Reply #34: That's a giant European house spider

[geniph]

Our house has zillions of them, but I rarely see a live one more than a few inches from the door - the cats grab them in nanoseconds and toss them around until they break.

If you have giant house spiders, you won't need to worry much about brown recluses; they're competitors and the giant house spiders are VERY predatory on brown recluses.

They do bite, and it can hurt, but they don't bite very often and it isn't particularly toxic. The ones we get are so large they're downright disconcerting - I call them the baby tarantulas.

All spiders have the palps - the jaws - that you can see on this one, it's just that this one has particularly large ones.

Here's an EXCELLENT page on these spiders (warning for the spider-phobic - there's lots of large pictures):
http://www.srv.net/~dkv/hobospider/european.html
T. Gigantea is the one we have.