“…Richter and Scholtz (1994) and Scholtz (2014) presented the morphological characteristics of a hermit crab ancestry of lithodids, whereas McLaughlin & Lemaitre (1997), McLaughlin et al (2004McLaughlin et al ( , 2007, and Crustacean Research 52 Lemaitre & McLaughlin (2009) developed theories against this hypothesis. Starting with Zaklin (2001), all subsequent studies using molecular genetic analyses have strongly supported the "hermit-to-king" crab hypothesis (Morrison et al, 2002;Ahyong & OʼMeally, 2004;Ahyong et al, 2009;Hall & Thatje, 2009Schnabel et al, 2011;Tsang et al, 2008;Bracken-Grissom et al, 2013;Noever & Glenner, 2018;Tan et al, 2018Tan et al, , 2019Wang et al, 2023). However, there is no consensus whether lithodids are nested within the genus Pagurus.…”