Pholcus phalangioides

Pholcus phalangioides, also known as the longbodied cellar spider is a spider of the family Pholcidae. It is also known as the skull spider due its cephalothorax resembling a human skull.

Females have a body length of about 9 mm and males are slightly smaller. The length of its legs are about 5 or 6 times the length of its body (reaching a legspan up to 7 cm in females).

Pholcus phalangioides has a habit of living on the ceilings of rooms, caves, garages or cellars. This spider species is considered beneficial in parts of the world because they kill and eat other spiders including dangerous species such as hobo and redback spiders.[1][2]

This is the only spider species described by the Swiss entomologist Johann Kaspar Füssli, who first recorded it for science in 1775.[3] Confusion often arises over its common name, because "daddy long-legs" is also applied to two other distantly related arthropods: one being Opiliones, another order of arachnid known also as a "harvestman", the other an insect less ambiguously called the crane fly.