae, Chaerilidae) from Tibet and Yunnan, China, Euscorpius 32 (32), pp. 1-40 : 29

Subfamily Chaerilinae Pocock, 1893

Comments. According to the Catalog of Scorpions of the World (Fet, 2000a), this monotypic family includes 21 species, all belonging to the genus Chaerilus Simon, 1877 . In a recent revision, Kovařík (2000) defined 18 species as valid, and added two more species most recently (Kovařík, 2005a). This genus was originally described and placed in the family Chactidae ; subsequently it was moved to its own subfamily Chaerilinae , and placed in the family Iuridae by Pocock (1893). A few years later, Laurie (1896) moved the Chaerilinae as a subfamily to the family Buthidae . Finally, Kraepelin (1899) raised the Chaerilinae to the rank of family. Vachon (1963) defined a unique pattern of cheliceral dentition for the Chaerilidae . Some years later, the same author (Vachon, 1974) characterized the unique trichobothrial pattern of Chaerilidae , defined as Type B, a totally different type from both Buthidae (type A) and all other families (type C).

The family Chaerilidae is distributed only in South and Southeast Asia. To explain this pattern of distribution, Lamoral (1980) suggested that the ancestors of the chaerilids originated in Pangaean times as an eastern Laurasian relic that moved into the Oriental Region after the Indian plate connected with Eurasia. They became isolated in the Oriental Region as the Himalayas formed (Sissom, 1990). Santiago-Blay et al. (2004) described a fossil genus Electrochaerilus and subfamily Electrochaerilinae from the Cretaceous amber of Myanmar ( Burma). In China, representatives of this family were poorly known until now. The only one known species and another, new species are both from the Tibet region.