A taxonomic revision of the New World Onthophagus Latreille, 1802 (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) of the osculatii species-complex, with description of two new species from South America

ABSTRACT

The taxonomy of the osculatii complex of the hircus group is revised, with descriptions of two new species from South America (Onthophagus chacoensis sp. nov. and Onthophagus basicarinatus sp. nov.). We provide illustrated keys to the species assigned to the complex, along with descriptions and updated geographical distributions of the known Onthophagus. A neotype is designated for O. osculatii Guérin-Méneville, while lectotypes are designated for four species names. Onthophagus insularis Boheman, originally described from Tahiti, is instead considered to be an American species belonging to the osculatii complex.

www.zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:8597804C-DC30-454C-808D-DC56B0390BB7

KEYWORDS:

• Dung beetles
• hircus group
• Gaetano Osculati
• America
• neotropics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the curators who gave us access to natural history collections and loaned out specimens for further study. We are also grateful to Dr B.D. Gill for his valuable comments and revision of the English of the early version of the manuscript. Many thanks to Dr G. Monteith of the Queensland Museum, who generously provided us with Australian Onthophagus to be compared with the type specimens of O. insularis. MR would like also to acknowledge Dr M. Forshage and Dr E. Åhlander (Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet) for their precious historical and bibliographic information on the voyage of the Swedish Frigate Eugenie, as well as Dr G. Pappafico (University of Urbino) for his time and helpful tips in making distribution maps with QGIS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Antonio Martínez’s collection is today deposited at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales ‘Bernardino Rivadavia’ (Buenos Aires) and CMNC. Martínez used to pin his natural history specimens with one to three light-brown labels, each of them bearing collection and identification data handwritten by the author himself. Most of Martínez Onthophagus are glued on a light-brown label. During our research, we examined several of the Martínez Onthophagus housed at the CMNC and all the specimens identified by the Argentinian author as O. osculatii do actually belong to O. transisthmius and O. chacoensis.

Additional information

Funding

MR is a PhD student at the University of Urbino and this research has been supported by a MIUR scholarship (Ministero dell’Istruzione, della Ricerca e dell’Università). FZVM is a CNPq fellow and parts of this work were funded by CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico: [302997/2013-0, 304925/2010-1, 484035/2013-4, 405697/2013-9 and 440604/2015-0; PPBio/CNPq 248299/2012-3, FAPEMAT/CNPq PRONEM 568005/2014, ISYEB, UMR 7205 CNRS/MNHN and INCT-CENBAM/CNPq]. Parts of this research were also granted by the Synthesys Project (http://synthesys3.myspecies.info/), which is financed by the European Community Research Infrastructure Action under the FP7 [MR: FR-TAF-3664, SE-TAF-6016; FZVM: GB-TAF-3855]. MZ is a recently retired Full Professor of Zoology, University of Urbino, free researcher collaborating with the Scuola di Biodiversità - Polo universitario Asti Studi Superiori, Italy.