Unknown Spider

[Souhait]

I found this spider roaming around the basement of the house and I am wondering what kind it is. I believe that it is part of the Gnaphosidae family of spiders, but I might be incorrect.


Edit: Hm, alright. Thanks anyways.

[mcar]

That needs a lot of classification techniques as far as I am concern. We can not just easily identify what spider that was.

[Zach]

Mcar brought up that interesting point, in that many of these (if not most) one must examine these in person using various methods. With some taxa, females are not even readily identifiable and mature males are need in order to identify by the palp hooks or mating claspers.

A very interesting problem, as some of the work a friend of mine is doing on tarantula phylogenetics is finding many apparent 'cryptic' species. Some people are finding the fact unacceptable, the fact that is that many female North American tarantulas simply cannot be identified without proper locality data and/or a genetic sequence.

[bhawk45]

A location on where this spider was spotted would be helpful.