Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi
species of arachnid
Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi is a species of spider in the family Euctenizidae, described in 2007 by East Carolina University professor of biology Jason E. Bond and Norman I. Platnick, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is named after Canadian rock musician Neil Young.
Bond & Platnick described the male holotype and female paratype, which were collected in Jefferson County, Alabama, in 1998. While specimens have been collected repeatedly since 1940, it was only in 2007 that they were recognized as a new species. He co-wrote a paper revising the genus with Norman I. Platnick, describing this and several other new species.
M. neilyoungi is widely distributed throughout Alabama, with one known locality from northwestern Florida.
Bond received $750,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation in 2005 and 2006 to classify the species of the family Cyrtaucheniidae and contribute to the foundation's Tree of Life project.
Bond opted to name the spider after his favorite musician, Neil Young, whose music and activism on peace and justice he appreciates.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi” as species of arachnid. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q134487. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1998, 1940 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.