Maindroniidae is a small family of silverfish, basal insects belonging to the order Zygentoma. It contains three genera.
Four species of these insects are found in deserts: in Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Atacama Desert on the west coast of Chile. The distribution of these closely related species suggests that Maindronia is a Gondwanan relict group. In 2020, a new species in this family, Maindronia bashagardensis, was discovered in Hormozgan province, Iran. There are no known existing specimens or illustrations of Maindronia mascatensis.
Taxonomy It has been suggested that Maindroniidae should be divided in two subfamilies:
Atacaminae: Atacamus neotropicalis (Wygodzinsky, 1940) - Chile Peruatacamus atunpacha Irish, Zúñiga-Reinoso & Predel, 2025 - Perú
Maindroniinae: Maindronia bashagardensis Smith & Molero-Baltanás, 2020 – Iran Maindronia beieri Schremmer, 1964 – Sudan Maindronia mascatensis Bouvier, 1897 – Oman and UAE Nota bene: A binomial authority in parentheses indicates that the species was originally described in a different genus
In 2019, a phylogenetic study using the Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I and the 18S genes showed that Maindronia neotropicalis, inhabiting the Chilean Atacama desert, is an assemblage of five genetic lineages that diverged from a common ancestor around 15 million years ago. All of these five lineages are likely well-separated species, and await formal description.
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Systematics of family