This title has been out of print for some years, but has now been reprinted. It is now generally recognised as the definitive text on British spiders. Roberts' first edition of this work (3 vols, in 1987) superseded and updated the previous bible for British Arachnologists (Locket and Millidge, 1951, 1953 and 1974). This newer edition with additional Appendix, Addenda and Corrigenda in turn updates and revises the1987 edition. The first volume contains all the text, starting with a series of introductory notes on spider biology and some information on classification and nomenclature as it applies to spiders. Following this is a key to families and the species descriptions including 105 genera and 267 species of Linyphiidae. These two volumes are both a work of art and a work of science and so bring together the highest possible achievements of a human being. Their presence in the libraries of all academic as well as private Arachnid libraries is a must in order that their great value to the science of arachnology in Europe be allowed to bear fruit abundantly.

"A user-friendly guide to identifying and understanding the spiders of the Pacific Coast. There are 67 families of spiders found in North America, and 59 of them can be found in California. This field guide will cover all 59 of those families, including introduced species and common garden spiders--those will be given extra coverage. Each family is reviewed including details of their identification, taxonomy, distribution, and natural history. There will be a full color plate for each of the families."--

Primary sexual traits, those structures and processes directly involved in reproduction, are some of the most diverse, specialized, and bizarre in the animal kingdom. Moreover, reproductive traits are often species-specific, suggesting that they evolved very rapidly. This diversity, long the province of taxonomists, has recently attracted broader interest from evolutionary biologists, especially those interested in sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies.Primary sexual characters were long assumed to be the product of natural selection, exclusively. A recent alternative suggests that sexual selection explains much of the diversity of "primary" sexual characters. A third approach to the evolution of reproductive interactions after copulation or insemination has been to consider the process one of sexual conflict. That is, the reproductive processes of a species may reflect, as does the mating system, evolution acting on males and on females, but in different directions.In this volume, authors explore a wide variety of primary sexual characters and selective pressures that have shaped them, from natural selection for offspring survival to species-isolating mechanisms, sperm competition, cryptic female choice and sexual arms races. Exploring diverse reproductive adaptations from a theoretical and practical perspective, The Evolution of Primary Sexual Characters will provide an unparalleled overview of sexual diversity in many taxa and an introduction to the issues in sexual selection that are changing our view of sexual processes.