Updated diagnoses for the cricket family Trigonidiidae (Insecta: Orthoptera: Grylloidea) and its subfamilies (Trigonidiinae, Nemobiinae), with a review of the fossil record

New Cretaceous crickets of the subfamilies Nemobiinae and Podoscirtinae (Orthoptera, Grylloidea: Trigonidiidae, Oecanthidae) attest the antiquity of these clades

“…For example, the Cretaceous Liaonemobius Ren, 1998, which was described as a member of Trigonidiinae (Trigonidiidae) and long-listed in the Gryllidae s. str. (Cigliano et al 2021), is actually not a cricket but belongs to the Elcanidae (Desutter-Grandcolas et al 2021;Cigliano et al 2022a, b). The Cretaceous Gryllidium oweni Westwood, 1854, originally considered as 'Gryllidae', proved to belong to Phasmatodea (Coram & Jepson, 2012).…”

“…This has been performed for the Trigonidiidae family and its two subfamilies, i.e. the Nemobiinae and Trigonidiinae (Desutter-Grandcolas et al 2021). In total, among the 12 fossils now listed for the Trigonidiidae, seven could be attributed to the Trigonidiinae (including Birmaninemobius hirsutus Xu et al, 2020b as a representative of its stem group, although described as a Nemobiinae), two juveniles could be attributed to the Nemobiinae, and two could not be reasonably considered; Curvospirus huzhengkun Liu et al 2022 clearly belongs to Trigonidiidae, but its morphological features do not allow it to be classified in either the Trigonidiinae, or the Nemobiinae, as it presents characters of both subfamilies in addition to original ones (Liu et al 2022).…”

“…The fossils we describe here belong to the families Trigonidiidae and Oecanthidae respectively. We use the diagnoses proposed by Desutter-Grandcolas et al (2021) for Trigonidiidae and its two well-supported and well-characterized subfamilies Trigonidiinae and Nemobiinae, and those proposed by Campos et al (2022) for Oecanthidae and its subdivisions from subfamilies to tribes. The reference classification of Cigliano et al (2022b) is now congruent with the phylogenetic classification of Campos et al (2022).…”

“…the Oecanthidae, and propose a revised classification based on well-diagnosed monophyletic entities from family to tribes and genera (Campos et al 2022): crickets are now distributed into five monophyletic families. Nevertheless, there is a strong deficiency of phylogenetic studies for crickets at a scale allowing the drawing of phylogeny-based classifications along with clade diagnosis (see Tan et al 2021 and references therein for the Gryllidae Eneopterinae; Desutter-Grandcolas et al 2021 for the Trigonidiidae; Campos et al 2022 for the Oecanthidae).…”

“…Other cricket groups have been defined using characters of the stridulum, such as several fossil subfamilies of the Gryllidae (Cigliano et al 2022 a , b ), while some extant taxa present unique characters on their wings, such as the Trigonidiidae p.p. (Desutter-Grandcolas et al 2021), the Phaloriinae (Phalangopsidae) (Desutter-Grandcolas, 2015), the Pteroplistinae (Chopard, 1936) or some Oecanthinae and Podoscirtinae (Oecanthidae) (Campos et al 2022). The main problems with wing characters are first that numerous crickets are brachypterous, micropterous or apterous, and secondly that the females are usually devoid of a stridulum, making the stridulatory criteria uninformative.…”