A new species of Cerylonidae (Insecta: Coleoptera) described from Baltic amber using X-Ray microtomography

ABSTRACT

Examples of the small beetle family Cerylonidae are scarcely represented in the fossil record or at least are rarely determined as such by specialists. Until now, only one species of an extinct genus has been reliably identified to this family from Eocene Baltic amber. A new species, Mychocerus gedanensis McHugh et Ślipiński, sp. nov. (Coleoptera, Cerylonidae), is described from Eocene Baltic amber using X-ray micro-computed tomography (μCT) and optical microscopy. This is the first extinct species described for the subfamily Ceryloninae. It belongs to the extant genus Mychocerus Erichson, 1845, the largest cerylonid genus, which has a widespread distribution that until now excluded the continental parts of the Palaearctic. The new fossil species can be placed in the North American discretus group with two remarkably similar species (M. discretus (Casey, 1890) and M. striatus Sen Gupta & Crowson, 1973) based on the presence of a long and parallel-sided prosternal process.

LSID: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:95EA100C-3323-472C-A17B-B75480B3FB18

KEYWORDS:

• extinct
• Ceryloninae
• Mychocerus
• minute bark beetles
• Eocene

Acknowledgments

The authors are sincerely grateful to Woiciech Kalandyk (MAIG) for donating this collection to MAIG, Dr Elżbieta Sontag (MAIG) for providing the loan, Anatoly P. Vlaskin (I.I. Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology, Kiev) for cutting and polishing the piece, and the late Prof. Gennady M. Dlussky for identification of the Formicidae.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2023.2220001

Additional information

Funding

The study was partly supported by the state project AAAA-A17-117081640018-5 for M.V. Nabozhenko and the Russian Science Foundation grant № 22-19-00732 for E.V. Sadyrin; E.E. Perkovsky was supported by a Scholars at Risk Ukraine (SARU) fellowship at the University of Copenhagen.