Phanaeus septentrionalis Pessôa, 1934 : 291

Maldaner, Maria E., Cupello, Mario, Ferreira, Daniela C. & Vaz-De-Mello, Fernando Z., 2017, Type specimens and names assigned to Coprophanaeus (Megaphanaeus) d’Olsoufieff, 1924, the largest New World dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Phanaeini), Zootaxa 4272 (1), pp. 83-102 : 89-90

Phanaeus septentrionalis Pessôa, 1934: 291 . Available name (Lectotype designated).

Type specimen: Lectotype: here designated, male (‘ Anno / 1922 / Pará / Belem [one side]; Lima / leg. [other side]’ ‘TYPUS’, ‘19396’, ‘ LECTOTYPE ♂ / Phanaeus septentrionalis / Pessôa, 1934 / des. Maldaner et al. 2017’), genital capsule dissected and glued to a paper card, MZSP.

Paralectotypes: 1. Female (‘ Anno / 1922 / Pará / Belem [one side]; Lima / leg. [other side]’ ‘TYPUS’, ‘19394’, ‘ PARALECTOTYPE ♀ / Phanaeus septentrionalis / Pessôa, 1934 / des. Maldaner et al. 2017), MZSP . 2. Female (‘ Anno / 1922 / Pará / Belem [one side]; Lima / leg. [other side]’ ‘TYPUS’, ‘19395’, ‘ PARALECTOTYPE ♀ / Phanaeus septentrionalis / Pessôa, 1934 / des. Maldaner et al. 2017), MZSP .

Type locality: Brazil: Pará: Belém.

Nomenclatural history: In his revision of the genus Phanaeus MacLeay, 1819 , Pessôa (1934) proposed the name Phanaeus septentrionalis to a supposedly new Amazon species of the subgenus Megaphanaeus . His description was based on what he believed to be five female specimens deposited at the MZSP (then called ‘Museu Paulista’) collected by ‘Mr. Lima’ in the city of Belém, capital of the Brazilian state of Pará. This species was mentioned as being closely related to both Phanaeus lancifer and P. bonariensis , but Pessôa (1934) listed some characters (such as overall size and shape of female pronotal carina) that he believed to be sufficient to differentiate these three taxa. In the following year, Lane & Camargo-Andrade (1935) dissected Pessôa’s type series and found that one of the syntypes was actually a male. Three decades later, Martínez & Pereira (1967) gave a confused judgement about the validity of P. septentrionalis : while they clearly established the synonymy between this name and P. lancifer by writing that ‘there is no morphological characteristic apart from the sexual ones in males and the reduction in the size of the body and of the cephalic and pronotal armature in both sexes that separates septententionalis from lancifer ’ (our translation), they also wrote that septentrionalis probably represented a subspecies of P. lancifer since ‘populations studied by us of both supposed species were never found together’ (our translation). Martínez & Pereira (1967) referred to specimens collected in Bolivia as an example of a population of P. lancifer that would ‘correspond to the form septentrionalis ’. Finally, Edmonds & Zídek (2010) argued that the features used by Pessôa (1934) and Martínez & Pereira (1967) to support their hypotheses for the existence of a separated species or subspecies were actually intrapopulational variations of a single species, Coprophanaeus lancifer .

Edmonds & Zídek (2010) stated that the name-bearing type of P. septentrionalis was a female holotype deposited at the MZSP. However, Pessôa (1934) never indicated one of his specimens as the name-bearing type; so no holotype was designated. All five specimens are syntypes and equally eligible to become the lectotype. Here, we choose the only male syntype to be designated as the lectotype. As for the female syntypes (now paralectotypes), only two were found by us at the MZSP; the whereabouts of the other two specimens are unknown.