Pterolonchidae
family of insects
Pterolonchidae is a small family of very small moths in the superfamily Gelechioidea. There are species native to every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Taxonomy and systematics
As of 2014 the family may be considered to consist of the following seven genera:
Anathyrsa Meyrick, 1920 - 1 species
Coelopoeta Walsingham, 1907 - 3 species
Houdinia Hoare, Dugdale & Watts, 2006 - 1 species
Homaledra Busck, 1900 - 4 species
Plexippica Meyrick, 1912 - 2 species
Pterolonche Zeller, 1847 - 7 species
Syringopais Hering, 1919 - 1 species
The family Pterolonchidae was first named by Edward Meyrick in 1918. Meyrick omitted a description, thus the family was a nomen nudum, until Thomas Bainbrigge Fletcher provided the first description of the family in 1929.
In 1987 (the journal volume is dated to 1986, but this issue was published the following year) Antonio Vives Moreno published a revision of the family. Vives included seven species in two genera in the family (Pterolonche and the monotypic Anathyrsa), describing two new species and synonymising one species within the genus Pterolonche. He also published a new subgeneric classification for Pterolonche: the subgenera Agenjius and Gomezbustillus to classify respectively two species native to southern Andalucia and the northwestern Maghreb, and one species native to Sicily.
In 1999 Ron Hodges classified the group as the subfamily Pterolonchinae of the family Coleophoridae, including eight species in two genera (still Pterolonche and Anathyrsa). His classification was based on morphology (as all other classifications had been constructed up until this time).
In WikiSpecies in 2008, the Pterolonchidae mysteriously included:
Phthinostoma Meyrick, 1914
Pterolonche Zeller, 1847
In Zhi-Qiang Zhang's 2011 attempt to number all the known animal species of earth, van Nieukerken et al., the authors of the section on Lepidoptera, followed the works of Vives in 1987 and Hodges in 1999 regarding the Pterolonchidae.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pterolonchidae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.