Abstract
Abstract. A new weevil species (urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:2D5E9E4A-A250-4D0A-AF69-CF4753436686), Pseudopilolabus othnius Poinar, Brown and Legalov, sp. nov. (Coleoptera: Attelabidae), is described from Dominican amber. The new species is close to the extant P. viridanus (Gyllenhal, 1839) and P. splendens (Gyllenhal, 1839) but differs by having a bronzed body, narrower and more convex elytral intervals, long antennae reaching the middle of the pronotum, and weakly convex eyes; from P. rugiceps (Voss, 1925) it differs by having a smoother pronotum without transverse rugosity; from P. chiriquensis (Hamilton, 1994) it differs by having indistinctly protuberant humeri and the elytra nearly parallel from the humeri to the midpoint. The fossil weevil is the first record of the tribe Pilolabini (Attelabidae) from the West Indies and the first record of the Attelabidae from any amber source.
Highlights
The leaf-rolling weevils of the family Attelabidae comprise a monophyletic group of curculionoid beetles adapted to roll leaves to provide food and protection for their larvae (Zuppa et al, 1994; Legalov, 2005b)
Dating of Dominican amber is controversial, with the latest purported age of 20–15 Mya based on foraminifera (IturraldeVinent and MacPhee, 1996) and the earliest of 45–30 Mya based on coccoliths (Schlee, 1990)
Dominican amber was produced by the leguminous tree Hymenaea protera Poinar (Poinar Jr., 1991), and a reconstruction of the Dominican amber forest based on amber fossils indicated that the environment was similar to that of a present-day tropical moist forest (Poinar Jr. and Poinar, 1999)
Summary
The leaf-rolling weevils of the family Attelabidae comprise a monophyletic group of curculionoid beetles adapted to roll leaves to provide food and protection for their larvae (Zuppa et al, 1994; Legalov, 2005b). Almost 1300 species are in the modern fauna (Legalov, 2007, 2010). Centers of their biodiversity are in the Oriental, Neotropical and Ethiopian regions. One species of the extant Oriental genus Phialodes Roelofs, 1874 was described from upper Miocene deposits at Oeningen in Germany (Heer, 1865; Legalov, 2013). Since members of the Attelabidae have not been found in any amber deposits (Hieke and Pietrzeniuk, 1984; Legalov 2015), the present record of a representative of the most primitive tribe of the Attelabidae in Dominican amber is very surprising
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