The Oldest Representative of the Rove Beetle Tribe Pinophilini (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Paederinae), from Upper Cretaceous Burmese Amber.

Josh Jenkins Shaw,Dagmara Żyła,Ming Bai,Bo Wang

doi:10.3390/insects11030174

Josh Jenkins Shaw, Dagmara Żyła + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11030174

Copy DOI

Abstract

The recently reviewed subtribe Procirrina comprises eight extant genera with a predominately (sub)tropical distribution. Previous phylogenies consistently recover the tribe Pinophilini of the subfamily Paederinae monophyletic. No fossils of the tribe have been described, although compression fossils are known from the Cenozoic Green River Formation (50.3–46.2 Ma) as well as inclusions from the Miocene Dominican (20.43–13.65 Ma) and Mexican (20–15 Ma) ambers. Here we describe †Cretoprocirrus trichotos Jenkins Shaw and Żyła gen. et sp. n., the oldest fossil representative of the tribe Pinophilini, from Upper Cretaceous Burmese amber (ca. 99 Ma). Phylogenetic analyses of morphological data allow its unambiguous placement in the subtribe Procirrina. †Cretoprocirrus trichotos is the second genus of Paederinae described from Burmese amber and provides an important insight into the evolution of the subfamily.

Highlights

The family Staphylinidae contains over 64,000 described species in 32 subfamilies, making it the most speciose animal family known [1]
Here we describe Cretoprocirrus trichotos gen. et sp. n. from Upper Cretaceous Burmese amber and assess the systematic position of the new taxon based on phylogenetic analysis of morphological data using Bayesian inference and maximum parsimony
We visualized the average standard deviation of split frequencies (ASDSF) across chains as a function of chain length, which confirmed that the chains converged in their estimate of topology and support values

Summary

Introduction

The family Staphylinidae contains over 64,000 described species in 32 subfamilies, making it the most speciose animal family known [1]. Among all subfamilies of rove beetles, the Paederinae are one of the more diverse, with 7584 described extant species and 34 fossil species [1,2,3]. Recent molecular [2], total-evidence [3] and morphological [4] phylogenetic analyses of Paederinae have contributed a wealth of data, helped to improve the classification [2] and provided the first morphological matrices for the entire subfamily [3,4]. Some molecular data for Paederinae was produced as a side result of larger studies focused on Coleoptera in general or Staphyliniformia and related families. Zhang and Zhou [5] included four genera of Paederinae and McKenna et al [6] contained 11 paederine genera, two of them from the tribe

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion