Elephantomyia longirostris
extinct species of fly
Elephantomyia (Elephantomyia) longirostris is an extinct species of crane fly in the family Limoniidae. The species is solely known from the Middle Eocene Baltic amber deposits in the Baltic Sea region of Europe. The species is one of six in its genus described from Baltic amber.
History and classification
Elephantomyia (Elephantomyia) longirostris is known from the holotype specimen, collection number MB.J.337, along with ten further adults which are preserved as inclusions in transparent Baltic amber. As of 2015, nine of the amber specimens were included in the collections of the Polish Academy of Sciences, while another was housed at the Natural History Museum Humboldt University, and the last resided in a private collection. Baltic amber is recovered from fossil bearing rocks in the Baltic Sea region of Europe. Estimates of the age date between 37 million years old, for the youngest sediments and 48 million years old. This age range straddles the middle Eocene, ranging from near the beginning of the Lutetian to the beginning of the Pribonian.
E. longirostris is one of six crane fly species in the genus Elephantomyia described from the Baltic amber, the others being E. baltica, E. bozenae, E. brevipalpa, E. irinae, and E. pulchella. All six species are placed into the Elephantomyia subgenus Elephantomyia based on the lack of tibial spurs and by several aspects of the wing morphology.
The public source identifies “Elephantomyia longirostris” as extinct species of fly. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Elephantomyia, longirostris and extinct.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22285076. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elephantomyia longirostris” 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.