The horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus (Linnaeus, 1758) is a famous species, renowned as a 'living fossil' (Owen, 1873; Barthel, 1974; Kin and Błażejowski, 2014) for its apparently little-changed morphology for many millions of years. The genus Limulus Müller, 1785 was used by Leach (1819, p. 536) as the basis of a new family Limulidae and synonymized it with Polyphemus Lamarck, 1801 (Lamarck's proposed but later unaccepted replacement for Limulus, as discussed by Van der Hoeven, 1838, p. 8) and

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... Xyphotheca Gronovius, 1764 (later changed to Xiphosura Gronovius, 1764, another junior synonym of Limulus). He also included the valid modern genus Tachypleus Leach, 1819 in the family. The primary authority of Leach (1819) is widely recognized in the neontological literature (e.g., Dunlop et al., 2012; Smith et al., 2017). It is also the authority recognized in the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS Editorial Board, 2021).