Kekveus brevisulcatus sp. nov., a new featherwing beetle from mid-Cretaceous amber of northern Myanmar (Coleoptera: Ptiliidae)

Abstract

Ptiliidae (featherwing beetles) is a group of minute staphylinoid beetles with a scarce fossil record. Here a second member of the Mesozoic genus Kekveus Yamamoto et al. is reported from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, with detailed morphology obtained through confocal microscopy. Kekveus brevisulcatus Li, Yamamoto, Newton & Cai sp. nov. shares with K. jason Yamamoto et al. the unpaired medial pronotal fovea and narrowly separated transverse metacoxae, but can be separated from the latter based on its less elongate body, shorter pronotal foveae, and much weaker transverse depression on the head. Our phylogenetic analyses support the discheramocephalin affinity of Kekveus, although its relationship with other members of Discheramocephalini cannot be confidently resolved.

An enigmatic Cretaceous beetle with possible affinity to Erotylidae (Coleoptera: Cucujiformia)

“…To evaluate the systematic placement of the new fossil, we conducted constrained morphology-based phylogenetic analyses under parsimony (e.g., Fikáček et al 2020 , Li et al 2023a , 2023b ). The data matrix was derived from the previously published dataset by Leschen et al (2005) .…”

Foveapeltis gen. nov., an unusual cleroid genus with large hypomeral cavities from mid‐Cretaceous amber (Coleoptera: Cleroidea)

“…For taxa with both morphological and molecular data, their interrelationships were fixed as the backbone tree. The fossil genus and other extant taxa without molecular data were allowed to move freely across the backbone tree (e.g., Li, Liu, et al., 2023 ; Li, Newton, et al., 2022 ; Li, Ślipiński, et al., 2023 ; Li, Yamamoto, et al., 2023 ; Li, Zhang, et al., 2022 ). The resulting tree was visualized with the online tool iTOL 6.6 (Letunic & Bork, 2024 ) and graphically edited with Adobe Illustrator CC 2017.…”