Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879

Genus Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879 View in CoL

Restricted synonymy.

A. Milne-Edwards, 1879: 21 — Bruce 1986: 126; Kensley and Schotte 1989: 129; Magalhães and Young 2003: 222; Lowry and Dempsey 2006: 168.

Type species.

Bathynomus giganteus A. Milne-Edwards 1879 ; by monotypy.

Remarks.

Bruce (1986) reviewed the taxonomic history of Bathynomus and diagnosed the genus. Lowry and Dempsey (2006) provided the most recent comprehensive worldwide review of the Bathynomus species, along with their global distribution. Over the last decade, four more species have been added ( Shipley et al. 2016; Kou et al. 2017; Sidabalok et al. 2020; and Huang et al. 2022), and the distributions of some have also been extended (e. g., Huang et al. 2022; Dueñas et al. 2024). To date, Bathynomus has 11 “ supergiant ” and nine “ giant ” extant species ( Boyko et al. 2024), but there are still several species of Bathynomus that remain undescribed (see Sidabalok et al. 2020; Huang et al. 2022). Molecular methods (using COI and 16 S rRNA sequences) have proved to be useful to help identify species as in the case of B. jamesi , which is morphologically similar to B. kensleyi , and to distinguish B. yucatanensis from B. giganteus s. str., with support from morphology ( Huang et al. 2022; Huang and Bruce 2024). Bathynomus fossil species have been recently reviewed by Hyžný et al. (2019), with a new species described later by Hyžný et al. (2020).