ИСТИНА

Leodamas chevalieri (Fauvel, 1902) is the only species of the genus recorded in the Arabian region including the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. We investigated the specimens of Leodamas collected in the intertidal zones of Kuwait and Oman and compared them with the type and non-type material from Senegal (West Africa), the type locality of L. chevalieri. The methods included light and scanning electron microscopy and phylogenetic analyses of one mitochondrial (CO1) and one nuclear (ITS2) marker. Based on the molecular analysis, we revealed that at least two species inhabit both the Kuwait and Oman shores, and both of them differed from the specimens of L. chevalieri sampled at the type locality. One of these species was L. gracilis (Pillai, 1961) described from Sri Lanka, and our finding representing a new record of this species in the Arabian region. The second species was new to science, morphologically very similar to L. chevalieri, but differ from the latter in fine chaetal characters