Ptychognathus barbatus

(A. Milne Edwards, 1873)

The dorsal surface of carapace is perfectly flat and smooth but the H-shaped suture in the middle portion and the two epigastric ridges, which are crescentic in shape, are well impressed. The frontal margin is very feebly sinuate; the lateral borders are slightly arched and markedly convergent posteriorly, the three antero-lateral teeth are shallowly separated by two closed fissures, the first or the external orbital angle is long and the last one only rudimentarily cut, the posterior half of these borders is thickly fringed with hairs. The eyestalks are considerably straight but not very short; the infraorbital borders are finely granulated. The external maxillipeds are characterized in having the exognath as broad as the ischium, the merus being very broad and auriculated at antero-external angle.
Chelipeds are equal, the arm very short and the wrist not armed; the palm is particularly swollen and high, the chela having a tuft of long hairs at the base of the outer surface. The terminal segment of male abdomen extremely oblong and terminally fringed with longish hairs. (T. Sakai, 1939: 659)

Type locality: New Caledonia.
Range: Madagascar - Fort-Dauphin (Crosnier, 1965); Mauritius (Michel, 1964); Burma - Diamond Island off Pegu coast and Akyab (Alcock, 1900b); Sumatra - Banda Aceh (de Man, 1898); Malaysia - Penang (de Man, 1898); Japan - Amami-Oshima (Ortmann, 1894a), Okinawa (Sakai, 1939), Hachijo-jima, Yoron-jima and Ishigaki-jima (Sakai, 1976a), Okinawa-jima (Miyake, 1983), Hachijo-jima, Tosa Bay, and Yoron-jima (Muraoka, 1998); Taiwan - Nanfangao, Chi-lung, and Tungkang (Lin, 1949); China - Guangdong (Dai & Yang, 1991); Indonesia - Ambon (de Man, 1888d); New Caledonia - (A. Milne Edwards, 1873), Plum and Hienghéne (Takeda & Nunomura, 1976).

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