The South African authors and the South African

The most recently compiled world list of valid tick names contains the names of 692 ixodid and 186 argasid tick species as well as that of Nuttalliella namaqua, the only species in this genus (Nava, Guglielmone & Mangold 2008). Of these 879 spe-cies, 80 ixodid and 25 argasid species and N. na-maqua occur in South Africa. Twenty-one of the 80 ixodid species and two of the argasid species have distributions confined to this country (Theiler 1962; Walker 1991; Walker, Keirans & Horak 2000), and N. namaqua has only been recorded in South Africa and Namibia. Forty-six of the 80 ixodid and 16 of the 25 argasid species and N. namaqua have been de-scribed since 1908, and this review is confined to the latter 63 ticks. Twenty-four of these descriptions were written, or contributed to by people in South Africa, and the remainder by researchers in England