Cassida sinuata Fabricius, 1792

Sekerka, Lukáš & Barclay, Maxwell V. L., 2014, Fabrician types of Cassidinae (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) deposited in the Natural History Museum, London, Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae 54 (2), pp. 657-684 : 676

Cassida sinuata Fabricius, 1792

Cassida sinuata Fabricius, 1792: 298 .

Type locality. ‘Asia’.

Type material examined. Presumably lost, not found in the BMNH collection.

Status in ZIMSEN (1964). P. 90; No. 1323 (no material listed).

Original description. ‘C. flavescens ferruginea thorace postice sinuato, coleoptris punctis undecim nigris. Habitat in Asia Mus. Britann.

Media. Antennae, caput, thorax aut flava, aut ferruginea, immaculata. Thoracis margo posticus sinuatus. Elytra punctis quinque, primo baseos, secundo, ad suturam, tertio in medio, quatro & quinto pari, & communi versus apicem.’ ( FABRICIUS 1792).

Current status. Junior synonym and primary junior homonym of Basiprionota sinuata (Olivier, 1790) .

Remarks. So far, we have been unable to ¿nd any specimen in the collection which might represent potential type of C. sinuata . Judging from the description we are not sure whether the species was correctly synonymized with B. sinuata (Olivier, 1790) because the latter has differently positioned spots on elytra and with one spot on marginalia which was not mentioned by Fabricius. Basiprionota sinuata is a very variable species but it never has a spot on the suture, as in Fabricius’s description.

ZIMSEN (1964) did not report any material for this species. However, it is possible that the species belongs to a quite different genus and any surviving type specimen(s) are standing unnoticed under a different species name. We processed in detail most of the BMNH Cassidinae, with the exception of the old world Cassidini and Aspidimorphini . There is a chance that the type could still be hidden among this material, but it is certainly not present in the main collection of Basiprionota .