54 ALLAN HANCOCK PACIFIC EXPEDITIONS VOL. 24 



mens to P. armatus . . . and never, so far as I can learn, published 

 his P. similis." 



The single record of P. armatus from the Galapagos Islands 

 (Boone, 1932) may have been due to accidental introduction of the 

 species in that area. On the whole, it appears to be conspicuously 

 absent from the Pacific American offshore islands. 



The local Peruvian name for the species is "Salamandra" accord- 

 ing to R. E. Coker (Rathbun, 1910). 



Borradaile (1898, pp. 464-467) believed the Indo-Pacific species 

 Petrolisthes asiaticus (Leach), 1820, and P. rufescens (Heller), 1861, 

 to be but varieties of P. lamarckii (Leach), 1820, and created another 

 variety of the latter, fijnbriatus. Under "P. lamarcki var. asiaticus" 

 he listed an extensive synonymy which included the American species 

 P. marginatus Stimpson and P. armatus (Gibbes). Miyake (1942, 

 1943) considered P. asiaticus , P. fimbriatus, and P. lamarckii to 

 be distinct species, retaining P. rufescens as a variety of the latter. 

 All these Indo-Pacific forms have been examined; P. asiaticus, which 

 is the most closely related to P. armatus, lacks pubescence in the gape 

 of the fingers and has fewer spines on the anterior margin of the 

 merus of the walking legs. P. marginatus is only remotely allied to the 

 Indo-Pacific species. 



Ortmann (1897) extended the range of Petrolisthes armatus to the 

 Indo-Pacific region on the basis of specimens examined by him in 

 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The present writer 

 examined part of this material and found none of it to pertain to P. 

 armatus; undoubtedly the remainder, which cannot now be located, re- 

 fers to one or another of the Indo-Pacific species mentioned above. 



The synonymies of P. armatus in the western and eastern Atlantic 

 were recently listed by Haig (1956a) and Chace (1956), respectively. 



Range: Eastern Pacific: Puerto Penasco and San Felipe, Gulf 

 of California, south to Bahia de la Independencia, Peru; Galapagos 

 Islands (extralimital). Western Atlantic: Connecticut (extralimital) ; 

 Gulf coast of Florida to Santa Catharina, Brazil ; Bermudas. Eastern 

 Atlantic: ?Gibraltar; Senegal to Angola; Ascension Island. 



