The Giant Pill-Millipedes, order Sphaerotheriida – An annotated species catalogue

This monograph provides the first comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge of the ecology, development, morphology, and diversity of the giant pill-millipedes, order Sphaerotheriida. It summarizes all known aspects of the life history and ecology, including predators and parasites, of giant pill-millipedes and maps the biogeography of the order and its families. This work includes illustrations, primarily based on scanning electron microscopy images, of all major general morphological characters of the giant pill-millipedes. To capture the intraordinal variation of giant pill-millipedes, it further includes illustrations of the female vulva and male posterior telopods of all known main groups and genera of the order. In addition, the monograph provides a detailed list of all 39 known unique characters of members of the Sphaerotheriida. The catalogue part presents the first complete list of all described species, genera, and higher categories of the giant pill-millipedes. It includes a key to all five Sphaerotheriida families, short descriptions of the key characters for each of the 24 genera, and a list of all 351 valid Sphaerotheriida species with their synonyms. For each species, the catalogue further provides the number and location of type depositories as well as the locality data from the literature. For each family, genus and species it includes bibliographic citations, including all subsequent citations, in chronological order. The monograph also contains a complete reference list with more than 280 entries about the Sphaerotheriida.