2 
Marianne E. Filka and Rowland M. Shelley 
INTRODUCTION 
The importance of the Appalachian Mountains to the arthropod 
class Diplopoda has been evident since 1969, when Hoffman identified 
the mountains as a global center of milliped evolution. This opinion was 
based on the diversity and abundance of known indigenous taxa. Four 
other areas also were cited as important global centers of evolution and 
dispersal, and since all are mountainous to some extent, Hoffman sur- 
mised that vertical relief probably allows for a greater variety of 
ecological niches than occur in lowland or flat areas. 
The Appalachian Highlands, one of eight physiographic divisions of 
the United States, is comprised of seven physiographic provinces (Hunt 
1967). The most important in terms of known diplopod faunas are the 
Ridge and Valley and Blue Ridge Provinces, especially the southern sec- 
tion of the latter (the region south of the Roanoke River). The 
Xystodesmidae, the dominant Nearctic polydesmoid family, attains its 
greatest known diversity in the part of the southern Blue Ridge Province 
south of the Kanawha River System (Hoffman 1969). The bulk of the 
southern Blue Ridge Province is in western North Carolina, where it is 
demarcated from the Piedmont Plateau by a prominent escarpment, the 
Blue Ridge Front. Thus, for all practical purposes one of the five regions 
of greatest milliped diversity in the world lies in the western part of this 
state. 
Although most of the mountains of North Carolina are west of the 
Blue Ridge Front, a number of prominent hills and ridges also occur to 
the east in the Piedmont Plateau. Some of these are quite properly called 
mountains and extend to altitudes of well over 300 meters. These isolated 
mountains protruding from a surrounding flat plain are known as in- 
selbergs and are erosional remnants of previously more extensive moun- 
tain masses (Kesel 1974). Five main groups of inselbergs occur in Pied- 
mont North Carolina (Fig. 1): the Sauratown Mountains of Stokes 
County (including Pilot Mountain, Surry County); the Brushy Moun- 
tains of Wilkes, Caldwell, Alexander and Iredell counties; the South 
Mountains of Burke, Rutherford, McDowell and Cleveland counties; the 
Kings Mountain region of Cleveland and Gaston counties; and the 
Uwharrie Mountains of Davidson, Randolph, Montgomery, and Stanly 
counties. The faunas of these inselberg regions are of particular 
biogeographic interest and raise a number of questions. Do they, for ex- 
ample, reflect previous direct connection with the Blue Ridge chain? If 
so, their later isolation may have separated previously continuous 
diplopod populations and led to speciation by geographical isolation. 
Accordingly, knowledge of the inselberg diplopod faunas may provide 
insights into processes affecting milliped evolution, and an investigation 
of one such area was conducted in this study. 
The Kings Mountain region straadles the South Carolina border 
about 13 km southwest of Gastonia. Preliminary studies there had dis- 
closed a milliped fauna with southern elements found nowhere else in 
