Helius, Lepeletiere and Serville, 1828

Kopeć, Katarzyna, Kania, Iwona & Krzemiński, Wiesław, 2016, New and little known crane-fly species of the genera Helius, Elephantomyia and Toxorhina (Diptera, Limoniidae) from Dominican and Mexican amber, Palaeontologia Electronica 13 (8), pp. 1-14 : 3

Genus HELIUS Lepeletiere and Serville, 1828

Type species. Helius longirostris ( Meigen, 1818) .

The genus is represented by more than 240 extant species, occurring mainly in the Oriental region ( Oosterbroek, 2015). Almost 50 species are represented in Neotropic and Australian and Oceanian, over 20 species in Palearctic and Afrotropic, but only four species are reported from the Nearctic region.

Until recently, 20 fossil species had been described, mainly from Eocene Baltic amber ( Loew, 1850, 1851; Meunier, 1906; Alexander, 1931; Krzemiński 1985, 1993; Podenas, 2002; Kania, 2014), but also from Early Cretaceous of Botswana ( Rayner and Waters, 1990), Burma ( Ribeiro, 2003), Lebanon ( Kania et al., 2013; Krzemiński et al., 2014) and Eocene/Oligocene (Krzemiński, 1991), Oligocene of Germany ( Statz, 1934, 1944), Oligocene Dominican amber ( Podenas and Poinar, 2001), Miocene of Russia ( Krzemiński, 2002), Miocene of Mexico ( Podenas and Poinar, 2012).