I'm in southern Chile at the moment, and I wanted to point out some amazing terrestrial leeches and their evolutionary history. Yes, I'm talking about leeches that live on land, it is a real thing and actually common in many parts of the world. It is my first time finding a nice, blood-feeding terrestrial leech outside of Asia and Australia. Mesobdella gemmata (left leech picture), a member of the family Xerobdellidae, is a common occurrence here in the temperate rain forests near Valdivia, Chile. It looks and acts just like members of the family Haemadipsidae, such as the Haemadipsa (right leech picture) species I have gone to collect in China and Cambodia. But, these families are not each others closest relatives, and might have evolved to live on land independently (much as birds and bats evolved flight independently). It was much debated whether these groups of leech were each others closest relatives or not until molecular work began to clarify the issue (check out their paper).