although cribellate and non-cribellate orb weavers had earlier been placed in the same taxon (from at least 1789), the two kinds of orb weaver were placed in separate taxa after the possession of a cribellum was prioritized over the form of the web. following john blackwall in 1841 and philipp bertkau in 1878, for a long time the majority of araneologists accepted spiders with a cribellum as a coherent taxon, cribellatae. many also held that cribellate and ecribellate spiders had separately evolved orb webs from other kinds of web. by the early 1970s, it had become apparent that cribellate spiders were a paraphyletic group, the cribellum being an ancient feature of araneomorph spiders that had been lost in many descendants, so that grouping spiders together based on the retention of this feature did not produce a monophyletic taxon.