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ViewAttendees 5

SysEB

Student Competition 10-Minute Paper

Grad 10-min: SysEB, Evolution 2

Molurina and Phanerotomeina (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae: Sepidiini) revisited: Discovery of new genera highlights delimitation problems between the subtribes

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Student Competition On-Demand
Sepidiini is a species-rich ( >1,000 sp./spp.) and morphologically diverse tribe of desert-inhabiting darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae: Pimeliinae) distributed throughout Africa and the southern Palearctic. The tribe contains many poorly defined taxonomic groups and is in need of revision at all taxonomic levels. In this study, examination of morphological traits revealed two previously unrecognized lineages among the extremely speciose genera Psammodes (164 species and subspecies) and Ocnodes (144 species and subspecies); namely the Psammodes spinosus species-group and Ocnodes humeralis species-group. In order to test their placement, a phylogeny of the tribe was reconstructed based on analyses of DNA sequences from six non-overlapping genetic loci (CAD, wg, COI JP, COI BC, COII, and 28S) using Bayesian and maximum likelihood inference methods. The aforementioned, morphologically-defined, species-groups were recovered as distinct and well-supported lineages within Molurina+Phanerotomeina and are hereby interpreted as independent genera, respectively Tibiocnodes gen. nov. and Tuberocnodes gen. nov.  Furthermore, as the recovered phylogenetic placement of Tibiocnodes and Tuberocnodes undermines the monophyly of the subtribes Molurina and Phanerotomeina, an analysis of the available diagnostic characters for those subtribes was also performed. As a consequence, Phanerotomeina is considered as a synonym of the newly redefined Molurina sens. nov.